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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Imagine you are walking down the street and a man in a suit walks up to you holding a large cudgel…
“Excuse me,” he says, “I have seen you walk down this street on a daily basis wearing a tee-shirt and in future I would like you to wear a suit and tie to raise the tone of the neighbourhood.”
“Er, no,” you reply, “I am happy dressed the way I am.”
“I see,” the man replies, “well I would rather not have to threaten to hit you with this cudgel if you do not do what I say so I want you to voluntarily agree to wear a suit and tie.”
“But you are threatening to hit me with that cudgel!” you point out.
“No,” he says, “I will only threaten to hit you with this cudgel if you don’t do what I want voluntarily.”
This statement of the bleedin’ obvious by me was brought on this sadly typical piece of ‘press release’ style journalism:
The three voluntary “responsibility deals” agreed with the food industry are aimed at helping the public to eat more healthily, in a drive to tackle the growing problem of obesity among both adults and children. Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, believes that firms will be more likely to set ambitious targets for themselves if they are negotiated on a voluntary basis. Rather than a “nanny state” approach, he is keen to arm the public with the tools they need to cope in an “obesogenic environment,” where people are bombarded with adverts for unhealthy food.
If firms break their promises, the Government will however consider taking compulsory measures.
So rather than writing an article that explains the dynamic of what is going on here, Rosa Prince in effect just delivers a government press release complete with the approved spin… ‘voluntary’… ‘not nanny state’…
Why exactly does The Telegraph need to have a ‘political correspondent’ at all rather than just republishing whatever the government wishes? What value is Rosa Prince actually adding here? The fact that these food industry groups agreed to do something under threat of compulsory measures means that this clearly is a prime example of the ‘Nanny State’ in action… and moreover if there is an explicit threat of legal coercion, how is this in any meaningful sense ‘voluntary’?
Here’s Ronald Reagan’s great speech of 1964. Like many classical liberals, I realise that he fell short of what we would want – the size of government did not appreciably fall on his watch, although tax rates fell sharply and some important deregulations continued. But the Soviet Union did reach its demise when he was in power – and he was partly responsible for pushing it on its deathbed – the entrepreneurial boom seen in areas such as Silicon Valley did seriously get under way why he was POTUS, aided by a friendly tax regime. It is not hard to see – much to the frustrations of his snooty detractors – why this man was so much loved. Here is a balanced assessment by David Mayer.
“There was never any widespread popular demand for change, and the argument that people would find a decimal system easier was true in practice only of those who rarely used it, i.e., foreigners. From an educational point of view, our duodecimal system was preferable because it taught children how to count in different bases. People brought up before decimalisation are almost invariably better at mental arithmetic than those born since. When we lost our shillings and pence, as when, more gradually, our weights and measures were subverted, we lost the full meaning of many of our nursery rhymes, jokes and proverbs. We also lost the actual coins, all of them superior in design to what replaced them and all, because they remained in circulation so long (it was common in the 1960s to receive a Victorian penny in change), of historical interest. Indeed, this is literally true, since the inflation of the Heath/Wilson years made the new coins almost valueless.”
Charles Moore, Spectator, page 11, 19 February edition (behind the subscriber firewall).
He is right on this. Yes, I can see some readers sniffing that a lot of old rot about rhymes and so on is hardly any reason for keeping a form of coinage, but I think he has a point about different bases in counting; even in my own field of finance and banking, I noticed that in some areas, such as the pricing of US bond securities, the practice was recently, or still is, to mark prices in sixteenths and 32nds, rather than in the decimal form used for Eurozone bonds, for example. And being able to do this is good for my maths – not a strong point.
But the broader issue surely, is that while the loss of old coinage may be upsetting to traditionalists, the real nub of the matter is that there is no point in embracing some “modern” standard of counting or whatever if the government, and central bank, debauches the currency. And unfortunately, even during the “good old days” when old coinage existed, the quackery of inflationism was eroding the value of those pounds (a unit of weight, remember) and everything else. I would settle for any coinage system so long as it retained its value.
What killed respect and affection for money was not the decimalisation mania of the late, unlamented Sir Edward Heath. It was inflation.
It will not do to chastise Obama’s budget proposal as a simple “refusal to lead,” a “punt,” or a “cynical political maneuver.” Obama isn’t failing to lead. He is very cleverly leading us toward an irreversible expansion of the welfare state. If Obama is reelected and in control when the entitlement crisis finally does hit, he will manage the country toward Euro-style taxes and Euro-style socialism. After all, in the midst of its current fiscal crisis, Obama is pushing Europe to expand spending, not contract it.
