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]
H.L. Mencken defined “puritanism” as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy”. Meet Nathan Robinson, editor of a journal called Current Affairs, Guardian contributor, and a man who has almost certainly named his kids “Fly-extravagance”, “Sorry-for-misgendering” and “If-carbon-had-not-been-offset-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned”. He writes,
There is, perhaps, no better way to appreciate the tragedy of 21st-century global inequality than by watching a billionaire spend $90m launching a $100,000 car into the far reaches of the solar system.
Musk said he wanted to participate in a space race because “races are exciting” and that while strapping his car to a rocket may be “silly and fun … silly and fun things are important”. Thus, anyone who mentions the colossal waste the project involves, or the various social uses to which these resources could be put, can be dismissed as a killjoy.
But one doesn’t have to hate fun to question the justification for pursuing a costly new space race at exactly this moment. If we examine the situation honestly, and get past our natural (and accurate) feeling that rockets are really cool, it becomes hard to defend a project like this.
A mission to Mars does indeed sound exciting, but it’s important to have our priorities straight. First, perhaps we could make it so that a child no longer dies of malaria every two minutes. Or we could try to address the level of poverty in Alabama that has become so extreme the UN investigator did not believe it could still occur in a first-world country. Perhaps once violence, poverty and disease are solved, then we can head for the stars.
Many might think that what Elon Musk chooses to do with his billions is Elon Musk’s business alone. If he wanted to spend all his money on medicine for children, that would be nice, but if he’d like to spend it making big explosions and sending his convertible on a million-mile space voyage, that’s his prerogative.
But Musk is only rich enough to afford these indulgent pet projects because we have allowed gross social inequalities to arise in the first place. If wealth were actually distributed fairly in this country, nobody would be in a position to fund his own private space program.
Whenever I have attempted to discuss health care, I am always told about how the US health system fails people. I am sure that this is some combination of untrue (my own experience of US health care was walking in unannounced, paying $100 and being seen and fixed straight away) and unfair. US health care is not wholly private or even very free-market at all, and suffers a high level of regulation. But I do not understand enough about the details.
I occasionally hear good things about other health care systems, such as Australia’s method of having people pay and then possibly having the government refund them. While I can understand that it will be hard to convince people that anarcho-capitalist health care is best, it is interesting in the UK that no changes to the structure of health care at all will be considered. Private companies must not be allowed to make a profit! Such profit can only be gained from killing patients.
However the IEA have recently made an interesting strategic decision to counter-attack the knee-jerk reaction that the only alternative to the NHS is US-style health-care. What if the NHS and the US system are both weird and there are other sane and functional systems in the world? Kate Andrews has appeared on the BBC pointing this out. Guido covered it. Kate Andrews wrote a piece for the Spectator. All this is to publicise the IEA report Universal healthcare without the NHS.
One thing they keep pointing out is that the NHS ranks in the bottom third of the world’s health care systems in terms of outcomes. That will need a lot of repeating if anyone still thinks it is the envy of the world.
It is also, perhaps, a much more effective strategy than attempting to convince people of the benefits of free markets up front. “Let us try to learn something from nice country X” does not require breaking down as many mental barriers as “please abandon a lifetime of carefully cultivated opinions about the unfairness of capitalism”.
Scantily clad women are “unacceptable” at a betting industry conference, Britain’s gambling regulator has said.
Sarah Harrison told the BBC that some women working at the ICE Totally Gaming event were wearing “little more than swimsuits”, while men wore smart suits.
The chief executive of the Gambling Commission said the body could boycott future ICE Total Gaming events.
But the event’s manager said the complaint was directed at a “very small” number of firms taking part.
Kate Chambers, managing director of ICE London, also said the show has been encouraging exhibitors to represent women more respectfully.
[…]
Earlier, Ms Harrison told BBC’s Radio 4’s Today programme of her dismay at seeing a gender disparity at the show, with some women on exhibition stalls doing promotional work in revealing clothing.
“The men were wearing smart suits and women were being asked to wear not much more than swimsuits. That’s totally unacceptable; it’s not reflective of the modern economy,” she said.
“This isn’t about political correctness. It’s about good regulation and good governance, because businesses that have a more diverse workforce are more likely to make better decisions. And that’s critical from a regulator’s point of view.”
“It’s about good regulation and good governance, because businesses that have a more diverse workforce are more likely to make better decisions” is one of the weirder non-sequiturs I have come across lately. It sounds like someone inputted a load of modern buzzwords into a 1980s Turing Test chatbot program. But that is a side issue.
