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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Instapundit (and yes I am reading him a lot just now) has been linking to a book called Gray Lady Down, which is about the downfall of the New York Times, from a persuasive proclaimer of the statist consensus to an unpersuasive proclaimer of the statist ex-consensus. I’ve not read this book, but it has a big picture of a skyscraper on its front cover. Might there, I wondered, be a brand new, custom-built headquarters involved in this story? There might indeed:
The New York Times Building is a skyscraper on the west side of Midtown Manhattan that was completed in 2007. …
Previous example of something very similar here. Since writing that earlier posting, I have dug out the original description of this syndrome, by Professor C. Northcote Parkinson, and I note that he sees the causation involved as a bit more complicated than I had previously stated. It is not just that building a new headquarters building causes an enterprise to take its eye off the ball. Its eye already was off the ball, or it would never have decided to build its new headquarters in the first place.
Instapundit quotes an emailer (Ed Stephens), on the subject of the TSA and its intrusive gropings at airports:
Remember how not long ago the President was so upset about the possibility of people being stopped and asked for “their papers” while going to get ice cream? It was the height of living in a police state. Yet we’ve not heard a peep out of him while TSA goons grope the general public (including nuns and little kids) on the way to grandma’s house.
If we are expected to put up with this, asking to see “your papers” suddenly seems a less onerous request.
Which was perhaps always the idea? Getting libertarians to beg to have to show only their papers. How perfectly statist is that?
This is how you get what you want in this world, whether you are trying to expand the powers of the state or to chip away at them. Demand something that is, to your enemies, totally outrageous. Then, with a great show of reluctance, settle for something only moderately outrageous. Repeat indefinitely. Sadly, for the time being, the expanders of the state are more numerous and more powerful than us chippers-away.
The secret of chipping away successfully is to continue to discuss the dynamiting of the whole damn mountain. How might that be contrived? How nice would that be? Then settle for dynamiting only half of it …
Here is Alex Singleton’s take on what could happen to Cameron’s chances of a second term, if he continues surrendering to the EU:
UKIP arguably cost the Conservatives 10 seats at the last election. If a handful of extra [Tory] activists defect to UKIP in each marginal constituency in time for the next election, and others prioritise their golf over Tory leaflet drops, this figure could easily increase, helping to drive David Cameron from Downing Street.
Given how statist Cameron is, that is a delightful thought.
The Guardian laments the stillbirth of the clause in the Equality Act 2010 that required public sector bodies to consider the impact of every policy on inequality. The Act itself was passed as one of the last flourishes of the previous government, but this clause was not due to come in until April 2011. Now Teresa May says it never will.
In practice the “public sector equality duty” would have meant that local authorities would have had to carry out an “Equality Impact Assessment” on, well, everything. Here is a link to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s own guidance on carrying out an Equality Impact Assessment.
The Guardian says that the clause was “a moderate and sensible effort to provide exactly the ‘framework for equality’ she [Teresa May] claims she wants” and May was mean to kill it. I quote from the editorial linked to above: “All the clause required was that every new policy had to be considered through the filter of its impact on poverty. ”
All? That “all” is no small thing. Funnily enough it was the left that alerted me to the sinister effects of having to consider things through a filter chosen by the elite. “Hegemonic discourse” is their preferred term for it.
Now the Guardian says the clause was nothing more than a light steer given to councils that they would be free to interpret how they wished, and talks as if the description “socialism in one clause” was just Teresa May’s snark and scaremongering. Back in January 2009, though, Polly Toynbee wrote an enthusiastic article about its potentially “mind-bogglingly immense” impact and quoted a Labour Cabinet minister who described the public sector equality duty “with relish” as… guess what?
“Socialism in one clause”.
Rather let the cat out of the bag, there.
Sarah Palin has apparently attacked Barack Obama in her impending book ‘America By Heart’ and Alex Spillius writes:
The attack is likely to deepen the impression that the former Alaska governor is too divisive a figure to win the presidency.
A political saying unflattering things about a political opponent! Whatever next? Crazy days, eh? 
The IMF auditors have arrived in Dublin. What should Ireland do now?
