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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In today’s Guardian Michael Tomasky has written the following article about the murder of six people and attempted murder of many others, including Congresswoman Giffords: In the US, where hate rules at the ballot box, this tragedy has been coming for a long time. Some selected extracts:
… You don’t have to believe that alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, is a card-carrying Tea Party member (he evidently is not) to see some kind of connection between that violent rhetoric and what happened in Arizona on Saturday.
… So what particular type of nut is Loughner? We don’t have a full picture yet. But we have enough of one. His coherent ravings included the conviction that the constitution assured him that “you don’t have to accept the federalist laws”. He called a female classmate who had an abortion a “terrorist”.
In sum, he had political ideas, which not everyone does. Many of them (not all, but most) were right wing. He went to considerable expense and trouble to shoot a high-profile Democrat, at point-blank range right through the brain. What else does one need to know? For anyone to attempt to insist that the violent rhetoric so regularly heard in this country had no likely effect on this young man is to enshroud oneself in dishonesty and denial.
I would like to report to you that my nation is in shock, and that we will work together to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. Alas, neither of these things is close to true. Of course an event like this is hard to believe in the moment; but in the context of our times, it’s really not surprising at all. Last summer, a California man armed himself and set off for San Francisco with the express intent of killing liberals at a nonprofit foundation that had been pilloried by Glenn Beck and others. Only the lucky accident of his arrest en route for drunk driving prevented the mayhem then.
The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has documented more than two dozen killings by or arrests of rightwing extremists who intended to do serious political violence since 2008. One Tennessee man killed two worshippers at a liberal church, regretting only that he had not been able to ice the 100 liberals named by author Bernard Goldberg as those most responsible for destroying America. Giffords herself received threats after voting for the healthcare reform bill, and shots were fired through the window of her district office. An event like this has been coming for a long time.
In contrast, here is the article that Michael Tomasky wrote when Major Nidal Hasan murdered thirteen people and attempted to murder many others: American, for better or worse. Some selected extracts:
We have much more to learn about Hasan before we can jump to any conclusions. A New York Times profile of him from yesterday notes that this army psychiatrist, who’d presumably heard many blood-curdling war stories, obsessively feared being sent over to Iraq or Afghanistan. But it then says that the FBI has monitored some internet postings by a certain Nidal Hasan that spoke positively of suicide bombers, comparing them to soldiers who risk their lives for their comrades. The Times didn’t know if it was the same Nidal Hasan.
For all most Americans know about Palestinian culture, Nidal Hasan could be as common a name as Dave Johnson. The Palestinian is an unknown person in the US. Jews are a part of the country and have been for decades, but average Americans pretty much know Palestinians only as suicide bombers. Sadly, for some Americans this event will reinforce an image of a people who resort first to mindless violence.
…
We should assume until it’s proven otherwise that Hasan was an American and a loyal one, who just snapped, as Americans of all ethnicities and backgrounds and political persuasions do. And, as is so rarely the case in these situations, he’s alive, so we’ll have a chance to hear him express his views some day.
“But I detect that the criticism [of big businesses] is increasingly out of date, and that large corporations are ever more vulnerable to their nimbler competitors in the modern world – or would be if they were not granted special privileges by the state. Most big firms are actually becoming frail, fragile and frightened – of the press, of pressure groups of government, of their customers. So they should be. Given how frequently they vanish – by take-over or bankruptcy, this is hardly surprising. Coca-Cola may wish its customers were “serfs under feudal landlords”, in the words of one critic, but look what happened to New Coke. Shell may have tried to dump an oil-storage device in the deep sea in 1995, but a whiff of consumer boycott and it changed its mind. Exxon may have famously stood out from the consensus by funding scepticism of climate change (while Enron funded climate alarmism) – but by 2008 it had been bullied into recanting.”
Matt Ridley, the Rational Optimist, page 111.
