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.
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Douglas Young ponders how close to the edge our lives are.
In the wake of the near assassination of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally, a large number of Americans have wondered if he survived solely “by the grace of God.” Indeed, many believe that the Almighty Himself must have altered the direction of the assassin’s bullet so that it grazed Mr. Trump’s ear instead of hitting his head.
But if we accept this and are logically consistent, do we not also have to believe that God guided the assassin’s bullet that killed the devoted father shielding his wife and children at the event, as well as the bullets seriously wounding two other men? Or that He simply did not care about them?
I think the July 13 assassination attempt is all the more disturbing because it highlights so starkly just how huge a role luck plays in our lives. It is sobering to realize that, no matter how good or careful we think we are, very often we have no control over whether we get terminal cancer, crippled or killed in a car wreck, or even shot.
I suspect the major novelist Norman Mailer was right that this is why we prefer conspiracy theories to make sense of senseless tragedies. So instead of a total loser like Lee Harvey Oswald being able to kill President John Kennedy and change history all by himself, we much prefer to believe that only a massive cabal involving the CIA, our military-industrial complex, the Mafia, the Russians, or the Cubans could have managed such a massively consequential crime.
Now, despite clear evidence of recent rank incompetence at the U.S. Secret Service, we are sorely tempted to believe that last month’s extremely close call with the GOP presidential nominee had to be the result of a well-coordinated plot involving the CIA, other government officials, and/or even the Secret Service – anything but that awkward and lonely assassin barely out of his teens acting by himself. Yet almost every shooter of an American president has been an utter failure who somehow single-handedly pulled off what was assumed to be almost impossible.
In 1835, President Andrew Jackson survived an assassination attempt by a deranged man convinced he was a 15th century English king. In 1881, President James Garfield was murdered by a lone gunman and likely schizophrenic whose life had been a complete catastrophe. In 1901, President William McKinley was shot to death by an unemployed socialist-anarchist. In 1963 President Kennedy was cut down by a mentally ill high school dropout who had become a communist. And in 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot by an insane loner hoping to impress a famous actress he had not even met.
→ Continue reading: This precarious life
“Yes, the Chinese put on a display of thousands of co-ordinated drummers, itself an extraordinary physical feat, but hey, WE HAVE DRAG QUEENS, DECAPITATION, AND A FAT SEX-SWAPPED JESUS.”
– David Thompson.
Of course, maybe the French organisers of the Olympic opening shindig wanted to bring a bit of Eurovision, or even better, Eurotrash, back into the limelight.
On a separate note, Ilya Somin has this thought-provoking post on how to fix the “dark side of the Olympics”.
And finally, gender fluidity comes for boxing.
I was going to write a post about the riot in Southport that followed the random knife murders of three young girls in that town carried out by Axel Rudakubana. Prior to Rudakubana’s name being released, a false rumour spread on social media that the perpetrator was a Muslim, leading the rioters to attack a mosque. Then I remembered I had already made the same points in this post about the riot in Dublin that took place in November 2023 following the attempted knife murder of three young children by Riad Bouchaker. I am not re-using the old post merely to save time: I am doing it to demonstrate that the two incidents have a great deal in common.
“Despite police not revealing the suspected knifeman’s identity or motive”
In the following quote, replace “Irish” with “British” and “would-be child murderer” with “child murderer”:
It does not excuse the riots in the least if the rioters are correct to think that the would-be child murderer is any or all of a migrant, legal or illegal, or a Muslim, or from an ethnic minority. But the obfuscation from the Irish authorities and media on this point is making the situation worse.
The usual flashpoint for riots throughout history has been a rumour of crimes committed by a member of Group A against Group B. The riots in the Lozells district of Birmingham in 2005 have been almost forgotten because whites were not involved, but they were a typical example of the type, having been sparked by a completely unsubstantiated story that a black girl had been gang-raped by a group of South Asian men.
Sometimes the rumour is true, sometimes it is not.
