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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Vlad Vexler noticed that nearly everyone online was certain that Putin sent a body double to Mariupol rather than visiting himself. Then he ran a poll, which revealed that most people weren’t quite so sure, and actually more people thought it was more likely that Putin did go himself.
The point being that it is very hard to tell from the shouting and hollering in, say, social media commentary, what proportion of people really agree with a thing.
That institution might underestimate how much of the general population are actually not on board with these projects. It could happen because some of the leading newspapers, most of the universities, much of the discourse in the social media forums normalise something that might in fact have only persuaded a section of the population. It could be even some kind of elite, some kind of educated elite or some kind of urban elite or whatever. But that institution, let’s say the BBC, might go on as though actually 80% of the population are persuaded and it’s only 12% that are sort of not quite there because they’re irrational or because they are backward or don’t see things that way. But they’re a minority anyway. The problem isn’t whether these social justice projects are right or wrong; the problem is you’re assuming an act of persuasion has happened that hasn’t happened. […]
It’s so toxic to broadcast to the country and pretend that the 20% represents the 80%.
It can work the other way, too. In Vexler’s example, if the BBC writes an article and 7000 comments complain about it and only 1000 comments agree with it, it might become scared of shifting tides of culture, that the majority are against them, and they might start to take defensive measures; to treat as normal a minority opinion.
Vexler argues that these kinds of misjudgements cause political shifts and are dangerous for democracy. Even on a small scale I think it is unhelpful to go around thinking that Twitter, for example, reveals very much about what people are, in general, thinking.
You are almost certainly wrong, one way or another, about how many people agree with you*.
*Unless you are libertarian. Then the answer is 11
To the majority of people who believe lockdowns were right and necessary, the Covid era was no doubt distressing, but it need not have been cause to re-order their perception of the world. Faced with a new and frightening disease, difficult decisions were taken by the people in charge but we came together and got through it; mistakes were made, but overall we did what we needed to do.
For the dissenting minority, the past three years have been very different. We have had to grapple with the possibility that, through panic and philosophical confusion, our governing class contrived to make a bad situation much worse. Imagine living with the sense that the manifold evils of the lockdowns that we all now know — ripping up centuries-old traditions of freedom, interrupting a generation’s education, hastening the decline into decrepitude for millions of older people, destroying businesses and our health service, dividing families, saddling our economies with debt, fostering fear and alienation, attacking all the best things in life — needn’t have happened for anything like so long, if at all?
– Freddie Sayers
Self-described “Poe/history blogger and crazy cat lady” Undine @HorribleSanity has unearthed a page from an old children’s book with a moral likely to disturb most modern readers:
I wonder what this little girl is crying about ? O ! I have found out. John has taken the kittens from the old cat, and has drowned them in the pond ; and she is ready to call him a heartless creatore for doing so. Do you think he is ? O, no. It would be cruel, indeed, to torment the kittens as some children do ; but John was told to drown them for the convenience of the family ; so dry up your tears, Miss Lucy.
When I was a child my mother told me that when she was a child in the late 1930s and early 1940s it was still routine for litters of kittens to be drowned. There was a local man who probably made a living as a general odd-job man but who my mother and her sister hated because they saw him only in his role as “the kitten-drowner”. When my grandmother called him round to do the deed, my mother and her sister would hide while it was done and be upset for days afterwards.
But what else were people to do back then? If nature is allowed to take its course, a female cat can easily bear three litters a year. Let’s say three kittens per litter. Where you had one cat you now have ten, and it is not just your Tibbles doing that, but every cat in the neighbourhood, and it is not long before the kittens grow up and start mating with each other. To be sure, the geometric progression will not continue forever. That’s because in a society that has no practical means to stop them breeding, most stray cats either starve to death or are killed by the almost equally uncontrollable population of stray dogs. Unless, that is, someone spares them from this miserable life and lingering death by killing them in a relatively merciful way soon after birth.
Dogs, it is true, can usually be kept from breeding by not letting them run loose. But for most of human history the whole point of having a cat was that it would feed itself and earn its place in a human home by killing mice. It can’t do that on a lead. Commercially made cat food began to be produced in the 1930s. So it did exist when my mother was a child but only as a luxury product. Her family were far from rich. Their cats were given table scraps to supplement their main diet of mice, but the idea of paying for meat to feed a cat when humans often went without would have seemed ridiculous.
