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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Brendan O’Neill:
In much of the coverage of the torch relay, commentators have talked about the ‘supine’ British government and the ‘cowardly’ Bush administration which are failing to stand up against the brutes from the East, while cheering the French protesters and the Australian government for taking the Chinese on. As in the past, the driving force behind this outbreak of China-bashing is a perception that the West is in political and social decline, and the East might take its opportunity to snuff out ‘our’ civilisation once and for all. That 15 men in tracksuits could give rise to such an hysterical, out-of-control, fin-de-siècle, prejudicial debate reveals so very much more about contemporary Western fear and irrationalism than it does about Chinese wickedness.
Hmm. I think he has a decent point, even though his article does rather soft-play the whole Tibet issue. There has been something a bit, well, off-key about the venom directed against China, but then one should remember that for all its economic reforms, the grip of the Chinese Communist Party, an organisation responsible for some of the greatest mass murders in history (the Cultural Revolution, etc), does have rather a lot to live down. So for all that some of the demonstrations leave a sour taste, I think that most of those who object to what China is doing are on the side of the angels.
The Olympics are a vulgar, ruinous hullabaloo the chief functions of which are to facilitate graft on a spectacular scale and to act as a vehicle for the promotion of despotic values. They are, at best, unedifying and, at worst, intolerable.
The whole difference between statistics and astrology is supposed to be that statisticians make statements of statistical significance to determine how likely or unlikely it is that an observed outcome could have happened chance, while astrologers are satisfied with merely anecdotal confirmation of their hypotheses.
– Hu McCulloch
I brought prejudices acquired during the Cold War to the struggle between civilisation and Islam, but tried – and try still – to be careful to see the differences as well as the similarities between the two struggles.
In this spirit, I at first thought that whereas Soviet communism was ideologically breakable, Islam is not breakable. More than a billion souls believe in it, and however true it might be that it is evil and repulsive nonsense, saying this would accomplish very little. It would merely poke the hornet’s nest with a stick. But slowly, I have been coming round to thinking almost the complete opposite. Not only does denouncing Islam as evil nonsense establish the mere right, of us civilisationers, to denounce Islam – along with our right to say anything else we might want to say – true or false, nice or nasty, sensible or daft. Such talk also, I am starting to believe, strikes a dagger into the heart of the enemy camp, by spreading doubt in it about basic beliefs and hence sewing discord and confusion. I used to think that Islamists were indifferent to such ideological attacks. Now, I am starting to believe that they fear them very much. Hence all the murder threats. They sense that this is one of their weakest and potentially biggest fronts in the struggle. The biggest front of all, in fact.
And even if only a few “apostates” materialise, they are of huge significance, for they bring with them deep knowledge of the enemy we face and how we can see the enemy off.
Another advantage of ideological attacks on Islam is that arguments about – and in favour of – “apostasy” unite civilisation, and divide its enemies. We civilisationers argue fiercely with one another about how to oppose Islam, but almost all of us believe that if you want to criticise a religion non-violently you should be allowed to, and that if you want to abandon a religion you should be able to do that without getting extremely violent grief, or even the threat of it, from those who still do believe in it. Talking like this or doing this may be rather daft, and very unwise, and get you shunned by polite society (i.e. scared society), but … yes, it should be allowed. I am content to regard all who say that they disagree with the claims in this paragraph as the enemies of civilisation that they are, not just from the point of view of the mere truth, but on tactical grounds. Put such cretinous pro-Islamist fellow-travellers on the defensive also, I say.
And now I read this article (linked to about a week ago by Instapundit) in which it is claimed that the trickle of converts from Islam that was all I had so far noticed is actually whole lot more than that. It tells of a spectacular growth in the number of converts from Islam. Conversions have been happening in a steady flow for decades, but recently they have become a torrent, world-wide. Mostly these people are converting to Christianity, but sometimes just to not-Islam. Bossiness and terrorism and constant fighting is, it seems, not just repulsive. It actually repels. People are leaving the religion of war and joining the religion of, approximately speaking, peace – or joining no religion at all. Islam is only still growing numerically because it is growing so quickly by purely biological means. As far as the flow of converts is concerned it is now in headlong retreat.
