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]
|
At the end of the 19th century, a young William Allen White—a critic of William Jennings Bryan’s populist Democrats—wrote a column titled “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” There he mocked the wealth-haters, saying the populist felt that “what we need is not more money, but less capital, fewer white shirts and brains… We need several thousand gibbering idiots to scream about” the power of financial titans, because “we don’t care to build up, we wish to tear down.”
– Karl Rove, who sounds vaguely familiar.
There are all kinds of parallels between the “Gilded Age” of Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Morgan, and the populist, anti-gold standard levelling views of Bryan, and what is going on today, with AOC, Robert Reich saying billionaires must have all done something evil, and the rest.
Bryan was famously opposed to the gold standard, as well as being an opponent of teaching Darwinian evolution to children and supported taxing land and was for prohibition of alcohol. It’s sometimes odd to find a political figure who is wrong on so many issues in one go, and so dangerously appealing to people seeking a person on a white horse who is going to drive the “money changers out of the temple”, as it were. Right now, with the rubbish coming out about why billionaires should be banned, and must have got their wealth immorally, it feels all very familiar.
Of course – and this is where these issues get complex – some of what is going on with the Big Tech entrepreneurs of today, and the Leftist grandstanding or PR they sometimes engage in, is creating renewed enthusiasm for government powers that came out of the late 19th Century in the era of Teddy Roosevelt. I note that Instapundit blog supremo and law professor wants the US government (I mean, what could possibly go wrong?) to use anti-trust powers to bust up the Facebooks and the rest, and in part this appears driven by political animus as much as any ideas of competition, although Glenn Reynolds’ arguments that there are problems certainly are strongly made.
Yes, it is true that it looks odd to say captains of business taking what appear to be annoying SJW stances, but part of me cannot help but think that these people aren’t sincere enough to willingly wreck their firms by so doing, by “going broke by going woke”. To some degree, they have entered a Faustian Pact of making nice SJW noises, getting close to various causes, in the hope that the Left’s crocodiles forget to eat them. If there’s a recession, as there will be eventually, expect this trend to change. Firms cannot afford to damn their customers (as in Gillette, for example) if business is on the skids.
And in contrast to the Bryan denunciation of the “cross of gold”, today’s Left and Trumpist Right rarely refers to the massive balance sheet expansion of the US Federal Reserve (quantitative easing), which juiced asset prices such as real estate and equities after 2008, disproportionately benefiting the already-wealthy. In fact, if anything, today’s Left is beholden to the print-until-you-drop approach, without a thought for the Zimbabwe/Venezuela/Weimar consequences. Take its recent enthusiasm for something called Modern Monetary Theory.
The recent row about Amazon and its planned new big offices in Queen’s, New York, suggests that a sort of high point to this strategy has been reached and that maybe the Silicon Valley Big Techs will realise that there is no point trying to make all nice to those who want to destroy them. Eventually, the malevolence of the looter Left shows itself. Even though some critics of these firms might be motivated by dislike of corporate welfare (NYC wanted to give Jeff Bezos a fucking helipad, when the multi-billionaire has his own private space programme), it is hard not to smell are far more pungent smell of anti-capitalism. They cannot be appeased.
Joel Kotkin has written an interesting study of some of these modern “Gilded Age” trends, such as the culture of modern Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Washington, vs the rest of the US. On a far smaller scale, there are echoes of this in the UK.
But Kotkin, as he shows in a thoughtful (mostly) item on all this, has his own rather William Jennings Bryan-like blind spots:
One can appreciate the economic benefits that firms like Uber, Lyft, Salesforce, and others have brought to San Francisco and other tech-oriented cities. Yet the concentration of high-end businesses has also helped create a neo-Dickensian reality: sky-high housing prices, widespread homelessness, and a rapidly shrinking middle class. There are now more drug addicts in San Francisco than high school students. Rising rents have undermined that city’s cherished bohemian culture and hastened a rapid decline in the minority population, both in the city and across the tech-dominated Bay Area. In 1970, 96,000 African-Americans lived in San Francisco; today, barely 46,000 make their homes there, constituting less than 5 percent of the city’s population. More than half of the Bay Area’s lower-income communities, notes a recent UC Berkeley study, are in danger of mass displacement. Amazon, it seemed to many progressives, threatened to bring the same conditions to New York.