The Atlantic Monthly has a profile of Freeman Dyson, a scientist and contrarian who, I would hazard to guess, is known and has been read by a few regulars around these parts. It is okay up to a point – there are some nice biographical details to spice things up – but then it comes up with the following:
“That humanity has been kind to the planet is not a possible interpretation, not even for a moment—certainly not for anyone who has been paying the slightest attention at any point in the 4,700 years of human history since Gilgamesh logged the cedar forest of the Fertile Crescent.”
So I presume that instances such as the spectacular achievements of land reclamation by the Dutch over the centuries – turning tidal waters into productive farmland, for example, don’t count?
On it goes:
“That we repair our damage to the planet is a laughable assertion. It is true that the air is better now in London, and in Los Angeles too. Collars do blacken more slowly in both those places. Some rivers in the developed world are somewhat cleaner, as well: the Cuyahoga has not burned in many years. But it is also true that the Atlantic is afloat with tar balls, and that detached sections of fishnet and broken filaments of longline drift, ghost-fishing, in all our seas. Many of the large cities of Africa, South America, and Asia are megalopolises of desperate poverty ringed by garbage. Vast tracts of tropical rain forest, the planet’s most important carbon sink, disappear annually, burned or logged or mined. Illegal logging is also ravaging the slow-growing boreal forests of Siberia. The ozone hole over Antarctica continues to open every southern spring, exposing all life beneath to unfiltered ultraviolet rays. African wildlife is in precipitous decline.”
These are assertions not backed up by actual numbers or clear sources in the article. They are just trotted out as “facts”. In Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist, he points out, if my reading of that book is correct, that much of the data on resource depletion and species loss, etc, is wildly exaggerated, and Lomborg was able to point this out by using publicly disclosed data from the very sources so very often cited by the doomsters. The Atlantic’s article does, at least, concede that in the richer nations of the West, such as the UK, rivers have been cleaned up to some degree (as in the Thames), and air pollution of some kinds is far less – the smogs that were familiar in Victorian London are things of the past. What this article is talking about in fact is more about poverty; but as living standards rise and profit-making businesses look to wring out efficiency gains, so the use of fossil fuels to deliver a given level of output goes down. This has been a fairly widely observed fact. In the US, for example, thanks to improved efficiency as firms look to cut costs, less oil/coal is needed to produce a given amount of stuff now than was the case 100 years ago. Here are some figures from the US Energy Agency.
I suspect the reason why Dyson has got up the nose of the author of this piece is his essential optimism and enjoyment of the idea of human progress, his belief that science and technology can fix all the real or perceived problems, including Man-made global warming. He has likened the Green movement to socialism, and of course that really gets the temperatures rising. The truth, after all, often stings.
I found the tone of the article somewhat patronising, to be honest. Here is this fearesomely bright guy and he’s a Denier! The shame of it.
On a related theme, I have just received my copy of Tim Worstall’s Chasing Rainbows. I’ll try and post a review soon.
Real life spy dramas are interesting but what happens after the Big Denouement?
Russian intelligence sources told local media that the traitor who gave away Anna Chapman and nine others was Colonel Alexander Poteyev who served in the KGB’s elite ‘Zenith’ Special Forces unit during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
A criminal case for ‘state treason’ had been opened against him and he will be tried in absentia like other traitors before him, they said.
Hardly surprising…
Fyodor Yakovlev, a KGB veteran who said he served with Colonel Poteyev in Afghanistan, told the Regnum news agency that he now regarded his former comrade as a “non-person”.
“This non-person will live a lonely life until the end of his days in fear,” he said. “Lonely because his relatives and loved ones will not be by his side. Either his children will have to alter their appearances or else they will be doomed to the same nightmarish existence as their father.”
…so his loved one were left behind in Russia when we was extracted by CIA Operations, eh? Pity that but…
Colonel Poteyev is believed to have fled to the United States in June through his native Belarus days before the ten agents were arrested in America. He was reportedly deputy director of ‘Department S’ inside the SVR, the unit which coordinates the work of illegal agents in the United States.
He is reported to have worked in New York in the first half of the 1990s. It was there that the CIA is said to have recruited him, offering him a financial settlement. His wife later became resident in America and his son and daughter moved there before he fled Russia in June.
…er, hang on, Fyodor… did you not just say his loved one were not by his side?