So, is this true? Is this allegedly huge exflux really happening? I have heard nothing about it before, but that could merely mean that I am ignorant. Or is the exflux just wishful thinking on the part of Christians, talking nonsense to keep their spirits up?
Politicians are like parents who tell you what time to go to bed but can’t put dinner on the table.
– Matthew Taylor, now Chief Executive of the Royal Society for the Arts, quoted in a 2002 article by Janan Ganesh
I have linked to Tim Worstall quite a bit lately and make no excuses for doing so again. He has a good piece about the current economic issues and ponders whether the latest risk factor is that of carbon-reducing measures worsening the economic outlook. It is afactor to consider, for sure. If the EU or other groups of countries slap tariffs on “naughty” carbon emitters, it could have quite a severe impact.
Former UK Chancellor Nigel Lawson has a new book out on global warming issues. For all that he made some errors during his time at 11 Downing Street, his sharp analytical brain is rather more impressive than that of the current office-holder. This looks like a good study of the subject.
This commodity supercycle has led to an increase in the prices of wheat and rice. Governments have predictably undertaken a perverse policy of raising prices on the exports of crops to ensure their own supply (and take advantage of higher prices for revenue), removing incentives for farmers to cultivate more land or increase their productivity. Argentinian farmers on the pampas are now milchcows for Kirchner.
The reinforcing inflation of higher prices and bad policy leads inexorably to unrest amongst the poor. Was this not the overriding concerns of all elites in a subsistence economy? Now that age-old conundrum has returned?
Sir John [Sir John Holmes, the undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and the UN’s emergency relief co-ordinator] said: “The security implications should also not be underestimated as food riots are already being reported across the globe.
“Current food price trends are likely to increase sharply both the incidence and depth of food insecurity.”
As well as the riots in Egypt, rising food costs have been blamed for violent unrest in Haiti, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal. Protests have also occurred in Uzbekistan, Yemen, Bolivia and Indonesia.
China, India, Pakistan, Cambodia and Vietnam have curbed rice exports to ensure there is enough for their own people.
The phenomenon has even acquired its own term, ‘food insecurity’, though I prefer older and simpler terms: famine and starvation. Since the United Nations has stated the obvious, there is the unspoken assumption of “somthing must be done”. When one looks at the speech, the outstretched hand appears:
But I fear we are also going to need more global resources to tackle these challenges, to find innovative ways of raising these vitally-needed additional funds, and to make sure that these extra resources are spread evenly across the sectors. Allocations must not be devoted exclusively to the most visible aspect of this new demand i.e. meeting immediate food needs, but also to health, emergency education, etc. So the UN, NGOs and donors – both public and private – must continue to work together to increase the level of resources coming from both new and broader sources of funding, not least from the private sector, and to set appropriate priorities. We also need to continue to work on the diversity of funding mechanisms, in addition to core contributions to agencies and NGOs.
Holmes was talking at a conference in Dubai and, despite the denial of scaremongering, painted a picture of crisis (including the usual bogeyman, climate change) to demand more resources co-ordinated and spent by the UN, presumably.
UN spots crisis and pleads cash is not such a good headline, though more truthful.
David Selbourne is one of those intellectual figures who swims in similar currents to that of John Gray: mixing a sort of gloomy, conservative (small c) dislike of much modern culture and public life; a sort of grumpy dislike of the inevitably messy impact of individual liberty combined with a sort of authortarian desire for those in power to somehow rein in all this terrible individualist excess and take us back to say, 1950. Tim Worstall, well known around here, subjects his latest article to a fairly gentle fisking.
