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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It may be a minor thing but why oh why do people who cover the world’s conflicts seem to have so little technical knowledge of the subject they cover? I saw an article in the Telegraph with an image captioned “This image made from amateur video released by the Shaam News Network, purports to show a Syrian military tank in Homs, Syria”… except it is clearly not a “tank”, it is a BMP… an infantry fighting vehicle.
This is not new. I spent much of the 1990’s in various parts of the former Yugoslavia and was often exasperated to grab a western newspaper in Zagreb and see pictures of “Croatian tanks”… which more often than not captured former Yugoslav OT M-60 APCs pressed into service by the Croatian, HVO or BiH armies… or even rather exotic Croatian improvised armoured personnel carriers (in effect armoured trucks with a machine gun). More recently I also recall a clip on CNN describing “British tanks” in Iraq that were in fact AS-90 artillery vehicles.
It seems odd to me that so few modern war correspondents are ex-military and thus, with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan, far too many of them cannot tell the difference between a Mauser and a javelin (and neither can their editors it seems). This is certainly why I find Michael Yon so refreshing… he actually understands what he is looking at up the sharp end.
To hire an opinion pollster as a strategist is to put a spinning weathervane where a compass needle ought to be
– Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph.
Now where did I see the leader of this dismal crew described as a weathervane before back in 2007?
No, I don’t mean the US Supreme Court. The lads were doing their best. If they got a bit obsessed on the question of whether Obamacare was constitutional rather than whether it was a bad idea, you can’t really blame them. Obsessing on constitutionality is what they are paid for.
The court that is pre-eminent among the “many, many things in this so-termed civilization of ours which would be mightily improved by a once over lightly of the Hiroshima treatment”, as Robert Heinlein once put it, is Doncaster Crown Court, particularly when presided over by Judge Jacqueline Davies. It was she (styled ‘Her honour Judge Jacqueline Davies'”) who in November 2010 found against Paul Chambers in his appeal against conviction for “menace” for jokingly saying on Twitter that he was going to blow up an airport if it did not reopen quickly enough after being closed by snow. He did not say this to anyone at the airport, I remind you, he said it to the internet friend he was flying to meet. Then some security loser decided to reenact the story about the old woman who rings up the police to say her neighbour is standing naked at his window. If you recall, the cop asks sympathetically whether she is very shaken up. “Dreadfullly,” she says, “I was so shocked when I saw it, I nearly fell right off the stepladder.” Only this time the police thought the joke would end better with an arrest.
Supported by, among many others, the comedians Stephen Fry and Al Murray – good for them – Paul Chambers has appealed again and a High Court hearing was held yesterday. Judgement has been reserved for a later date. Now it is our turn on this side of the pond to get tense about a judicial decision affecting liberty.
Just warning you guys….
You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m going to be sure. From orbit.
There might be a tendency, I think, among some world-weary types to say that this whole “Fast and Furious” disaster now unravelling is nothing more than the US equivalent of the sort of “Westminster Village” obsessions that we Brits got engrossed over more than a year ago. Nothing much to see here, please move along, etc. But I don’t see it that way. The use of executive privilege to squash oversight of key decisions made by this administration seems to be a serious matter that ought to concern the wider public, not least as people got killed and hurt.
Jennifer Rubin weighs in on the subject of the lamentable US Attorney General, Eric Holder:
“If he were a first-year law student asked to explain how the president could refuse to allow House oversight on a botched operation in which Americans and Mexicans died and the administration has twice had to cop to providing erroneous information to Congress, Eric Holder’s letter would get an “F.” He doesn’t set out the nature of the document being withheld, the type of privilege being asserted, or the argument as to why it supersedes the right of Congress to oversee executive branch misconduct. Congress is certainly within it rights to hold him in contempt. But really the president should can Holder.”
Bear in mind this appeared in the Washington Post, the same newspaper that we associate with the Watergate scandal, and hardly a bastion of the “vast rightwing conspiracy”.
Here is a great video featuring “Skeptical Environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg, talking to John Tierney, . Lomborg discusses his views about how any debate on improving lives of the poor around the world requires us to understand that resources are scarce, and that being obsessed by “sexy”, attention-grabbing issues means we ignore the less glamorous, but often far more severe issues. Of course, the media and political world tends to push attention towards the “eye-catching initiatives” (to use Tony Blair’s formulation). But that doesn’t mean we have to settle for this. Lomborg is terrific. No wonder he drives deep Greens nuts.
I recommend pretty much all his works, especially his book, Cool It.
The answer to a market where the participants compete to make things worse by following bad incentives is to ask what is creating those bad incentives and to stop doing that, not to impose a monopoly.
That thought is my response to, and my almost entire agreement with, an ASI blog posting by Anton Howes, which is critical of Education Minister Michael Gove’s plan to replace competing examination boards with a state monopoly examination board. Gove says these are now racing each other to the bottom, racing each other, that is to say, in lowering standards.