Given that she is a history blogger with a specific interest in what TV Tropes calls “Values Dissonance”, I am sure Undine knows all this, but some of her audience clearly have not thought it through. “I hope whoever wrote that is burning in hell,” says one of the replies to her tweet.
Rather than call down damnation on people for whom killing kittens was the least inhumane option, it would be better to call down blessings on those who made it no longer necessary. Those who developed anaesthetics are rightly praised for having freed humans from much suffering, both by making surgical operations pain-free and by making surgery more likely to succeed because it no longer had to be done at speed. These benefits quickly filtered down to animals, too, first to bulls and stallions, and then on to smaller animals like cats and dogs. They can do surgery on hamsters now. If you think that wasteful, remember that the benefit of being able to save a pet goes not just to the animal but to the humans who love it.
As I said, we rightly praise the pioneers of medicine who made this happy situation possible – but the biggest driver in changing possibility to fact was the capitalist system that made us so much richer than our ancestors. We can afford to buy food specially for cats. We can afford to take cats to the vets to get the snip, and to have their annual injections done and their ailments treated. Now that their offspring are greatly reduced in number, we can afford to support animal shelters that will find homes for them if the card in the newsagent’s window doesn’t work. We can afford not to drown kittens.
“Deposit insurance is a cancer at the heart of the capitalist system, destroying its ethical foundations. Rich depositors should not be able to secure returns, in the good times, for investing in fundamentally riskbearing activities (which fractional reserve deposits are, by their nature) but then be bailed out by the government when times are tougher. And banks are the largest allocators of capital in the economy – so this fundamental injustice gets spread across the entire economic system.”
– Andrew Lilico, The Sunday Telegraph (£)
A problem in much of the West is that the large investors who have been bailed out, such as those who did so via Silicon Valley Bank, or Credit Suisse, etc, is that they tend to be politically quite powerful. A lot of the north Californian business class, for instance. And it tends to vote Democratic.
I like the following comments by Adrian Wooldridge, the journalist, writing in Bloomberg ($ paywall) a week ago:
The humanities at their best are also perfectly equipped to provide an education in something that has been sadly lacking in recent business history: human judgment. The notion of judgment might sound a bit vague — certainly compared with the profit and loss of the business balance sheet or the ones and zeros of the digital economy — but the difference between a successful leader and a mediocre one does not lie in the amount of information they possess. It lies in the very human ability to process a vast mass of ambiguous information — sales patterns, technological innovations, political threats — and then make a rapid decision under pressure. The importance of judgment is growing as the world becomes more uncertain and trade-offs become more pressing. Who knows? Perhaps this week’s financial turmoil could have been avoided if Greg Becker, the CEO of the just-shuttered Silicon Valley Bank, had studied the humanities at Indiana University instead of majoring in business.
A preference for deceptive certainties over fuzzy truths has arguably been the biggest problem for business in recent years. Businesspeople have grown incomparably rich since the 1980s by embracing the deceptive certainties of business theory while forgetting the great truths of political theory. They have embraced the cult of shareholder value (paying themselves like owners rather than employees) while also providing themselves with golden parachutes and exploiting every accounting trick in the book. But in so doing they have whipped up popular fury that is threatening to overturn business civilization (and will not be placated by a few bromides about diversity and sustainability).
They would have been wiser if they had studied classical political theory along with contemporary economics and business theory. Aristotle argued vigorously for the “golden mean” on the grounds that a prosperous middle class is necessary to long-term stability. Plato insisted that elites inevitably collapse if they give way to their own appetites rather than restraining themselves in the interest of the public good. Surely Plato+Aristotle is a better formula for understanding the state of modern America than any number of business theorists?
I’d like to quote the whole article but there is a copyright/subscription issue, and I am a free marketeer and respecter of property, after all.
Far from robbing anybody of surplus value, Capitalism is like a benevolent ancestor who, instead of consuming all the port that he could get – as some ancestors did – laid down an enormous cellar of it for the use of future generations. And every one who is now alive in this country, and millions abroad likewise, are now able to help themselves to bottles of the grand old vintage then laid down and now ready for us, crusted, fruity, full of ripe flavour and rich bouquet. For none of us could have been so well off, and many of us could not have been born at all, if Capitalism had not done this deed, and done it judiciously and well.