Here is the original piece by Selbourne. It follows a similar, arguably even more incoherent rant in the Spectator last week (sorry, I could not get the link to work, so you will have to trust me). Here he goes:
To expect the fulfilment by the citizen of his or her duties is no impertinence. It is essential to liberal democracy. Indeed, government ministers today speak hesitantly of a need for “constitutional renewal” or for a more “contractual” relationship between citizen and state. Under it, the performance of civic duties would be made a condition for the gaining of rights, many of the latter now routinely and shamelessly exploited by rich and poor alike.
As Tim puts it:
To return to a feudal system in which I owe duties to My Noble Lords in return for whatever rights they might see fit to grant me? Fuck that quite frankly.
Quite. Feudalism is actually a polite word for what this character wants to impose. A society in which freedoms are handed over like sweets in return for the prior performance of duties might be known as something rather ruder, like fascism.
Or maybe the problem could be more easily solved if Selbourne was honest about what he understands the definition of “rights” to be. In the classical liberal sense, a right is nothing more than a prohibition on the initiation of force against a person and his or her property; under socialism, the term “right” has been debauched into a claim on things such as the “right” to “free” schooling, which means that someone else be coerced into paying for the latter. The former negative definition of a right implies no such zero-sum game.
Selbourne must surely have heard of Isiah Berlin’s famous attempt to unscramble this confusion.
Some people I chat with in Indonesia on an almost daily basis have just told me that the Indonesian government have just blocked all access to YouTube, MySpace and Rapidshare. Apparently using proxy servers lets you get to a YouTube page but they cannot actual view the videos for some reason.
Does anyone out there have any technical suggestions to pass on to some freedom loving folks in Indonesia? If so, leave them in the comments here. Quite a few people there want to make a mockery of this blatant censorship, which is being done to pander to the most intolerant Islamist elements in that country.
The BBC is under fire after altering a news story about global warming as a result of activist pressure. Tim Worstall writes that:
I must say, I think this is an absolutely marvellous advance. We pay for the BBC, after all, so we really shouldn’t have any of that elitist nonsense about a factual reality or anything. No, news should be presented to show the world as “you” believe it to be, not as some impartial reporter of the facts would have it.
That, at least, was the view of one Jo Abbess, a climate activist (and a remarkably confused one at that, a little googling reveals that she worries about both global warming and Peak Oil: mutually exclusive concerns one might think. Bless.) who… did indeed manage to have a BBC news report changed to reflect her views. We mustn’t actually talk of static temperatures, or even worse, of 1998 being the hottest so far (and thus since then we’ve had cooling) because that might make people think that the world has, umm, not been warming and might even have been cooling since 1998. Can’t let the proles know the truth now, can we?
Will the BBC’s Roger Harrabin please put the article back to how it was before the lobbying started? Email him your views at roger.harrabin@bbc.co.uk.
Hollywood illiberals such as George Clooney and Michael Moore made a career of sneering at the ageing Charlton Heston, which was almost enough to make me join the NRA. True, many of Heston’s conservative views might be as dated as his movies. But a willingness to take up arms for human freedom is one reason why we still don’t live on the planet of the apes.
– Mick Hume, reflecting on the stance on the right to bear arms that was taken by the late, great Charlton Heston. Here is a wonderful tribute to Heston by the US actor, Richard Dreyfus. Dreyfus is a ‘liberal’ in the American usage; his comments show real class and generosity of spirit.
This appeared in the Daily Telegraph today, in an article describing the tensions inside the UK Labour government, assailed from its own ranks over issues like taxes on alcohol, imprisonment without trial and other matters:
Behind the scenes, things are even worse. With no clear direction from above, Cabinet ministers are at each other’s throats. I am reliably informed that, after one recent Cabinet meeting, Jack Straw threatened to punch Ed Balls during a row about who was responsible for youth crime. The Justice Secretary came back to his department fuming that he had never been spoken to so rudely by a colleague in public and that he was not going to put up with it.
Fistfights in the cabinet? Well, if you elect thugs, thuggery will break out eventually.
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