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]
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I usually agree with Roger Simon, but I have some points to pick with this attempt to compare Nixon with Obama:
“Now I realize the comparison is unfair to Nixon who, other than Watergate of course, was a pretty decent president. He and his cohort Henry Kissinger opened Red China and effectively changed history by triangulating the Soviet Union. What those two men did helped lead to the diminution of Maoism as well and probably saved a huge number of lives. Tricky Dick also ratified the first, and ultimately most significant, U. S. environmental legislation, the kind that actually had a positive effect on the air and water, as opposed to the destructive self-regarding nonsense we have today.”
Well, I suppose it is true that some of the regulation of pollution and so on did some good, and yes, the China issue was played fairly well. But this article commits a sin of ommission: there is no mention whatever of the abandonment of the gold link to the dollar (admittedly, the link was a mere formality by the early 70s anyway, but still) and the institution of price controls, a pure example of King Canute Economics.
Nixon was not as evil as he is portrayed, maybe, and it is true that he pissed off a lot of the right people, but he also pissed off a lot of the wrong ones as well. I think that is possibly where Obama has a common bond. Not only has The One done things guaranteed to annoy conservatives, he hasn’t exactly been a great liberal president in the best use of that word, either.
A thing I keep banging on about is that a crucial stage in an argument occurs when the burden of proof gets reversed.
Crackpot Theorists devise a Crackpot Theory. It unites them. It excites them. It excuses their shared belief that The Free Market Is Not Good Enough. They demand action from each other. They capture small parts of government departments that most people don’t give a damn about. They write small laws and get them passed.
A few Critics notice, and start explaining that the Crackpot Theory is, maybe, a crackpot theory. The Crackpot Theorists say: No it isn’t! The Critics say: But you are making bad decisions! The Crackpot Theorists say: No we aren’t! As this phase of the argument gets seriously going, the Critics become ever more convinced that the Crackpot Theorists are indeed Crackpot Theorists, and because the Crackpot Theorists are behaving like the maniacal Crackpot Theorists that they are, the Critics grow in number, and in their certainty that the Crackpot Theorists are totally crackpot.
The small bits of the government departments grow into big bits, and infect other bits. The laws they introduce get bigger and more intrusive.
But sadly, nobody else cares, or not enough to stop all this. The money and inconvenience involved is still trivial, by the usual standards of government-imposed expense and inconvenience. Let the Crackpot Theorists have their fun! And besides: Maybe, just maybe, the Crackpot Theorists are onto something. Better safe than sorry! Anyway, what can you do?
As the Crackpot Theory grows in power, powerless people start to notice and to cry out: Your Crackpot Theory is just an excuse for us to be taxed more! Alas, for many people this is a feature, not a bug.
Throughout this phase of the history of the Crackpot Theory, the Critics of the Crackpot Theory are in the impossible position of having only one way of stopping the rise to prominence of the Crackpot Theory, which is to convince the Crackpot Theorists that they are wrong.
Some Crackpot Theorists are convinced. Quite a few of them creep away in ashamed silence. A tiny few even say in public that they were wrong. But others of them are now so wholly dependent for their livelihoods upon the Crackpot Theory being true that they stick with it anyway, despite now suspecting or even knowing what total crackpottery it is. What can they do?
Until, one day, the Crackpot Theorists pick a fight with a group of people powerful enough for their anger to actually matter, to the entire world.
At which point, the burden of proof, hitherto weighing down only upon the shoulders of the Critics, now descends upon the shoulders of the Crackpot Theorists themselves. Suddenly, they have to convince the world that they are right and that their Critics are wrong. They have to convince their Critics that their Critics are wrong, just to shut their Critics up from saying what the world now wants to be told, namely that the fight with those powerful and angry people is a fight that is not worth having.
But our Crackpot Theory says that we must have this fight! No matter what! The world must be saved, even if it is ruined in the process!