What part of the legal remit of the Gambling Commission gives it authority to regulate the style of dress of people working in the gambling trade? It is meant to protect “vulnerable people”, that is, gambling addicts or people at risk of becoming gambling addicts. It also has a role in ensuring the law regarding gambling by minors is followed. Women employees who wear sexy dresses at a gambling trade show come into neither of these categories. How dare Sarah Harrison imply that they are either vulnerable or children. How dare she lay down the law on whether their dress is “acceptable” or “unacceptable” to her, when there is no law to lay down. She exceeds her authority.
Last night, Elon Musk mentioned that the development cost of Falcon Heavy was about $500M, an astonishing sum, until you remember that NASA’s new Space Launch System has consumed about $20B to date and isn’t finished yet. Full development costs for SLS are said to be $35B.
Also, while Falcon Heavy re-uses most of its hardware and costs about $90M a flight, the current quoted SLS flight cost is $500M, and more realistically might reach $1B per flight.
However, while Falcon Heavy can only carry 63 tons to low earth orbit, SLS Block 1 will be able to carry 70 tons.
Eventually, SLS Block 2 will be available, with a payload of 130 tons to LEO. By that time, SpaceX’s BFR, which will be fully reusable, may be in flight. BFR will be able to carry 150 tons to LEO, and is intended to be fully reusable, so a flight may cost as little as a few million dollars — likely under 1/100th of the cost of a flight of SLS Block 2.
As we have seen recently, Formula 1 has decided to ban the practice of young ladies parading in the grid at the start of a motor race, on the grounds that such behaviour no longer has a place in the sport. Come to that, why not just ban very attractive people from sports events and moments such as parading in front completely, just so to protect the feelings of those less fortunately endowed by Mother Nature? The US tradition of cheerleaders clearly has to go. And if a bunch of people want to lead out footballers at a cup final, make surethey are either very young, old, and preferably covered up completely.) A number of women have been angered by the move.
Well, since modern race cars use engines that make less of a noise, presumably as all part of the kinder, gentler age we are supposed to enjoy, this all makes sense. I personally think that this doesn’t go far enough: how about curbing speeds in F1 to, say, 30 mph, so as to encourage more responsible use of scarce resources? And should all motor racing fans be forced to attend some sort of self-awareness course about the need to not objectify people as sex objects, or even get a mild arousal from seeing attractive members of the opposite sex? (OK, sarcasm alert.)
In the meantime, for those like me who will be visiting Le Mans in France this June, here is reminder of what this raucous motor racing is all about. Check out this video of a Ferrari 312 PB works car, dating from the early 1970s. The sound it makes is simply fabulous.
I don’t know if Le Mans has attractive women parading near the cars this year (it has in years gone by), but this is France, and for all its faults, some old traditions linger on. But for how long? I cannot help but wonder whether, in the case of F1 (the endurance race series of which Le Mans is a part is not in the same category) cultural considerations have played a part. F1 has been held in places such as Malaysia and Abu Dhabi, and the Muslim populations, with oil-wealth in their hands, may have argued for a ban at least in their jurisdictions. UBS, the Swiss bank, is at the moment global sponsor of the sport, but I have no idea whether the Zurich-listed lender put pressure on F1, although it may have done, in keeping with its staid Swiss image.
We live in Puritan times, and part of why I think F1 is harming itself is that motor sport is meant to be a bit naughty; driving a car at 200+mph around a track, making lots of noise, and with all that danger and sense of life, is totally against the current do-gooder mood. As the US journalist H L Mencken has said, a puritan is someone who worries that someone, somewhere, is happy.
In South Sudan, food aid is used as a weapon and is either looted and destroyed or blocked from reaching those in areas controlled by the opposition. Similar instances occur in Somalia where aid organizations are heavily taxed, which results in additional funds that are used to perpetuate the conflict. In fact, receiving U.S. food aid literally feeds the violence and is positively correlated with a higher probability and increased duration of civil war.
10 ‘Conservative’ Councillors (of the 12 complement) on the Town Council in the little town of Desborough in Northamptonshire have resigned after an apparent hostile response to a 400% tax rise imposed by the local council, and there is an alleged undercurrent of unpleasantness in the local reaction, perhaps the spirit of Poujard lives on.
Desborough Tory councillors’ mass ‘bullying’ resignation
Well, who is the bully?
Is it the Council for ramping up tax by 400% from £19.10 to £96.98 per year on those who have to pay, with the sort like the Chairman, Councillor Pearce, of whom it is reported:
Ms Pearce… …said “with hindsight we perhaps should have sent out some kind of warning it was coming”.
and then went on to say:
“But I absolutely whole-heartedly believe it was the right thing to do and I would do it again tomorrow in a heartbeat,”
That’s a ‘Feck you!‘ if ever I heard one, and which I assume is a reference to the true costs coming through after some financial juggling used to disguise the costs of the Council ended (more like that later). And the article goes on, Ms Pearce said that:
she was “shocked by the ferocity” of the reaction.