But, says Howes:
The proposals to limit exam board competition to monopolies for every subject (or duopolies between O-levels and CSEs) would therefore exacerbate the problem by limiting healthy academic discrimination even further. With only one exam board to be lobbied for each subject, we would face a system where every self-interested education minister could easily ‘dumb down’ the system even further, no matter how much an overhaul could raise standards in the immediate short term.
Howes is spot on in identifying one of the biggest reasons why state action is so frequently resorted to, even by politicians generally inclined to favour free market solutions. To start with, state action sometimes seems to improve matters, definitely so to many eyes. Only later does the arrangement revert to brazen, monopolised incompetence. Markets, on the other hand, often start out as a bit of a shambles, and only yield their benefits to politicians who are prepared to be patient. In the long run, markets are incomparably superior, and some politicians do know this. But politics mostly happens in the short run.
Howes also notes that “free marketeer” Lizz Truss MP supports Gove in this move towards state monopoly.
Alas, Howes himself gets a bit confused in his final paragraph:
… the real solution to grade inflation may lie in more accurate and discriminating government league tables, …
Excuse me! Now who is putting his faith in a government monopoly? But before even the next full stop arrives, Howes corrects himself.
… or even their replacement with a competing system of tables by universities, employers, and other private groups.
Quite so. But lose that “even”.
A few days ago I nearly photoed someone wearing one of those idiotic Che T-shirts, but I missed the shot.
This is the kind of thing such T-shirts ought to be saying:
Although, I’m not quite sure about the wording, the bit at the bottom I mean. Truly, I’m not sure. It looks to me somewhat like an admission of defeat, rather than an assertion of victory. It’s like the bad guys really have succeeded in burying the truth about this appalling person, and the good guys are conceding this. But the first bit digs up that truth and proclaims it, and that’s good.
I found it here.
More about the real Che in this earlier posting here.
I have just been reminded by a spam commenter that long before denouncing Jimmy Carr was fashionable, I denounced Jimmy Carr, in September 2008. Quote:
I am watching the late night rerun of 8 Out Of 10 Cats on the telly, and I have a complaint. Carr has just said that: “It’s true. 68 percent preferred brains to beauty.” No Carr. If you join me in thinking about this, Carr, what you will realise is that 68 percent of people said they preferred brains to beauty.
Time was when we ordinaries just had to put up with media distortions of this kind, but now, the internet has changed the balance of power. We can now shout back at our tellies, and be heard. The world will never be the same again.
Indeed not. Don’t bother following the link to read the whole thing, because you just did.
More seriously, on a related note to the one sounded by me in para 2 above, here is a posting at Guido’s about how Laurie Penny threw some mud at David Starkey, calling him a racist, and he then threw some more mud back at Ms. Penny. Two short video clips show both bits of mud flying through the air.
This is the first time I have ever see Laurie Penny in action. I definitely prefer her beauty to her brain.
Time was when the original mud thrown by Ms. Penny would have stuck, and Starkey would have been muddied for ever, even in the minds of those who would have sympathised with what he said, on account of the original performance by Starkey on Newsnight that was the basis of Ms. Penny’s accusation not being available for anyone to check, even if they saw it first time around. But the game no longer plays out like that.
As is further illustrated by the fact that, in trying to recover her position with subsequent tweeting following the debate shown in those video clips, Ms. Penny only dug herself deeper into her hole, also exposing her original racism accusation to yet another audience and enabling commenters to clarify the whole spat still further.
The complete video of the event over the weekend is still, alas, stuck behind the Sunday Times paywall. It will surely emerge soon.
Here is a brief comment I left over at Tim Worstall’s blog, regarding fractional reserve banking and supposed journalistic illiteracy about said:
“I can see why smart people are dubious about fractional reserve banking. The whole “maturity transformation” line that defenders of FRB come up with only works if you are prepared to take the risk that, in the event of a crisis, you won’t be able to get your money out of a bank when you want it. That is why, in a real free market, not the rigged charade we have now, FRBs would have to be clearly advertised as such, and without the moral hazard-machines of state deposit insurance and a central bank acting as lender of last resort, printer of funny money, etc. In such a laissez faire world, FRB might persist, but it would be a lot more restricted than now, and its capacity for causing booms and busts reduced. Like I say, it should not be illegal so long as everyone knows what it is.”
I just read this piece by Jeff Carter about how Germany is doing all the productive work for the entire EU. This bit in particular:
If I am the Germans I feel like the weightlifter on the bench press that just had a couple of manhole covers added to the bar. How can you have a European Union, when only one country in Europe is productive? Socialism is like that. They direct and regulate, you produce.
Which made me say to myself the phrase “Germany shrugs”. Which I then googled, and I got to this by Andrew Lawford:
Some time ago, I read an interesting article that outlined the fact that a Greek exit from the Euro would compound its problems in that it would have a new currency that would devalue markedly against the Euro, but would have all its debt still denominated in Euro. Obviously the situation would be resolved either by passing a law that redenominated all Greek debt into the new currency, or simply by defaulting on the payments of Euro debt. The end result for investors would be much the same.