I’m just thinking aloud, you understand. Having seen this (linked to just now by the ever-alert Instapundit):
China will take swift counter-measures that could include impounding European aircraft if the EU punishes Chinese airlines for not complying with its scheme to curb carbon emissions, the China Air Transport Association said on Tuesday.
Wei Zhenzhong, secretary general of the China Air Transport Association, said:
“We would try to avoid any trade war.”
If that’s not a powerful and angry person threatening a trade war, I don’t know what is. If the trade war duly happens, next up: trade war. (What was that about the EU putting an end to conflict between Great Powers?)
So, Crackpot Theorists, is your Crackpot Theory true enough to be worth stuff like this? Go ahead. Convince us.
Bishop Hill always likes to see the best in people. He assumes good faith unless it is overwhelmingly obvious that it is absent.
So he is pleased to report that the House of Commons Committee on Energy and Climate Change has announce that it is to hold an inquiry into the economics of wind power. But this time, says the Bishop:
Looks like policy-based evidence making to me.
Confession: when I first read that, I assumed that I was reading this:
Looks like evidence-based policy making to me.
I have had to do a complete rewrite of this bit of the posting. I contrasted that with the following comments. In fact the following comments agree! Deep apologies. This is the biggest mis-reading I have ever committed as a blogger. I think. I hope. Anyway, back to that evidence-based policy making.
A commenter assumes that to be sarcasm. No. He means it.
Or as I should have put: A commenter read most of the questions the Committee says it will ask as I did, at first, and he wondered: why the sarcasm?
But most of the Bishop’s commenters are not nearly as charitable as he is agree with him. (Which concludes the corrections.)
The first one says:
It’s 2012. The Climate Change Act was passed in 2008, committing us to the most costly programme ever legislated in our history. Now they want to examine the economics!
And another says:
The last question reveals the true intent of the inquiry, “What methods could be used to make onshore wind more acceptable to communities that host them?”
And another:
Tim Yeo, MP, is in the Chair.
Expect the conclusion to be “We are getting it about right”.
Then in ten years time the lights will start to go out on still winter nights.
Biggest question of all: Is it actually necessary to fret about “climate change”? Something tells me that this Committee will assume a yes on that.
So, take your pick. Better late than never, or too bloody late? Enough of the right questions, or too many wrong assumptions?
What I mostly think is: Keep blogging away Bishop. Kudos for spotting this, and further kudos for reporting what gets asked and what answers are forthcoming, as I assume you will when the time comes.
There is something very old fashioned about blogs like Bishop Hill. While the newspapers mostly now bang on about celebs and football tournaments, here is a blogger actually spotting some at least potentially quite significant news, and reporting on it.
I just watched a late night TV show done by, and about, the ventriloquist Nina Conti, who is completely new to me. Very good. Such are the wonders of the internet that I can immediately now share my pleasure with you, complete with a link to a much shorter but equally funny video. That’s her and the monkey doing the Montreal Comedy Festival.
What I find so funny about Ms. Conti is that her personality on stage is so unstagey, so unshowbizzy, so un-actressy, just precisely as self-consciously embarrassed, yet gigglingly entertained, as she would be if she were talking to an actual monkey, on a stage, in front of lots of people. Yet what she is doing is the oldest of old school showbizz. Brilliant, I think. Acting of the highest quality.
She is very ambitious. Not willing to be a regular old school ventriloquist. She will either take the ancient art to new heights, or fall off the mountain trying. Very admirable.
Favourite line in the short video:
“Stop pretending it’s not your fault.”
Also good:
“Jim Henson knew his place.”
The monkey sounds ever so slightly Welsh. I wonder why.
“Let’s go home and get some therapy.”
She seems totally sane. Apart, that is to say, from having an imaginary monkey attached to her arm. Does that make her mad? Or does it keep her sane?
Recent posting at WUWT?