I like this post by Lexington Green (h/t Glenn Reynolds), although his vision of permanent Republican meltdown is overdrawn. Lexington rightly rejects the “failure to lead” framing, highlighting Obama’s strategic moves and long-term intentions instead. The notion that Obama plans to use Republican proposals for cuts to kick off a movement of “angry and mobilized” beneficiaries is exactly right. Obama’s 2010 attacks on the Chamber of Commerce and his infamous “punish your enemies” exhortation were efforts to do the same thing. I lay out the rationale behind this intentionally polarizing strategy in the final chapter of Radical-in-Chief. It’s a program deeply rooted in Obama’s past. And in the absence of an honest avowal of his plans and motives in the present, only the past reveals the truth about this president’s vision of the future.
Perhaps I’m wrong and “the president’s abdication of leadership” sound bite will be enough to defeat “the GOP’s heartless cuts.” Even so, as an alternative, I suggest: “Obama’s radical plans are leading us off a cliff.”
– Stanley Kurtz
Travel books, or adventure books chronicling experiences of living abroad, can be highly variable in literary or other qualities. I have my favourites: I loved that PJ O’Rourke classic, “Holidays in Hell”; I enjoyed the travel and memoirs of the great Patrick Leigh-Fermor, and another favourite of mine was Eric Newby’s The Last Grain Race (describing his experience of sailing aboard a four-masted clipper-type ship). Being a bit of a yachtie, I also enjoyed the Robin Knox-Johnson account of his single-handed sailing trip around the world. And of course there are military memoirs where adventure and travel are co-mingled with armed expeditions. And a case in point is the writing of Norman Lewis.
I have not read much by Lewis, who died at the grand age of 95 after having spent a rich and varied career in places ranging from Brazil, Indonesia to Western Europe. And perhaps his most celebrated book is “Naples ’44”, describing his year in the southern Italian city in the immediate aftermath of the Allied landings in Italy. It is a superbly written account – Lewis has a wonderful eye for detail – and conveys the sheer bloody awfulness of life for ordinary Italians recovering from both the invasion and the Fascist regime that had been dislodged. For example, his descriptions of how little food the populace had, and what they had to eat, is sobering indeed to anyone reading moral-panic journalism about our supposed obesity crisis.
Of course, any account of southern Italy will include tales of the Mafia, and banditry, and the relentless amounts of corruption. What is particularly striking – and this is where the libertarian in me gets interested – is how the black market for stolen Allied goods, such as penicillin – thrived. Naturally, with so many goods suppressed or in short supply, criminal gangs and bent military personnel sought to make a market. This highlights how when markets are suppressed and where the fabric of civil society has been smashed by war, thugs can often fill the gap. In some cases, theft of supplies from the Allied forces got so bad that Lewis and his colleagues had to do something about it. Ordinary Italians who got caught pilfering supplies often received long jail sentences; well-connected businessmen (ie, Mafia guys), were acquitted when witnesses suddenly failed to show up.
Lewis became something of an expert on the Mafia and this region of Italy. He does not romanticise what he saw – he was too lacking in fake sentimentality for that. I have sometimes heard fellow free marketeers liken government to a sort of Mafia – tax is a kind of legalised thievery – but I am not sure it is an analogy I would push too far. I wonder how many of us would have wanted to live in Mafia-run Sicily or the neighbouring mainland, even with the tasty wine, olives and sunshine.
I intend to read a lot more of Lewis’s output. His writing is wonderful.
“To all those under 30 who worked so hard to get this man elected, know this: he just screwed you over. He thinks you’re fools. Either the US will go into default because of Obama’s cowardice, or you will be paying far far more for far far less because this president has no courage when it counts. He let you down. On the critical issue of America’s fiscal crisis, he represents no hope and no change. Just the same old Washington politics he once promised to end.”
– Andrew Sullivan.
Hell hath no fury. Of course, if “excitable Andrew” had been paying a bit more attention to Obama’s past, Senatorial voting record, choice of friends and so on over the past three to four years, as our own Paul Marks has been remorselessly doing, then Sullivan would not have been shocked by Obama’s position on the deficit, or indeed, anything else. But it was so much easier to obsess about Sarah Palin or “Christianists”, wasn’t it?
I need to say this – you shouldn’t trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.
– Nick Clegg, interviewed by Henry Porter It is quite remarkable for a serving British minister to say this on the record. Public protestation of belief in the benignity and good intentions of the state is the normal standard.
