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]
|
Catastrophiliac. I like it. I found this word, which is new to me, in comment number one (“Mailman”) on this at Bishop Hill.
I like it because, as I keep on saying, climate change on its own is not the issue. The issue is catastrophic climate change, of the sort that would-be global tyrants think is a good excuse for global tyranny.
But there is now no getting away from it. The catastrophiliacs are now on the run. Just how completely they are on the run, and just how quickly this fact will become obvious to all, even to most of the catastrophiliacs themselves, are of course matters for much debate, but the direction of argumentative tide is now clear, even to the less dense catastrophiliacs. Regular people and regular politicians more and more now think that C(atastrophic) A(nthropogenic) G(lobal) W(arming) is at best an embarrassment and, in ever more such regular minds, a total crock, a fraud, a hoax. Only the “climate scientists” and their pathetic would-be globally tyrannical fans are still yammering on about it.
It’s not that CAGW and all its related rackets have entirely ceased from doing the world any harm. Far from it. But, to use a commercial analogy, CAGW is now what a business strategist would call a “mature product”, a cash cow, a product whose days are numbered. Attention now needs to switch to the products that might succeed CAGW when CAGW finally runs out of puff.
So, next question, what will be the next Big Tyranny Excuse from the would-be global tyrants for the global tyranny that they yearn for? I believe it will not be anything to do with “the environment”. We anti-global tyranny people have now become just too good at arguing against all that stuff.
No, it will be something totally different, and when they finally arrive at it, it will be quite a surprise.
Meanwhile, the Darwinian process of kite-flying (please excuse the mangling of those metaphors) will now get seriously under way, to identify the next Big Tyranny Excuse. This new BTE will have to be something catastrophic, something that is plausibly arguable as the fault of “capitalism” (which rules out things like asteroid strikes or the sun misbehaving dramatically), something which suggests a plausible, pleasingly tyrannical, and actually doable – but only just doable, provided we all drop everything (especially our guard against tyranny) and act now!!! – correction mechanism, and too intellectually complicated to be obvious nonsense.
They will need to discover or establish a whole new academic anti-discipline to base their nonsense on. But what will that be?
Once upon a time it was theology. Then it was economics, as mangled by Marx and then by Keynes. Just lately it has been “the environment”. (Arguably it never stopped being theology, more loosely defined.) What next? Any offers?
Here is the thing.
15 years works fine for the politicians. In 15 years time, they will have either been voted out of office, or they will be Robert Menzies, Franklin D Roosevelt or Otto von Bismarck. Either way, it will not matter.
Consider, though, the situation of the regular, young ambitious bureaucrat. The London 2012 Olympics came along. It was a short term assignment, but if you were 22 in 2008 that did not matter that much as you had few long term commitments. So, you decided to do stuff for the London 2012 Olympics.
If you were really smart, or really avaricious (or both), you figured out that there is a permanent, extremely well paid career (with virtually no accountability) running the Summer Olympics (wherever it is that they are held) for the next several decades, and went for that. If you were not quite so smart (or if you had delusions of patriotism) you decided on a British public service career instead. The time at which you may be reaching the peak of your career (department head, or possibly the place a little below that where you do the actual work) will be in about 15 to 20 years. This is the moment at which you will not want the facts about the sheer level of waste and excess that went on at the London 2012 Olympics to become clear.
So, my guess. In 15 years, it is still going to be very hard to find out what the 2012 Olympics cost, and who exactly spent the money, and what it was spent on.
(Try finding out what the Sydney 2000 Olympics actually cost. As the years have gone by, the reluctance of the people involved to give out actual information has got stronger rather than weaker).
“I would like to die on Mars… Just not on impact.
– Elon Musk
Charles Steele is a blogger I like to follow and he links to some terrific coverage of the “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal. What surprises me – although I should not be surprised – is how this has just not registered much in the mainstream press, but then considering how much of the MSM is covering for Barack Obama, there is no surprise, really.