This is zero-sum thinking on steroids. For a start, much of why the cities of San Francisco and others are so expensive is not because of demand but lack of supply (ie, planning laws); are Kotkin and others arguing that they would prefer for modern, disruptive businesses to not exist at all? A century-plus ago, the Sears catalogue business made its fortunes by blending the tech. of telegraph wires and railroads to bring supplies across the plains of the US. Sears today is in financial dire straits, as times change. But the Kotkins of this world would, presumably, have complained about how all the folk working for these businesses were driving up prices to “sky-high levels”. How dare they be so successful. As for the demise of the “cherished bohemian culture”, well, your mileage may vary as to how cherished that is.
Finally, I recently met Adrian Wooldridge, co-author with Alan Greenspan, former Fed chairman, of Capitalism in America. The book makes a number of claims (it is a good read) about American economics, and one of them is that the appetite for the “creative destruction” of capitalism is waning. Recent trends suggests that this is true. And that’s bad news for the world in general.
I continue to be obsessed by the Seventh Symphony of Sibelius, after hearing it performed at a live concert. (In a comment on that posting, Nick M expressed admiration for how Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra performed this piece. I assume he meant this recording. Having listened to many recordings of Sibelius 7 recently, I find myself strongly agreeing with Nick M. (My surprise second favourite Sibelius 7 is, as of now, John Barbirolli and the Halle Orchestra. (But Karajan and the BPO are much better recorded.)))
While seeking to learn more about this amazing piece, I came across a delightful start to some writing about it by Paul Serotsky:
So often does adversity transmute talent into greatness that we seem to consider it a general rule. Sibelius would be an exception to prove that rule. While still only 32, the Finnish government awarded him a pension for life, a year before he even began work on his First Symphony. That he went on to produce some of the Twentieth Century’s finest and most original music says much for his strength of character in the face of enforced prosperity.
Much is made of the last few decades of Sibelius’s life and of how, during all that time, he composed nothing. But he was over ninety when he died, and sixty isn’t a ridiculous age at which to be retiring from the creative life. In general, his life is usually regarded as a case of a government arts subsidy scheme working out pretty well. As Serotsky says, Sibelius is exceptional in being so creative, after receiving a guaranteed minimum income. (Incidentally, I wonder if the government of Finland had its collective brain cells scrambled by what they surely saw as the success of their Sibelius experiment, and thus thought that a generalised version of the same scheme would be other than a dismal failure, that echoed the end of Sibelius’s life rather than his earlier creativity?)
Serotsky’s words remind me that I did a couple of other music-based postings here, quite a few years ago now, about how adversity can sometimes indeed transmute talent into greatness.
It is rare that I agree so strongly with a fervent supporter of the European Union. Nesrine Malik of the Guardian argues that “the Brexit reckoning must happen” on the grounds that
A humbling must come to pass. From the beginning, Brexit created its own momentum. Once the question was asked – in or out? – all the grievances, justified or not, could be projected on it, with “in” being widely seen as a vote for the status quo. Within this frame, nothing else matters – not economic predictions, not warnings about medicines running out, nor threats of the need to stockpile foods. The remain campaign could not have done anything differently: it lost the moment the question was asked.
And so, maybe, in the end, we will finally believe that immigration is necessary for an economy and an NHS to function, that the inequality between the south-east and the rest of Britain is unsustainable, that our political class is over-pedigreed and under-principled. We might even believe that other crises, such as climate change, are real, too.
Maybe, in the end, the country outside Europe will find its stride by confronting its issues rather than blaming them on others, and forging its own way. But there is only one way to find out. What a shame Brexit is that path – but better to have a path than none at all.
She is right about our political class being over-pedigreed and under-principled, right that unless Brexit happens the country will be torn apart by claim and counter-claim as to what would have happened, and right that a humbling must come to pass. Let us go forward together and find out whose.
“A termite has about 100,000 neurons and we probably get through that number over a big weekend.”
– John Searle, American philosopher.