An old friend of mine, Andrew Ian Dodge, has joined the senatorial race in Maine to get on the Republican ticket, running up against Olympia J. Snowe. She is very much a RINO Republican, as you can see from this legislative record on her official website. Andrew Dodge has been a key figure in the Maine Tea Party movement, and has caused a stir by making it clear that the TP must be about tax, spending and the deficit, and is not interested in any social conservative agenda. For instance, he wants to cut the drinking age from its current age of 21 and is relaxed on issues such as gay marriage, etc. He may be seen as too much of a “wild card”, but he’ll freshen up the primaries, that is for sure.
Of course, having spent a fair amount of his life abroad, including the UK – his late father used to be a senior oil executive and Andrew lived all over as a result – he has seen what socialism has done in the UK, and does not want the same to take root ‘Stateside. That is an argument he can throw at any locals who wonder, absurdly, if he is “American” enough.
I wish him luck. At least the campaign will feature loads of good heavy rock music!
Remarkable developments are in train at London’s Royal Court Theatre, in the form of a play that is about climate science, but is not Watermelon propaganda. In a guest posting at Bishop Hill, Mr and Mrs Josh (Mr Josh also does the cartoons at Bishop Hill) provide a fascinating and enticing review of The Heretic, a new play by Richard Bean:
Book your tickets now, this play is a must-see comedy.
It has everything – more accurate climate science than a BBC documentary (ok, that’s not exactly hard), brilliantly funny and wonderfully staged.
The drama centres on university climate scientist, Dr Diane Cassell, played superbly by Juliet Stevenson, whose research on sea levels in the Maldives shows no rising trend in sea levels.
This puts her at odds with Professor Kevin Maloney, Head of Dept Earth Sciences, played by James Fleet (sinisterly morphed from Hugo, in the Vicar of Dibley) whose main aim is to attract more funding to the department by toeing the consensus line on Climate Change.
When she publishes her research and expresses her skeptical views, notably on Newsnight to Jeremy Paxman, she becomes the focus of some very direct persecution.
Add in Phoebe, her daughter, and Ben, her carbon-obsessed first-year student, plus an ex-marine security guard and the stage is set. Pure comedy ensues as Ben follows the logic of his beliefs, refusing to keep warm, travel in any petroleum-based transport, and considering suicide since his vegetarian diet causes excessive methane production. Phoebe is ahead of him; severely anorexic she is at real risk of not making it. Both characters are played with worrying fragility that conveys lives overshadowed by fear, battling to understand the issues or find a set of rules to live by. Their plight is all too similar to that of Diane, struggling to work out if the death threats from environmentalists should be taken seriously.
In a feat of Montfordian proportions nearly all the major recent climate change stories are woven into the play: the lack of sea level rise, the politicisation of science by the IPCC, Glaciergate, the logarithmic effect of CO2 (in a way you will never forget), the misanthropy of some environmentalist groups, the ‘one-tree’ hockey stick, and, of course, Climategate. But the issues are put on the table, without arm twisting, encouraging the audience to go out and do their own research.
Maybe I am reading far too much into this, but this sounds like it could be something of a cultural turning point in Britain. For decades now, there has been a self-reinforcing feedback loop shutting out anything but left wing friendly dramas from the live theatre in Britain, or so it has seemed and felt to one of those who has felt shut out. No anti-lefty dramas – e.g. praising Thatcher or heroic entrepreneurs or working class vigilantes, or denouncing bossy social workers or manipulative communists or ridiculous civil servants or psychotic and tyrannical Islamists, or pointing at the state itself as the prime mover in the banking crisis – have made sense to the theatres, because the audience for such things hasn’t been there, and because writers have been disinclined even to bother writing such things. What’s the point? And because there is no non-lefty drama, the audience for such things never comes. It stays at home surfing the net or watching its preferred telly shows and movies. If it is like me, it blogs.
Crucial to the willingness of another audience to show up to see this play is that it can be urged to do so on the internet, despite the major official organs of British theatre publicity, notable the BBC and the Guardian, apparently trying, just as they have tried with Climategate itself, to be very sniffy and dismissive. If a new audience does show up in strength at the Royal Court to see The Heretic, then that could result in Britain’s theatres saying: hey, I wonder if there are other non-lefty-friendly “issues” out there that we haven’t done before, because the BBC and the Guardian haven’t allowed us to?
Never forget that theatre folk love a big row, provided only that the row isn’t too big, as it would be if they took at serious whack at Islam. They love to push the boundaries, not too far, but just that little bit beyond what is entirely safe. They love to make mischief, to get everyone shouting at each other. They love to take the piss out of whoever happens at any particular moment to be the pompous and hypocritical elite, because, potentially, maybe, that will sell tickets, contrive bums on seats. Okay, most British thesps are lefties themselves, but many of those lefties are theatricals first, lefties second, and in quite a few other cases, on the quiet, so I surmise, not actually proper lefties at all, really, even though they dress like lefties and talk like lefties.