On the other hand, if Mitt Romney – who is hardly my idea of a great candidate – makes a correct (sort of) comment to the effect that a large number of people who receive subsidies from the state are unlikely to vote for him, the MSM goes berserk. Colleagues in my office in London were remarking how stupid and nasty MR obviously is. When I quietly pointed out that he merely touched on how hard it is to reform entitlements when almost half the country is receiving them in some shape or form, it produced a few furrowed brows. In their mindset, only a Republican commits “gaffes”; if Obama calls the the Falkland Islands the Maldives, for instance, or gives an execrable speech at the expense of entrepreneurs, it is laughed off. “Everyone is human, we all make mistakes, you got him out of context” etc.
Update: I love this piss-take of the MSM via Andrew Klavan.
“Romney is caught on tape saying that nearly half the country is on government assistance and will vote for Obama to keep the dole coming. In related news, a video is unearthed of Pythagoras saying that the square of the hypotenuse of the right triangle is equal to the sum of the square of the two adjacent sides.”
As a young and naive man, I “knew” what was right and voted accordingly. As I grew older and more sophisticated, I discovered such things as tactical voting and a perceived duty to support the election of the least-worst option with the best chance of victory, regardless of how slim the differences might be.
Now, middle-aged and faced with the consequences of those decades of “enlightened pragmatism”, I once again find myself voting my conscience, while turning a deaf ear to the blandishments of the machine. I have a vague notion that this sounds like some Buddhist proverb, or something.
– Samizdata commenter ‘the other rob’, who seems to be on a roll lately.
From one of my daily reads, the excellent Tim Sandefur. He ‘s knocking down a piece of nonsense on land rights from the hopeless Matthew Yglesias:
It’s typical of the left to argue that all property rights are somehow tainted by past injustices and therefore that government can redistribute to whatever groups wield sufficient political power to demand a share of the spoils. Of course, that is a non sequitur; past injustices do not justify new ones, against people who did not commit the original wrong. It’s true that, as Twain said, there’s not a foot of land that has not been stolen and restolen countless times. But isn’t this good reason to stop stealing what belongs to people? Instead of institutionalizing as social policy into the indefinite future a system that deprives people of their earnings, their belongings, and their substance, to serve priorities that others consider more important? The American Indian suffered terrible abuses, and stands today as an object lesson in what happens when government is given too much power to seize and redistribute property. Yet Yglesias praises that state of affairs and urges its repetition! That really is outrageous.
Absolutely. When debating collectivists over issues such as property ownership, I sometimes come up against the “but the original owners of land stole it” line, except that even if true, it seems absurd to suggest that every subsequent transaction, however free of coercion, is somehow tainted in some way. So a caveman beat up his neighbour and took a patch of territory – that hardly means I am not the legitimate owner of my small apartment in Pimlico.
Update: Related thoughts from Bryan Caplan. It includes an example of Murray Rothbard at his very best.
The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published cartoons mocking the Islamic prophet Mohammed. The magazine’s website is at CharlieHebdo.fr. It was very slow to load when I tried it, and although I did eventually find the front page I could not see the actual caricatures.
My opinion has not changed since I contributed a “Mohammed emoticon” (((:~(> to Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. I said then and I say now,
I take no pleasure from violating other people’s taboos. It is not polite and I wish to be polite. In ordinary circumstances if I want to do something that will annoy others I am willing to put up with moderate inconvenience in order to do it out of their sight. These are not ordinary circumstances. People are being threatened, harassed and sometimes murdered by fanatical Muslims for exercising free speech. The media and academia, fearless defenders of free speech so long as there was nothing to fear, have by and large caved in. So maybe it is time for ordinary people to step up. Lots of them. Spread the risk.
Obviously Charlie Hebdo itself stands proud where most other newspapers and magazines in the Western world cringe. If other journals had been as brave no one would have to be that brave.
Romney is no Thatcher – in truth, he’s far from it. It made sense for the unemployed back then to vote Thatcher because she offered an alternative to the headlong rush to destruction. Sadly, Romney may be correct – what sense would it make for today’s unemployed to vote for a marginally slower slide into the abyss?
– Samizdata commenter ‘the other rob’
Much is being made of Mitt Romney’s leaked comments to the effect that 47 per cent of America will never vote for him, because this 47 per cent depend on government hand-outs and he, Romney, has said he will cut these hand-outs.