Gordon J. Fulks:
We learned over the weekend that chemist Nickolas Drapela, PhD has been summarily fired from his position as a “Senior Instructor” in the Department of Chemistry. The department chairman Richard Carter told him that he was fired but would not provide any reason. Subsequent attempts to extract a reason from the OSU administration have been stonewalled. Drapela appears to have been highly competent and well-liked by his students. Some have even taken up the fight to have him reinstated.
But the reason seems clear. Drapela is a climate skeptic.
Says commenter number one:
Green is the new McCarthy.
Except that I bet that more people have been fired by American universities for being climate skeptics than were ever fired for being Communists.
I favour a world in which people can be fired for any stupid reason at all, provided there is no contract saying otherwise. Employee beware. But this case does shine a bright light on what a huge industry-stroke-secular-religion Climate Catastrophism has become. The idea that the big money is all on the side of climate skepticism is ludicrous.
Who pays for Oregon State University? Do they know what they are paying for? Do they like it? Might they be persuaded to stop paying? Maybe if questions of that sort were asked loudly enough, and if they started to be answered, Drapela might get his job back.
If anyone ever had any hopes that Boris was any different to the dreary authoritarians who populate the system, this should lay such notions to rest. He is very much ‘one of them‘.
He purports to have ‘libertarian instincts’ and yet thinks the role of the state should extend to telling people at gun point what they can eat. To hell with taking a moral position and respecting self ownership, says Boris, what are the utilitarian arguments?
A vote for this man was sadly a vote for more of the same regulatory statism that spews out of the political class.
Free-market Western democratic capitalism is sustainable, both environmentally and economically, and alone gives us the affluence and freedom to allow a sizable minority to divorce itself from the gritty daily tasks of production to critique and revile the very system that nourishes them.
– Victor David Hanson
This article has nothing really to do with politics or so forth, but it caught my eye as an excellent piece of analysis of a man’s reputation, not least a reputation that had been assiduously cultivated by the man himself, Pablo Picasso:
“They say that I can draw better than Raphael”, Gertrude Stein recorded Picasso as saying. “And they’re probably right. Perhaps I even draw better.” Picasso made this boast in claiming his right to creative freedom. The truth, however, is that Picasso not only did not draw better than Raphael, he may well have had a very limited understanding of how Raphael drew.
So writes someone called Catesby Leigh, in Standpoint magazine.
The author of the piece looks at an actual attempt by Picasso to draw a human form – a man called Vollard – in the manner of the Old Masters, such as Ingres. The commentary reminds of me of when one of my early efforts at school was given a fairly dusty appraisal by my arts teacher:
For starters, Vollard just isn’t put together quite right. Most problematically, he appears to be missing a goodly portion of his jawbone. His face reads like a rather shallow, U-shaped mask. As a result the structure of the side of his head and its engagement with the neck is badly resolved. Apart from the head, Picasso lavished the most care on the other unclothed portion of Vollard’s anatomy: the hands. Surely he recalled Ingres’s countless masterful hand studies from his Montauban visit. Vollard’s fingers in particular are modeled with excruciating care — a far cry from the familiar Picasso bravura. Even so the back of the outer hand, like the wrist of the partly covered hand, is a lumpen mass and not the articulated anatomical form it should be.
Picasso also failed to draw Vollard’s rump properly. He treated it, along with the better part of his upper left leg, as one big, flat receding plane, with the delineated folds in the trousers of his suit contributing nothing to its modelling. Shading lines continue straight back from the rump’s outline into the space between it and the back of the chair. This is a violation of one of the most elementary canons of classical draftsmanship: that lines should “follow the form” and in doing so indicate its depth. In this case those shading lines should have curved at the rump’s end so as to communicate its three-dimensionality. But Picasso followed the shade and not the form.