The interesting thing to consider, though, is if Germany were to quit the Euro. The rule that applies to Greece would presumably apply to Germany too: a new currency would be introduced, but the nation’s debt would still be denominated in Euro. In this case, however, the new currency would presumably appreciate massively against the Euro, thus reducing Germany’s debt burden as measured in its new currency. This begs the question: would Germany redenominate all its Euro debt into its new currency? Certainly this is what investors expect as they push bund yields to record lows during the current “flight to quality”, but upon what basis can such a redenomination be expected?
And he ends by saying:
The Germans may simply shrug.
I am surprised that “Germany shrugs” (most of the google hits had an “off” bolted on to the end followed by whatever it was that Germany was shrugging off) is not a more common phrase. It certainly will be, Real Soon Now. Trouble is, the whole world, including us here, have been wondering for ages when “Germany”, by which I mean the people of Germany rather than their EU District Commissioner rulers, will finally demand that their leaders stop leading them into an economic morass and put their economic interests first.
I’m now inclined to think that I got it right at the end of this, where I said that the EU will only collapse when it has entirely run out of all its money and all its power, and all of it will then collapse.
How rightly horrified people would be if a prime minister were to publicly “name and shame” someone for sexual behaviour that he, the prime minister, found “morally repugnant” but which was not illegal. For the first couple of decades after its decriminalisation in 1967 homosexuality would have fallen in that category in the opinion of most British adults. Adultery still does fall into that category. I am pretty sure Cameron claims to find adultery morally repugnant, so let us hear his reasons for not making public denunciations of all the adulterous celebs out there in the same way that he has denounced Jimmy Carr for tax avoidance. And if it is right for him to denounce adulterous celebrities he should also denounce adulterous cabinet ministers and Tory donors, of course. If he would recoil from this course (and to be fair, he probably would) then he ought to be able to understand what is wrong with the man given the highest power in the land publicly denouncing as immoral the legal financial behaviour of a named individual.
The Times‘s behaviour in this affair has been disgusting, too. By all means write features denouncing tax avoidance – personally I think tax avoidance is morally neutral at worst, and more often good, but I recognise that opinions differ – and I would say that using already-public sources such as company accounts to expose the behaviour of individuals to public hostility is within the rights of a free press even when my sympathies are with the person exposed. One citizen slagging off another citizen is a very different thing from the prime minister slagging off a citizen. But the witchunting smirk of the Times‘s coverage makes me sick. Celebrity exposés for the people who think they are above celebrity exposés. And the witchunting howl of the Guardian‘s coverage as its writers scrambled like hyenas for the scraps left over from the Times‘s kill make me even more sick. These are the same people who were so high-minded about the press intrusions into privacy cited at the Levenson enquiry.
The original meaning of “bully” in the phrase bully pulpit was merely “wonderful”, i.e. that high office gave the holder a wonderful high platform from which he could reach a wide audience with his sermons. Nonetheless I have little doubt that from long before the time President Theodore Roosevelt first coined the term the bully pulpit has been used for bullying in the modern sense. The very fact that a prime minister or president potentially has the power to do harm to a private individual ought to clamp shut the leader’s mouth. No such scruples stopped Tony Blair from joining in the mob that got Glenn Hoddle fired from his job as England football manager for his religious beliefs, but then Cameron always has said he was the heir to Blair.
Decent silence ought to be kept by the great even more firmly in the case of a private citizen’s tax matters than in sexual matters or matters of belief, because a modern democratic state has largely ceased to employ mutaween or inquisitors (“diversity advisors” aside), but it does employ an army of tax collectors, and the prime minister or president is at the head of that army. A responsible ruler would be horrified by the thought that a careless word against an individual might well cause servile tax officials to attempt to win the ruler’s favour by focussing on that individual.
From Media Law by Geoffrey Robertson, Q.C. and Andrew Nicol, Q.C., I quote:
The arcane offence of scandalum magnatum was created by a statute of 1275 designed to protect “the great men of the realm” against discomfiture from stories that might arouse the people against them. The purpose of criminal libel was to prevent loss of confidence in government. It was, essentially, a public order offence, and since true stories were more likely to result in breaches of the peace, it spawned the aphorism “The greater the truth, the greater the libel.” Overtly political prosecutions were brought in its name, against the likes of John Wilkes, Tom Paine and the Dean of St Asaph. Truth is not a defence, unless the defendant can convince a jury that publication is for the public benefit. The burden of proof lies on the defendant, who may be convicted even though he or she honestly believed, on reasonable grounds, that what was published was true and a matter of public interest.
Some of our readers are learned in the law of the land. I appeal to you, find a way to bring a prosecution against divers great men of the realm, to whit David William Donald Cameron and Daniel Grian Alexander. Should not the law apply equally to great and small? Find grounds to bring suit against Cameron and Alexander for their criminal libel against James Anthony Patrick Carr, against whom said Cameron and Alexander, abusing their office, did arouse the fury of the mob despite Carr having broken no law.
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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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