“My husband’s taken abuse on Facebook. I’ve had comments made to my eldest child who’s only 15. I’ve had people try to stop children playing with my nine-year-old daughter.
So a frank expression of views and voluntarily withdrawing social interactions is shocking when you start robbing people under colour of law?
Her observation?
“They didn’t ask for that and they don’t deserve that.”
I think that is exactly what the residents are telling you, Madam! Action and re-action, this is not bullying, it is intra-election consultation.
For our more international readers, this council is about the smallest unit of local government that can levy taxes, and this council probably doesn’t need to exist, it can add a local ‘precept’ onto the taxes levied by the other local authorities, (4 layers are possible, 3 with taxing powers), all of which is loaded onto the ‘Council Tax’ bill that households pay, overall bills can be in the region of £1,200 to £2,000+ p.a.
To the resigning Councillors, I say ‘Oh dear, how sad, never mind‘, and count yourselves lucky that you live in such temperate times.
Meanwhile, at a County level, the County Council for Northamptonshire have spent £53,000,000 on a new headquarters, and in true Parkinson’s Law fashion, with the new HQ, matters have started to disintegrate, with spare money running out, so they have had to go to the government and tell them that they have cocked things up and run out of discretionary money to spend.
So having moved into a new HQ in October 2017, they are now looking to sell it to keep themselves going (by which they mean ‘sell it to a company who will lease it back to them, so that they can squander the capital and saddle locals with rent charges’ rather than ‘downsize and cut costs’). It’s just as well that the entire County is not rising up to berate the County Councillors, but perhaps the whole thing is too complicated and remote for people to care.
But at least the spirit of Poujade stirs from time to time, the BBC might think like Durin’s Bane, but actually more like Beorn. There is hope yet in England. And the Sage might wish to maintain a discretion on this one.
Edit: an erroneous ‘r’ removed, my apologies to the Gods of Accuracy, Spelling and M Poujade, and my thanks to Appianglorius, the price of accuracy is eternal vigilance, its true.
Yet the involvement of sitting intelligence officials—and a sitting president—in such a campaign should be a frightening thought even to people who despise Trump and oppose every single one of his policies, especially in an age where the possibilities for such abuses have been multiplied by the power of secret courts, wide-spectrum surveillance, and the centralized creation and control of story-lines that live on social media while being fed from inside protected nodes of the federal bureaucracy.
Well, the memo was released. You can read it in full here, and I recommend you do so because, on the evidence of much of Friday’s TV and radio coverage, most commentators only want to talk about it in the most shallow political terms. Whereas the questions it raises about state corruption in an age of round-the-clock technological surveillance are far more profound.
My other enemy is such
As you too should abhor:
Who justly hates white racists much,
Hates socialists yet more.
It seems so superflous to add that non-white racism (between the Shona and Ndebele tribes) was also a feature of Mugabe’s rule; he was a Shona as well as a socialist.
He doesn’t mean to be a monster and I don’t want to see him as one, but in his presence my blood ran cold. I was afraid of him. I was even more afraid of the way the earnest folk in the room laughed as he joked about the unintended consequences of various programmes to clean up the act of the idiotic, self-destructive great unwashed, I realised that I might be the only one there who included himself in the category of “the people” to be shaped as opposed to the smug elite doing the shaping.
No one seemed remotely concerned for the freedoms of those on the receiving end of Dr Chadwick’s mind bending, “nudging” and manipulation — the benighted mugs who ultimately pay to have such well-shod professionals sneer about them behind their backs.
It reminds me of the following remarks I made when speaking to a rather earnest employee of Her Majesty’s government. It was at a PPE dinner at an Oxford college, filled to the rafters with pretty much the same people who filled the room where Tom Paine’s blood ran cold. As I was clearly very off-message, she had just told me that “You’re the sort of person we need to convince”:
“Don’t waste your time trying to convince me its all for my own good, because the objective isn’t my good, its making sure the people in this room have power. If you keep nudging people, and you just won’t stop, eventually they’ll punch you in the face. But we both know the reason that doesn’t happen to you is because Mao’s dictum is entirely correct. Your presumed right to do what you do to the hoi polloi is embedded at an axiomatic level, you don’t have any coherent moral argument to back it up, and why should you? The only reason you can do what you do is because you keep the police force funded, which is why you don’t need to convince me of anything.”
For some reason I don’t get taken to those kind of dinners any more 😆
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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