The familiar “subversion of academic conventions” apologia for Picasso’s idiosyncracies will not wash in the Vollard portrait’s case. Though working from a photograph, Picasso was doing this one straight, eager to convince himself and others that he could draw like an Old Master. Impressive as the results undeniably are, he couldn’t match Ingres’s draughtsmanship no matter how hard he tried. For economy of artistic means combined with flawless technique, his rival’s Guillon-Lethière leaves Picasso’s Vollard in the dust.
The article’s mood is very measured and polite, but that doesn’t mean we need to be so reticent. Picasso has always left me cold, and assuming the analysis here is correct, could it be said that one reason for Picasso’s move away from traditional forms of art is not just because of a genuine desire to take art in what he saw in a new direction, but because, in terms of the skills of the Old Masters, he just could not quite hack it in every rigorous aspect, and therefore chose forms more in tune with his undoubted talents?
For those interested, this book on the skills of the Old Masters, by Charles Lock Eastlake, looks interesting. Drawing and painting is a skill of mine that I have, to my shame, let go a bit. It is something I intend to put right.
It did not fit easily into my previous post but another example of a person afflicted by “… a desire to maintain the delusion that the world would heed your message if only it were allowed to hear it” is Peter Gleick, who despite having his own blog at Forbes Magazine and turning down star billing to debate his opponents at the Heartland Institute face to face persisted in his belief that they were managing to “prevent this debate”.
Incidentally, the Undebated One has been reinstated at the Pacific Institute, I see from a report in the Guardian. You will rejoice to hear that
The Pacific Institute indicated in the statement that it had found no evidence for Heartland’s charges that Gleick had forged one of several documents he released last February.
To my suprise Suzanne Goldenberg, the author of the report who until now has appeared besotted with Gleick now sounds almost like one of those cynical reporters one used to read about:
But the Institute offered no further information on the findings of the investigation, or any evidence to support the claim of having conducted a fully independent investigation. It gave no further explanation for its decision to reject Heartland’s charges that Gleick had faked a document.
Ms Goldenberg then continued to veer from side to side in the article. After Old Suzanne wrote about a Heartland plan to “spread misinformation in schools about climate change” (making no reference to the fact that the most damaging quotes on that score came from a document that she has hinted a minute ago was fake), New Suzanne lets slip, I think deliberately, that:
… when Heartland promoted the climate conference by taking out a billboard comparing believers in climate change to psychopaths like the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, a run in donors, which had been relatively modest immediately after Gleick’s exposé, spiked dramatically. Two board members resigned, almost all of those based in its Washington DC office quit, and a number of Heartland allies publicly chided the organisation
The words in bold represent a change. Until recently the Guardian line was that Gleick’s exposé had been, shall we say, misguided, but had struck a mighty blow against Heartland.
I do not think I quite qualify as an ally, but I was and am a strong supporter of the Institute in its efforts to get the truth out of Gleick, and was also one of the chiders after the Unabomber poster came out, though as you will see if you read that post and its comments many here disagree. My impression is that Ms Goldenberg and others with similar views turned with relief from defending Gleick to talking about the Kaczynski poster. Without a confession or an adverse verdict in a court of law they will never admit that Gleick lied. However I suspect the penny has dropped that their public credulity regarding an obviously fishy story, and the public excuses they made for Gleick’s admitted dishonest tactics, let alone his unadmitted ones, sent the message to the public that they may also be credulous and tolerant of dishonesty when it comes to climate science.
“By the way, George Soros also warned that the new, creditor-dominated Europe would become “a German empire with the periphery as the hinterland”. Didn’t a certain female politician warn of something along these lines nearly 25 years ago, and wasn’t she branded xenophobic for her pains? An entire generation is being made to pay for our continent’s slow learners.”
Charles Moore.
Declare free trade unilaterally, says Tim Worstall in the Telegraph. Good and true are his words, but since you all know that already, allow me to draw your attention to an exchange you may not have seen in the comments that manages to be both entertaining and at the same time slightly sad.
“davidaslindsay” wrote:
A perfect illustration of how there is nothing more anti-conservative than capitalism.