If, as in that case, the inciting rumour is not true, the best tool for squelching the false claim and quelling the violence is a trusted press, taking the term “press” in a wider sense than just newspapers. If the rumour is true, the best tool for quelling the violence is still a trusted press. It can do things like publicising condemnations of the crime from leaders of the group to which the perpetrator belongs. What a pity that Ireland, like much of the Western World, no longer has a trusted press because it no longer has a trustworthy press.
It’s not “Despite police not revealing the suspected knifeman’s identity or motive, far-Right thugs emboldened by “misinformation” descended on the streets of the capital”, it’s a damn sight closer to “Because of police not revealing the suspected knifeman’s identity or motive, far-Right thugs emboldened by “misinformation” descended on the streets of the capital”. If the official sources of information won’t do their jobs, don’t be surprised when people turn to unofficial sources instead.
Top Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh killed in Iran, reports the BBC.
It is particularly good that Israel killed Haniyeh while he was staying in Iran to attend the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Let all know that Iran cannot protect its proxies.
The BBC continues in its usual style:
Widely regarded as a pragmatist, Haniyeh was said to have maintained good relations with other rival Palestinian groups.
Here is a short video clip of Haniyeh pragmatically celebrating the October 7th massacres.
… hope and prayers for the freedom fighters in Venezuela. Hoping for a Nicolae Ceaușescu style exit for Nicolas Maduro.
The first piece is how pensions work, and what’s gone wrong with them. In our state pension (I’ll say a little about private schemes at the end), we don’t “save up for our retirement”. When we started the system after the war, we needed to pay retirees immediately. Pensions have therefore always been met each month out of taxes paid by workers that month. At any given moment, there is only a week or two of funds in the government’s “State Pension account”.
While that arrangement solved an immediate problem, it created an enormous structural problem. When the pension scheme was started, life expectancy was about 68. Now it’s about 82. And birth rates started falling in the 1960s, meaning that more and more pensioners incomes are being funded by fewer and fewer workers. The result is that the average person born in 1956 now takes out around £290,000 more in retirement income than she paid over her working life.
The plan for addressing that problem was to grow the economy each year by an amount sufficient to generate enough tax receipts to keep funding the expanding retirement bill. And for most of the 20th century, while we benefitted from a global hydrocarbon and nuclear energy system that for decades doubled in size every 7 years, that plan worked.
“Net Zero” puts an end to that.
– Richard Lyon
The foreign ministers of Australia, Japan, India and the US issued a joint statement after the massacre, saying ‘We underscore the need to prevent the conflict from escalating’. Likewise, Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, has said ‘we are deeply concerned about the risk of further escalation’. These are warnings to Israel, aren’t they? These powerhouses of Western diplomacy, with their noisy teeth-gnashing over ‘escalation’, are essentially telling Israel to chill out. Indeed, one US security analyst told the Guardian that ‘the most pressing task for US officials’ is to ‘delay any Israeli retaliation’ in order that we might ‘achieve de-escalation’. Relax, Israel – it’s only 12 kids.
– Brendan O’Neill
Steve Baker, the former Conservative MP (he lost his High Wycombe seat in the 2024 general election), ex-RAF officer, and a business figure in the IT sector, drops some solid truths in his new Substack:
The evidence suggests that we cannot afford the state we have, not now and not in our lifetimes. Taxes are at historic highs and it is implausible to believe they can be raised usefully. Debt is heading into unsustainable territory and the National Insurance Fund will be exhausted in 20 years, putting a date on the currently inevitable default of the welfare state.
Moreover, the evidence is that currencies have been dramatically debased since 1971, manufacturing injustice on a vast scale in ways which are rarely and poorly understood, but which appear to be reflected in commonly-expressed grievances which have been leading to political radicalism.
The situation facing the UK and the world is extremely serious. When Rachel Reeves on Monday tells the Commons we cannot afford present spending, the Conservatives should make the most of it in the public interest.