I have never been a great Trump fan, but I am in awe of how he drives his enemies insane. And I am not speaking figuratively, I mean literally insane, batshit moonbat loonytoons crazy. Trump Derangement Syndrome is to Bush Derangement Syndrome as Pneumonic Plague is to a Common Cold.
– Perry de Havilland, as part of an on-line discussion elsewhere about ‘Out‘, a homosexual advocacy publication slamming Trump for pressuring Iran to decriminalise homosexuality. Yes, seriously.
Those people who voted for you a couple of years ago thought they were electing Labour MPs. Given that things have turned out differently, and that your opposition to Brexit was a major motivation for your departure, should not each of you be confirming that you still have the people’s mandate by submitting to a People’s Vote, sorry, by-election?
Gregory Benford has a new book out, called Rewrite, and while I tend sometimes to be careful of pre-publication hype, this looks mighty promising and a good way for me to while away the hours as I fly to Hong Kong in a few days’ time. The author gets an interview in Wired magazine, proof that good things occasionally do appear in that publication, despite what appears to be its turn to eco-lefist nonsense in recent years.
I really enjoyed his novel, Timescape. Chiller, a book that features cryonics, is also good.
By the way, there is a Robert Heinlein Society, which runs a scholarship programme. I think the writer, former Navy officer, fencing expert and blood donor advocate would have approved.
Heinlein once wrote about The Crazy Years, a period in his early writings known as the Future History series. I am not the first person to wonder if our own era deserves that moniker, although with hindsight is it any nuttier than any other?
“Corbyn’s first wife, Jane Chapman, told his biographer Tom Bower that she never knew him read a book in four years of marriage.”
– Nick Cohen.
Following on from the posting below about the “ISIS bride” is this comment from Brendan O’Neill at Spiked:
Indeed, the story of these three London girls who ran off in 2015 was always a very telling one. It contains lessons, if only we are willing to see them. Too many observers have focused on the girls’ youthfulness and the idea that they were ‘groomed’ or ‘brainwashed’ by online jihadists. Note how ‘radicalisation’ has become an entirely passive phrase – these girls, and other Brits, were ‘radicalised’, we are always told, as if they are unwitting dupes who were mentally poisoned by sinister internet-users in Mosul or Raqqa. In truth, the three girls were resourceful and bright. All were grade-A students. They thought their actions through, they planned them meticulously, and they executed them well. Far from being the passive victims of online radicalisation, the girls themselves sought to convince other young women to run away to ISIS territory. The focus on the ‘grooming’ of Western European youths by evil ISIS masterminds overlooks a more terrible reality: that some Western European youths, Muslim ones, actively sought out the ISIS life.
A point that comes out of this is how it is so common these days to downplay the fact that people make choices and have agency. Whether it is about young adults joining Islamist death cults, or people becoming addicted to drink, porn or social media, or falling into some other self-destructive and anti-social behaviour, very often people talk about the persons concerned as passive, as victims. “She was groomed to be a terrorist”…..”he suffered from alcoholism”…..”he was damaged by over-use of social media”……the very way that journalists write sentences or broadcast their thoughts seem to suggest that people don’t really possess volition, aka free will. (Here is a good explanation of what free will is, at least in the sense that I think it is best formulated, by the late Nathaniel Branden.)
Sometimes debates about whether humans really do have volition can sound like hair-splitting, an obscure sort of issue far less important than other matters of the day. I disagree. For decades, centuries even, different arguments have been presented to show that humans are pushed around by whatever external or internal forces happen to be in play, whether it is the environment, toilet training, parental guidance, economics, the class system, whatever. Over time, these ideas percolate into wider society so that it becomes acceptable for people to talk as if their very thoughts and actions aren’t really under their control. The self-contradictory nature of people denying that they have volition (to deny is, after all, a decision) is rarely remarked upon.
When people think about the problem of “snowflake” students, or identity politics, or other such things, remember that these phenomena didn’t come out of nowhere. We are seeing the “cashing in”, as Ayn Rand put it almost half a century ago, of the idea that people are not agents with will, but mere puppets.
Update: A lively debate in the comments. There is some pushback on the idea that the ISIS bride sees herself as any sort of victim but I think that charge is correct because of the entitlement mentality she is displaying by demanding that she returns to the UK to have her child, and no doubt fall on the grace of the UK taxpayer. And that mindset is all of a piece of thinking that actions don’t bring consequences.