Judging by what happened in Britain in the Thatcher years, Romney is (assuming I have it right what he said) wrong, about none of these people voting for him I mean. Here in Britain then, as in the USA now, unemployment was unprecedentedly high, and many assumed that nobody unemployed and drawing the dole would ever vote Thatcher. Yet quite a few such people did, and not just once either. They did it again and again.
Anti-Thatcherites said that this was false consciousness. These poor deluded, put-upon Conservative voters simply did not understand their own interests.
But what if such down-on-their-luck Conservative voters actually wanted jobs, even though they did not now have them? Many definitely did. What if they depended on government hand-outs, but hated this and longed for this demeaning arrangement to end? And what if, rather than blaming Thatcher for them having lost their old jobs, or even if they did blame Thatcher for them having lost their old jobs, they instead focussed on the future and regarded Thatcher as a better bet than the Labour alternative for them to get new and different jobs?
Even if all that any voter ever cares about is his or her own economic interests, and damn the country, for an unemployed person in the 1980s in Britain to vote Thatcher was at least a reasonable thing to do. It was not a self-evident case of someone not knowing what was best for them. Voting for the likes of Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock (Britain’s Obamas of those times, neither of whom ever made it to Prime Minister, thank God) might merely have made unemployment even worse, and jobs even harder to come by.
My point is not that such disagreement with the more usual opinion (if you’re unemployed vote left wing) of those times was definitely correct. I merely argue that such disagreement was a reasonable judgement to make, given that it was indeed a judgement call.
The same will apply to many Americans who depend on government hand-outs now, who will likewise vote for Romney rather than Obama, because they reckon Romney is more likely to get them back on their economic feet than Obama, and because back on their economic feet is where they really, really want to be.
And this will remain true, even though Romney has just (or so I have been reading) insulted these people by accusing them of being incapable of rational thought of the sort that I have just described, and of being incapable of voting other than for Obama, like so many sheep. At least Romney is showing hatred of the arrangements that they also hate, and which Obama might well make worse, and showing determination to change those arrangements. That might count for far more, in the eyes of an unemployed person who badly wants not to be unemployed, than those insults. So, he thinks I’m a sheep. So what? I know I’m not.
Thatcher herself never made the mistake of accusing unemployed Brits of being incapable of discerning what a brilliant Prime Minister she was, for them as for all others. From where she stood, only Labour voters were in the grip of false consciousness.
How many unemployed people will vote Romney? Rather more if Romney gives them further reason to vote for him, by saying something like: if you hate being dependent on the government, vote for me, and you’ve got a better chance of getting back into paid work than if you vote for the other fellow. → Continue reading: Why people who are now unemployed and on the dole may still rationally vote Romney (despite him saying that they won’t)
I’ve just discovered, while reading a Guardian piece about and against censorship by Nick Cohen, that Salman Rushdie has just published an autobiographical work about what his life has been like for the last decade or so, while being subjected to the calculatedly frenzied threats of the Islamist hordes following the publication of The Satanic Verses.
I have never regretted for a single second purchasing my copy of The Satanic Verses, and I still have it. But like many others who voted thus with their wallets, I soon gave up with actually reading the thing.
Joseph Anton, on the other hand, looks like it might be quite a page turner. As a general rule I far prefer reading autobiographies by award-winning literary novelists to reading their award-winning literary novels. Whether I enjoy reading Joseph Anton or not, I won’t regret buying that either. Which I just did.
I have yet to discover why it is called Joseph Anton, but I’ll find out soon enough. And … I just did. While inserting that “page turner” link above, I found myself reading this:
Rushdie’s new memoir, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, takes its title from the name he used while in hiding – which was a combination of the first names of two of his favourite writers, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.
So there we are.
Bloody hell, I also just found out: 656 pages! That’s a lot of pages to be turning. Maybe just bits of it, eh?
“After all these years of endlessly repeating the same tired tropes on the New York Times op-ed page, taking Maureen Dowd’s columns seriously requires a suspension of disbelief that is normally only needed to watch science fiction.”
– Jonathan Tobin
Incoming from Michael Jennings, in the form of a link to this:
How many months do we still have to save the world from verbal catastrophe?
|
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