Sorry but sounds to me like some guy called Hank Smith from Chickasaw Falls, plus his wife Wilma, son Hank Jr and daughter Natasha… er, I mean Britney… are living Happily Ever After and spending that hearty ‘financial settlement’ from Uncle Sam in a suburban strip mall looking forwards to Christmas somewhere with a fuck load better weather than Moscow.
Europe is full of stupid bloody windmills.
– text message from Michael Jennings on an Autobahn
An American friend of mine, Andrew Ian Dodge – known to several folks around here – has recently undergone a deeply unpleasant encounter with airport security types in the US, thanks to those lovely folk from the TSA. A few years back, Andrew had surgery for cancer treatment, and bears the scars of that. It seems that he suffered a lot of discomfort when a TSA character tried to pat him down, as they say. What the TSA goons may not have realised, since Andrew is not your regular stiff in a suit as he dresses more like a rocker clad in plenty of leather, is that he has some pretty weighty political connections, and will use them. There will be consequences.
I am not an expert on the pros and cons of scanner technologies, or whether they flood the body with dangerous radiation, and so on. What I do know is that this sort of outrage will always happen when certain persons, such as TSA officials, have that moment of supreme power over anyone else, as in a queue for security at a busy airport. What I suspect is different, however, between the USA and the UK is that the former country, as demonstrated by the recent successes of the Tea Party movement, has not yet entirely decided to kowtow to the conventional wisdom. So there is a decent chance, I think, that Congressmen and women might try and smack the TSA down, and hard. We can only hope. Back in the UK, there seems to be scant chance of this occurring. Our sheeplike habits are now too ingrained.
There is a good article in the Wall Street Journal on the same issue. And NickM, of Counting Cats, has an absolute blinder of a post on the subject. As he says, whatever excitements may once have attended air travel – at least the nice kind of excitements – are dead. The only people who can enjoy such travel these days are the mega-rich and politicians. As for the rest of us, we get the dubious pleasure of being felt up by the state’s functionaries.
Quite a lot of the time, I get irritated by the Channel 4 news programme, and its anchor, Jon Snow, who is often so blatant in his bias that it no longer angers, merely bemuses. But in fairness to that channel, it still seems willing to take risks with genuinely intelligent and argumentative programmes of the sort that the BBC will often rarely touch these days. Case in point was this programme. It does not pretend to be coolly objective: it is fiercely pro-free market; it hammers away at the fact that Britain is massively in public debt and that this issue primarily stems from decades of the Welfare State and a socialistic polity. Various people, such as Mark Littlewood of the Institute of Economic Affairs, appear on it. (Very good he is too, as the old film reviewer Barry Norman used to say). I would imagine that anyone watching this who is a Keynesian or big government type would be spitting blood by the end of the show, particularly as a result of how, for example, it raves about Hong Kong under the benevolent guidance of John Cowperthwaite during the late days of Hong Kong’s colonial history. Another thing struck me: Alisdair Darling, the former finance minister in the recent Labour government, came across as incredibly weak in defending his views; he looked a broken man. The head of the TUC, Brendan Barber, looked like a complacent City banker during the fat years.
This show is not an isolated example of how the channel has thrown rocks at the received wisdom. This show was another case; and this more recent tilt at the gods of AGW alarmism was another.
Of course, these may only be isolated examples. But I am not so sure. There is, at the moment, a general questioning among some people about certain supposedly “settled views”, such as that we need governments to prevent AGW, or that printing money and expanding the state is a good thing, or that genetically modified crops are the mark of Satan, and so forth.
And I can remember the Channel 4 Diverse Reports series of the 1980s, including its show, The New Enlightenment (which I don’t know is still available). I remember watching it for the first time and imagining how the the heads of leftists and tweedy Tories would be exploding.
The story of Waleed Hasayin, a Palestinian West Bank atheist blogger, is indicative of the nightmare that is inevitable in any system where state, society and religion are completely intertwined.
[Muslims] believe anyone who leaves Islam is an agent or a spy for a Western State, namely the Jewish State.
The mere existence of an outspoken atheist is intolerable in such an environment… but the thing about tolerance is it is only appropriate when it is reciprocated and Islam does not tolerate views that deny their God’s existence, so why should any non-Muslim tolerate Islam? Tolerance for intolerance is cowardice, not to mention suicidal.
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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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