He’s right, of course. While Hollywood moviemakers may delight in using bosses of large firms to be villains, which is rather ironic, given the importance of big entertainment firms like Time-Warner, Disney and Sony Corporation to the movie industry in recent years. The actual track record shows, as Ridley says in this excellent book, that firms have a far shorter shelf life than government agencies. This is hardly surprising. There is, in government, no negative feedback loop with a failed agency or an agency that has outlived whatever reason for its original existence. As we see time and again, a government agency will often look for new things to justify its continued existence, arguing for larger budgets, more staff, and so on. With business, on the other hand, any firm that does not adapt to the constant shifts of consumer habits will die.
Here’s more:
“Half of the biggest American companies of 1980 have now disappeared by takeover or bankruptcy; half of today’s biggest companies did not even exist in 1980. The same is not true of government monopolies: the Internal Revenue Service and the National Health Service will not die, however much incomptence they might display. Yet most anti-corporate activists have faith in the good will of the leviathans that can force you to do business with them, but are suspicious of the behemoths that have to beg for your business. I find that odd.”
After having read and watched anti-business folk for years now, I don’t perhaps find this attitude as odd as Ridley does. The hatred of business is, in my view, a product of centuries of crappy, anti-reason philosophy and a fear of freedom that this has generated.
If we ever get to the day when the best we can do in the way of eccentrics is men who wear silly hats, then heaven help us.
– Simon Heffer, on the late David Hart
What depraved individual wants to make it easier for the government to do stuff? The government doing stuff is expensive and hurts freedom, so we should all be trying to make sure it barely ever does anything. Still, there are people out there that hate humanity and want the government constantly doing stuff and spending our money while pushing us around. They must be foiled.
– from a posting by Frank J concerning a proposal to make government faster, entitled Making Government Slower. His suggestions follow.
My fellow Samizdatista and cricket fan (but Aussie) Michael Jennings has been accusing me of not celebrating enough when England have done well in the recently concluded Ashes cricket series. My message throughout the series, to anyone who would listen, has indeed been: wait for it, wait for it. Both to England fans exulting and to Aussies wanting to pitch straight into their speculations about why Australia is now a failed state, I have been saying throughout, needed to wait until the crushing England win that looked ever more likely as the series proceeded was actually achieved. Or not, as the case might have been.
But now that England have indeed achieved their 3-1 (away) victory (there first away win at five-day cricket against Australia for nearly a quarter of a century, which included three innings victories which trust me is crushing), I am now celebrating, with a long posting last night at my personal blog. Well, really it’s about ten blog postings – with handily placed asterisks to enable you to skip to the next one, should you be inclined to.
Topics include: Jimmy Anderson’s girlie-man wicket celebrations, Alastair Cook sounding like Noel Fielding, the role of and nature of luck in sport (and in life generally), the inverse relationships between good individual bowling figures and team success (well, that’s mostly in the first and only comment so far, also by me) and between national economic and national sporting success. Plus, the fascinating contribution made to cricket folklore by the Radio Four shipping forecast, which, amazingly, caused Radio Four listeners to miss the final moments of all three England wins.
If you’re the sort that enjoys that kind of thing, enjoy.
Health and safety kills off the Lear of a lifetime. Jim White writes in the Telegraph:
Earlier this week, I went with my son to see Derek Jacobi in King Lear at the Donmar Warehouse. We were so close to the action we were almost in it. It was clear that the enthusiasm expressed in Charles Spencer’s review for this paper was not misplaced: the actors delivered the poetry brilliantly, the pace crackled and fizzed.
For 50 minutes, we were entranced. Then: bang. Just as Kent had been sentenced to a spell in the stocks, the lights went out. For a moment, I thought this was a directorial ruse, and that the next scene would find him in some Tarantino-style torture chamber. But no. It was a power cut.
The house lights cranked into action, and for a minute or so, the actors carried on, the scene barely diminished by the reduced visibility. Quite right, too. As this was a show almost spartan in its freedom from special effects, there seemed no reason not to continue. The communication of the verse would have been as powerful in the gloaming.
But then a technician announced that since there had been an outage, the performance was being cancelled, for – you’ve guessed it – health and safety reasons. “Your safety,” he said, “is our number one priority.”
I struggle to know how to respond to this. Could I, perhaps, take a line or two, as suggested in my title for this post, from another of Shakespeare’s plays:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
Or could I say, begone, abominations. You are dead things that pretend to live.