Read it all. As Mr Baker writes, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, is due to address parliament on Monday (29 July) on the state of the UK public finances, claiming that they are so much worse than originally thought (which is disingenuous, to be polite), and hence pave the way for even more tax hikes. Mr Baker’s essay contains some fairly eye-popping charts and data points about where the UK is in terms of its total tax burden.
Natalie writes,
That loss of trust is one of the things that has made me much less pro-immigration than I once was. If that means the loss of my Libertarian purity certificate, so be it.
Amen to that. For years I have been trying to reconcile my belief in freedom with my doubts about immigration and have totally failed.
I would prefer not to lose my Libertarian purity certificate. I want a political philosophy that is simple and has universal application. That way I don’t have to think too hard. For the last 30 years libertarianism has been that philosophy. Name an issue of the day and I can give you the answer. Sluggish growth? Privatise, lower taxes and de-regulate. Busy roads? Privatise. Inflation? Abolish the Bank of England or re-introduce the Gold Standard, or, er… privatise the Bank of England. OK, some issues are not quite that easy but usually they are. Until we get to immigration. Because if libertarianism means open borders then libertarianism is wrong because open borders are a disaster.
→ Continue reading: Immigration and the libertarian
As I keep saying jobs are a cost not a benefit. We do not want to go around the world – or even our own country – creating costs now, do we?
No, no, jobs really are a cost, they are not a benefit. Think on it. We have some amount of human labour available to us. So, if we use that labour to do this thing here then we cannot use it to do this other thing over there. The cost to us of using the labour to do this thing is therefore losing the opportunity to do that other thing over there.
Yes, I know, people like to be able to consume. For most of us that means having an income with which we can purchase our consumption. But even to us that job is a cost. The work we’ve got to do is the cost of gaining the income. And, obviously, a job is a cost to the employer – the production is what they desire, the job is a cost of gaining it.
It’s entirely true that renewables require more human labour than other forms of energy collection and or generation. But that means they make us *poorer*.
– Tim Worstall
“How will the service rebuild in the wake of its catastrophic failure? The agency might argue that it is striving to bulk up, adding personnel needed to thwart assassins. On Monday, the Secret Service advertised two openings. The positions could be found at the U.S. government’s employment portal, USAJobs. Those hired will each be paid $139,395 annually. With what essential mission will they be tasked? Counter-sniping? Evasive driving? No. The title of both jobs is “Lead Public Affairs Specialist.”
– Eric Felten, Wall Street Journal ($).
The humorous writers and mockers of government idiocies, such as the late H L Mencken and P J O’Rourke, would have had much sport with this sort of story.
Do people remember all those years back, at the time of the financial crash of 2008, about how so many wrote and spoke about dangers of an over-concentrated banking system, “too big to fail”, moral hazards of bailouts, poor risk management, etc? I do. I cannot count the articles, conferences, talks, books and videos about all this, and the lessons that must be learned.
Well, here we go:
There is, however, a bigger and simpler problem that financial-stability supervisors have been growing concerned about: The over-reliance of banks and markets on a limited number of third parties for things like cloud-computing services, software and risk-modelling tools. The UK, for example, found that 65% of British financial firms used the same four cloud providers. And earlier this year, the International Monetary Fund dedicated a chapter of its annual Financial Stability Report to cyber risks, noting that the world’s biggest systemically important banks were growing increasingly reliant on common information-technology providers. The IMF found a greater overlap in major banks’ use of the same IT products and services than was the case for insurers or asset managers.
The comment is by Paul J Davies, a writer for Bloomberg ($). He is writing about the implications of the Microsoft/Crowdstrike outage that slammed banks, airlines, healthcare providers and others last Friday and through the weekend.
Besides the level of “fragile” reliance on a few systems, is the fact that this saga, in my mind, makes it even more dangerous to proceed with things such as digital identities (an idea of Tony Blair), central bank digital currencies, and the rest of it. I think I need to re-read the Nassim Taleb book, Antifragile.
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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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