The Cold War is long gone, so there is no remaining need for Tories to be corralled out of fear into voting for Conservatives and other such Liberal parties
Imagine, just imagine, if a site not unlike this one in structure, if in nothing else, were to give a platform to people who recognised that there was no patriotism without economic patriotism, set within a broader appreciation of the rural, the provincial, the socially conservative, and the classically (and Classically) Christian, with the consequent pronounced aversion to global capitalism, to American hegemony, to obeisant Zionism, to wars to make the world anew, to wars generally, and so on.
Just imagine such a voice in the debate. Just imagine it. Even if only for one moment, just imagine it.
“TimWorstall” replied
David, this is a blog.
You have a blog. Thus there already is a blog which reflects such views.
Very democratic place, the internet.
What is both funny and sad about David Lindsay’s cri de coeur is that he does not just have a personal blog but has, or had in 2009, a slot in the Telegraph, a privilege that most bloggers would give their best stripy pyjamas to obtain. Lindsay’s cry of “Just imagine such a voice in the debate. Just imagine it. Even if only for one moment, just imagine it” makes him sound like a combination of Galileo facing the Inquisition and Captain Kirk trying to get the Fabrini to believe they are on a generation ship in For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky. Yet he scarcely had to stretch his imagination to conceive of a voice exactly like his being given a platform even beyond the one offered by davidaslindsay.blogspot.com. All he had to do was remember as far back as 2009.
What is the appeal of believing that you are silenced when you are given a megaphone?
Some of it is persecution envy, or to be more accurate, envy of the chance to be heroic. Mr Lindsay is of the nostalgic Right and appears to me to suffer a little from this condition but the phenomenon is most common and strong on the nostalgic Left. How they do hate being the rich, safe, privileged ones. How they love to reminisce about standing up to Thatcher, or at a pinch, their resistance during the grim Bush years. How they would have loved to have been a Freedom Rider. They would have been heroes, honest.
Some of it is a desire to maintain the delusion that the world would heed your message if only it were allowed to hear it. This thought hurts much less than the thought that the world has had ample opportunity to hear your message and heeds it not. Before you laugh at Mr Lindsay – or being realistic, slightly after – remember that (a) in so far as this is a delusion it is one he shares with us (have we not blogs? Seen the libertarian sentiments of the populace lately?) and (b) the belief that the people are being stopped from hearing minority voices by a semi-conscious conspiracy of the mainstream media is only just now ceasing to be true.
We do not quite match the faithfulness in delusion of those communists who have announced the imminence of world revolution every year for close on a century, but many of the bloggers whose writing I love most – Instapundit, Brian Micklethwait, me – have announced the imminent death of the gatekeeper every year for close on a decade. Yet there the decrepit old bastard is each new morning, bleary eyed, swaying on his feet, pretending not to know about the people who slipped past him while he was drunk and incapable the night before – but still manning his old rotten gate most of the time and just damn refusing to die.
Mind you, we were not exactly wrong about the old boy’s morbidity, just premature. He’ll turn up his toes eventually and the patient messengers of every suppressed creed with break through and be heard in all the land, only we’ll be heard most gladly because we are in the right. I hope. I think.
“The late economist Mancur Olson has argued that economies tend to grow more slowly as rent-seeking coalitions become pervasive and ubiquitous, since they divert resources from wealth-creating to wealth-consuming uses. This is one reason, he argues, why the United States grew so rapidly in the nineteenth century, and why West Germany and Japan grew so rapidly in the two or three decades after World War II. At such times, these economies were open to investment and entrepreneurship, and, as a consequence, they enjoyed historically high rates of growth. With the passage of time, all of these systems were gradually encumbered by coalitions seeking benefits through the state. Political paralysis and slow growth, Olson argues, are by-products of political systems captured by rent-seeking coalitions. These groups, operating collectively, can block any overall effort to cut spending or to address the problems of deficits and debt.”
– James Piereson
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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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