“What it really shows is the extent to which the politics of global warming is driven by an already existing culture of fear. It doesn’t matter what The Science (as greens always refer to it) does or doesn’t reveal: campaigners will still let their imaginations run riot, biblically fantasising about droughts and plagues, because theirs is a fundamentally moralistic outlook rather than a scientific one. It is their disdain for mankind’s planet-altering arrogance that fuels their global-warming fantasies – and they simply seek out The Science that best seems to back up their perverted thoughts. Those predictions of a snowless future, of a parched Earth, are better understood as elite moral porn rather than sedate risk analysis.”
– Brendan O’Neill.
I love that final sentence. You do not have to buy into this guy’s Marxian point of view to enjoy his class analysis of what drives part of the Green agenda. I think he has a good point.
Guido Fawkes, along with several others, is giving the deep Green, and also deeply red, Mr George Monbiot, a thoroughly deserved going over for this idea that “wealthy householders” – however defined – should be forced to give over some of their rooms to let to those deemed to be deserving. As several of Guido’s splendidly rude commenters point out, this brings up images of how the Russian Bolsheviks forced the “rich” to accomodate the proletariat in the homes of the former. I remember reading about such a scene in Ayn Rand’s “We The Living”, one of her first pieces of fiction (and a book that I thoroughly enjoyed, BTW).
At root of the issue here is that Monbiot, while he himself is happy to avail himself of the benefits of a society that allows private property – he has a nice home himself – he has no real, rooted respect for private property as such. He believes that all the property that currently exists is a “common resource” to which “we” – whoever happens to be living in a defined geographical space – are entitled to use. His view of property rights is not a bundle of rights that contain the important right to exclude, which is all of a piece of the idea, as traditionally expressed, that an “Englishman’s home is his castle”. No: for him, he regards a home as what PJ O’Rourke has called a “gimme right”. As far as Mr Monbiot is concerned, if the “needs” of X are what they are, then so much the worse for whoever happens to be owning a particular piece of property deemed to be “too big”. And why stop at seizing property in stuff like buildings? After all, the skills and abilities we bring are, according to his view, also a “common resource” that everyone has a claim on.
Another problem here, which leads to my point about Monbiot’s fanatical Greenery, is his zero-sum approach to life generally that this sort of comment exhibits. Rather than think of say, freeing up planning laws and the like to encourage more home-building – a perfectly sensible idea in my view – he argues for more control. And like a lot of Greens, he presumably does not favour laissez faire solutions to shortages of things like housing because he fears there are just too many damn people in the world, and in this small island of the UK, anyway.
One a point of detail, forcing owners of homes to let out one or more rooms to whoever demands them would require a monstrous government bureaucracy of some kind. I can only shudder at the sort of issues that would get thrown up by administering such a scheme.
Mr Monbiot is an enemy of liberty, that’s for damn sure. He may be a clown in the eyes of many here, but remember that this guy is taken seriously in certain quarters. Such nonsense can never be attacked often enough.
As an aside, this book by Richard Pipes, looking at the very different traditions of Russia and the UK concerning property, is well worth reading.
There is furious debate in the comments to this article in the Guardian by Naomi Wolf, in which she argues that “Julian Assange’s sex-crime accusers deserve to be named”.
Do they? He has been after all.
I just don’t know. Neither about Assange’s case, or the general case.
On a point of fact, Wolf is quite wrong in claiming that the rule of law by which the plaintiff in a rape case is given anonymity is a “Victorian relic”. Commenter “snoozeofreason” said that anonymity was introduced, for what were seen as feminist reasons, in the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1976. This link to RapeCrisis, an activist group, confirms that fact. It also argues in favour of anonymity for the accuser but not the accused. I reject that. The only thing of which I am sure is that the accused and the accuser should be treated the same: anonymity for both, or for neither.
Naomi Wolf is an icon of feminism. In making this argument she has broken ranks with other feminists. Schadenfreude at the the sight of them rending each other is never far away, but schadenfreude does not actually give me an answer as to whether anonymity in rape cases is a good or a bad thing. I have bitterly criticised feminists and anti-rape activists in the past for their wilful denial of the possibility of false accusations of rape. I sneer at Naomi Wolf’s late discovery of this type of possible injustice. Yet she makes a strong argument:
“Though children’s identities should, of course, be shielded, women are not children. If one makes a serious criminal accusation, one must be treated as a moral adult.”