A earlier key moment in British theatrical history happened in the late nineteen fifties. British live theatre was then the Conservative Party at play, watching third-rate Noel Coward imitations consisting of brittle, well-dressed upper middle class chat in implausibly opulent living rooms with big floor-to-ceiling French windows at the back, centre stage. That is a caricature but not that much of one. But suddenly, or so it felt, all that was smashed to pieces by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, and all that followed from it. Look Back in Anger was also, by the way, first presented at the Royal Court. Perhaps my view of all that is a bit myopic, because the nearest theatre to my home when I was a kid was the Windsor Rep, which, I seem to recall, showed third-rate Noel Coward imitations just about all the time. But I suspect I have it about right, even if those closer to theatrical happenings then had felt in their water that the Angry Young Man upheaval had been coming for some time and thus remember it as a somewhat more gradual thing. I’m not saying that The Heretic is in the same class, as a play or as a culturally explosive event, as Look Back in Anger. I haven’t seen The Heretic yet. But this new play may perhaps, with hindsight, come be seen as one of the bigger paving stones that paved the way for something that is more like Look Back in Anger.
Goodness knows, Britain certainly contains plenty of anger just now.
Conveniently for me, the Royal Court Theatre is in Sloane Square, which is only a longish walk or a short bus or tube ride from where I live. I’m giving a talk on Monday. As soon as that’s out of the way, I will pop around to the Royal Court and fix to see The Heretic for myself.
I am, therefore I’ll think
– John Galt
From the latest Radio Times, concerning a Radio 4 programme entitled In Denial: Climate on the Couch, to be aired at 9pm this evening. I will listen, and I will set my radio recorder.
Radio Times blurb:
Jolyon Jenkins investigates the psychology of climate change efforts, asking why some people seem unconcerned even though scientists are forecasting terrible changes to the planet. He questions whether environmentalists and the Government have been putting out messages that are counterproductive, and whether trying to scare people into action might actually be causing them to consume more.
My suspicion is that what I and all others who listen to this programme will hear will be an explanation of the failure of the Greenists to convince that omits the crucial matter of the mere truth, and what is now sincerely believed to be the truth by more and more of the mere people. The phrase “In Denial” does strongly suggest this. And “On the Couch” suggests that they think that some people, presumably all who deny, are mad.
You know the kind of thing: People don’t think there’s anything they can do! – No wonder they’re being crazy! – We have not communicated successfully! – We have not got our message across properly!
It probably was rather a bad idea to make it look like they want to blow up children who disagree with them. But what if, despite such communicational ineptness, they have got their message across, but people just think it’s a pack of lies? If that is what people now think, then no amount of improved communicational expertise that doesn’t deal with the mere truth of things will make much difference.
But, my suspicions may prove to be unjustified. As of now, I live in hope that the truth, both what it is and what it is now believed to be, will at least get a semi-respectful mention, in among all the psychologising.
LATER:
This programme isn’t about climate science so it’s going to assume that the scientific consensus is true.
And a moment later, someone described (it may have been Jolyon Jenkins) this consensus as “undeniable”. Which was an odd word to use, given the title.
Well, at least it has just been admitted that people sometimes say that it’s all being exaggerated, even if it is assumed that this is mistaken and evasive. That it might be an honest opinion is not up for discussion, because that would mean discussing climate science.
So, the early and pessimistic commenters here are right. It looks like being a long discussion of what a bunch of true-believers can do to save the world, given that a huge tranche of people has decided that the world doesn’t need saving, but will have to be convinced in the true-believer stuff is to even make sense let alone accomplish anything.
The elephant in their room is that they have lost this argument, in the sense that they need unanimity in this, but are drifting further and further away from unanimity. They are ignoring this elephant. They are behaving like that economist, stuck on a desert island with various other sorts of experts, who is wondering how to contrive a tin-opener. “Let’s assume we have a tin-opener.” This won’t work.
LATER: Thinking about this some more, I should perhaps stress that the people who sincerely disagree that CAGW is happening were not called mad, as I feared they might be. They were simply ignored. All were assumed to really believe in CAGW, but to be using some kind of psychological doublethink to evade what they knew they ought to be doing really. Like I say: let’s assume we’ve won.
… Kenneth Clarke invariably supports anything with “european” in front of it. If they re-named ebola virus “european virus”, I expect he’d declare himself in favour of that, too.
– Owen Morgan commenting on James Kirkup’s Daily Telegraph blog
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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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