After all, if she is the devout believer in creating a Global Caliphate, based on killing and enslaving unbelievers and all the assorted mindfuckery of such a goal, it is a bit rich, really, for her to come back to a country the prosperity of which is based on it being a largely liberal, secular place. She wants to have her cake and eat it.
Of course, some young jihadis can be brainwashed and are surrounded by a culture that encourages such behaviour, but it is worth pointing out that there are hundreds of millions of Muslims who, whatever the pressures, don’t do these things, and some are trying their best to move away from this mindset. And one of the best ways that liberal (to use that word in its correct sense) societies can resist the pathology of Islamist death cults is by resisting the “victim culture” and insisting on people taking ownership of their actions, with all the consequences for good or ill that this brings.
As an aside, here is an interesting essay by a Canadian academic debunking what might be called “apocalyptic ethics” and a rebuttal of the argument that as religious fanatics embrace death, they are beyond the rational self interest test of ethics. The article deals with that argument beautifully.
What do you think should be done with her?
Former MI6 director says schoolgirl who joined Isis should be ‘given a chance’
Although Shamima Begum has shown no remorse, Richard Barrett says Britain should be strong enough to reabsorb her
A pregnant British teenager who fled to Syria with two schoolfriends to marry an Islamic State fighter should be “given a chance” and allowed to come home, a former director of global counter-terrorism at MI6 has said.
Describing Shamima Begum as “a 15-year-old who went badly off the rails”, Richard Barrett said British society should be strong enough to reabsorb her, despite her lack of contrition. By contrast, he said the immediate reaction of the British government “has been a complete lack of concern for her plight”.
Begum fled her home in Bethnal Green, east London, with two schoolfriends to join Isis fighters in Syria in 2015. Interviewed this week in a refugee camp in the north of the country after fleeing Isis’s last stronghold, she told the Times that she was nine months pregnant and had fled the fighting after her two other children had died. “I’ll do anything required just to be able to come home and live quietly with my child,” she said.
Those words do get my sympathy. The next ones, less so:
She did not regret going to Syria, she told the newspaper, and expressed support for the murder of journalists, whom she said had been “a security threat for the caliphate”. Seeing a severed head in a bin “didn’t faze me at all”, she said, adding that her husband had surrendered to a group of Syrian fighters.
The launch of Turning Point UK felt to me like an important moment.
Douglas Murray agrees:
Earlier this week I made the usual mistake of looking at Twitter and saw that ‘Turning Point’ was trending. This is unusual in Britain. Turning Point is a very successful organisation set up in the US to counter the dominance of left-wing views on campus. It turned out to be trending because of the launch of Turning Point UK this week. In essence the response to the launch of Turning Point demonstrated the need to launch Turning Point in the UK.
This is also how I now feel about the Brexit vote. The response to that also explains why it needed to happen.
The EU could collapse in the same way the Soviet Union did, George Soros warns
Back in 1991/92, when the Soviet Union had just collapsed and the UKIP party had just formed to fight the “ever-closer-union” Maastricht Treaty, one of their posters was two pictures of the map of Europe, one captioned ‘Before’ and the other ‘After’. ‘Before’ showed Western Europe divided into many separate countries while the east was the single monolith of communism. ‘After’ showed Eastern Europe divided into many separate countries while the west was the single monolith of the EU.
In Britain, this comparison was used as an argument against the EU but Mr Soros evidently sees it differently. He
has issued a call for Europe to “please wake up” and recognize “the magnitude of the threat” it faces.
Otherwise
“the European Union will go the way of the Soviet Union in 1991.”
Mr Soros blames
“the lack of legal tools for disciplining member states”
Also attracting his ire is “the outdated party system that prevails in most European countries” (I do not recall this being a problem in the old Soviet bloc), and the fact that changing the treaties that define the EU is too difficult. He also thinks the EU should not have required migrants to register in the first EU country they reached, instead of moving them on over the continent, because that made local electorates more aware of their numbers.
However Mr Soros believes all will yet be well if the Eurocrats
“awaken the sleeping pro-European majority”
Good luck with that.
|
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.
|
Recent Comments