Against that is a more nebulous pressure, but one with deep roots in the human psyche: rape is different from other forms of assault. The trauma of a rape victim, male or female, does not arise only from the physical injuries received. Harm is done to them by having the fact that they have suffered such a violation made public. Some victims would feel unable to come forward if it were to be made public.
Yet other rape victims argue that this reluctance merely reinforces the barbaric idea that there is something shameful in being raped. We use the word shame to mean too many things.
As part of the “No shit, Sherlock” series at Samizdata, here is an item about the marrying preferences of women, at least according to a new survey.
Matthew Lynn, one of the better finance journalists out there, has a column up over at Bloomberg News about the fact that, as of October this year, there will need to be a new boss at the European Central Bank. The term of Jean-Claude Trichet, a Frenchman, is due to expire. Lynn runs through all the various choices currently deemed available, and says they are, for various reasons, bad. For instance, if an Italian gets the job, this will piss off the Germans, already seething at the cost of trying to protect Ireland and Greece. If the job goes to a German, that will annoy the “peripheral” countries worried – rightly – that membership of the currency bloc means, effectively, rule by the most powerful economy. And so on.
But then again, this sort of issue reminds me of why the eurozone was a doomed venture in the first place. Far from removing all this nationalism, the issue of who gets to run the single currency remains fraught with geo-political tension, for the very simple reason that no genuinely popular pan-European polity exists. As we have seen in various referenda, European voters have, time and again, voted No to things such as the European Constitution, only to see their legislators switch a few items and then ram such items through national parliaments. There is widespread public cynicism about much of the current European “project”.
By contrast, while there is always a fair amount of speculation leading up to the choice of chairman of the Federal Reserve system in the US, I don’t recall seeing debates about whether the job should go to a Texan, or Californian, or Floridan, etc. Debate normally is based around general fitness for the job. One thing that does come out of the Bernanke experience, it seems to me, is that it is wrong for a central banker to have a purely academic background, as Bernanke does, and not to have any hands-on experience in running an actual private sector bank.
Of course, one prime requirement of a central banker is to be able to perform the role of legalised counterfeiter without smirking too much on camera. The issue of whether we should have central banks at all, is another matter.
Too old. Too gay. Too rich. Too weird. These are some of the objections raised to Elton John and David Furnish adopting a son born of a surrogate mother.
Is this a good thing? I have no idea. Ask me, or better yet, ask young Zachary in 2028. (Until then, leave him alone.) Should it be allowed? I think so. Even on the most harsh interpretation possible of Mr John and Mr Furnish’s probable ability to give the boy a good start in life, there is no denying that billions of children are born to a worse one.
That was the peg. This is the coat. A great big dirty overcoat that will not hang up neatly and drips over the floor: what objections ought to be enough for the state to forbid people to adopt?
Everyone has heard stories of how social workers seem to actively enjoy seeing would-be parents contort themselves to fit through ever-tinier hoops of social worker righteousness. So you’re a smoker? Shake of the head. I see you are fat. Tut tut, going to have to lose a few pounds, aren’t we? What’s this – you are a Christian who disapproves of homosexuality? I am afraid… oh, you are a Muslim. That’s OK, then.
I read an account by one couple who said that the sight of a four-pack of beer bottles among their shopping on the table was enough to make their inspecting social worker devote a whole paragraph to their incipient alcoholism in her report. I heard of another who deduced from a couple’s dog being overweight that they had a dysfunctional attitude to food. What fun, to be your own Sherlock Holmes and have the consequences your deductions played out in human lives. These are the powers they would gladly take over all parents. Be warned.
Most here will be as angered as I am by the thought of children remaining in council care, becoming more harmed and mentally stunted by it with every month that goes by if the eventual fates of children who grow up in care are anything to go by, while people who would have loved to give them a good if not perfect home are turned away.
But can we dispense with the State altogether?
Without the social workers, how are you going to stop paedophiles, cultists, Fagins, and would-be owners of slaves from adopting children?
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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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