– Hartley Withers, The Case for Capitalism, 1920 p239. Withers was editor of the Economist between 1916 and 1921. It’s a good analogy, or ought to be. It ought to make you think of science, shipping, railways, hospitals, educational institutions. Unfortunately, in my case it – especially the “rich bouquet” bit – makes me think of sewers.
We are now forewarned that the British government has chosen St. George’s Day, 23rd April 2023, to trial a new ‘alert’ system by sending alerts to the phones of everyone in the UK. It seems that you have to interact with the phone to stop it blaring a siren-like noise at you, and so acknowledge this impertinence.
However, not all phones can receive these ‘alerts’. The functionality is limited:
Compatible mobile phones and other devices
Make sure your device has all the latest software updates.
Emergency alerts work on:
iPhones running iOS 14.5 or later
Android phones and tablets running Android 11 or later
If you have an earlier version of Android, you may still be able to receive alerts. To check, search your device settings for ‘emergency alerts’.
But you can turn off these alerts on your phone (if you are socially-unfriendly):
You can opt out of emergency alerts, but you should keep them switched on for your own safety.
To opt out:
Search your settings for ‘emergency alerts’.
Turn off ‘severe alerts’ and ‘extreme alerts’.
If you still get alerts, contact your device manufacturer for help.
Blimey, something the government acknowledges that it can’t help me with, is this a first?
But what, pray, is this all for?
You may get alerts about:
severe flooding
fires
extreme weather
One might hope that severe flooding and fires would be incompatible, but perhaps with the climate emergency, Mr Sunak will set the Thames on fire.
And the form of this message?
‘It ain’t half hot, Mum!‘
Not exactly:
What happens when you get an emergency alert
Your mobile phone or tablet may:
make a loud siren-like sound, even if it’s set on silent
vibrate
read out the alert
The sound and vibration will last for about 10 seconds.
An alert will include a phone number or a link to the GOV.UK website for more information.
OK, but what should I do if I get an ‘alert’?
What you need to do
When you get an alert, stop what you’re doing and follow the instructions in the alert.
But does this apply to say, surgeons in an operating theatre? This is not mentioned.
And wait, what if I am…
If you’re driving or riding when you get an alert
You should not read or otherwise respond to an emergency alert whilst driving or riding a motorcycle.
If you are driving, you should continue to drive and not respond to the noise or attempt to pick up the mobile phone and deal with the message.
Find somewhere safe and legal to stop before reading the message. If there is nowhere safe or legal to stop close by, and nobody else is in the vehicle to read the alert, tune into live radio and wait for bulletins until you can find somewhere safe and legal to stop.
It is illegal to use a hand-held device while driving or riding.
Well at least that’s clear…
What is the legal basis for the government taking this power, and why is this not explained?
And presumably, if there’s someone running amok with knives or guns, this won’t be part of the alert system, when it might actually be unexpected, unlike the weather.
I can see where this is going. It will eventually be used to warn people that Nigel Farage is making a speech locally and that they should stay indoors and not follow the event on social media.
Sorry, I was being overly cynical there, I have seen this:
If you cannot receive emergency alerts
If you do not have a compatible device, you’ll still be informed about an emergency. The emergency services have other ways to warn you when there is a threat to life.
Emergency alerts will not replace local news, radio, television or social media.
That’s good to know, I had been wondering if it would. And I am pleased to hear that I won’t be getting messages from Robert Spencer if there is a certain type of rare incident in the locality. Then again, what if there is a hippo on the loose? Is there a template alert message for that, if not, why not? Are you seriously trying to protect us? Will it sound if there is, say, an unexpected landing on a beach by persons unknown?
Around 35 years ago, the late Auberon Waugh said that people only go into politics for the pleasure of pressing switches and watching us all jump. This figure of speech has become reality.
Oxfam has come a long way since it was founded 81 years ago. There was a time in the dim and distant past when its primary purpose was to raise money from well-meaning, relatively affluent folks and use their donations to assuage the hunger pangs of the poor and downtrodden across the globe. It was a worthy cause.
Those days are long over. For some time now it’s been more associated with Left-wing agitprop than famine relief. Indeed, you almost get the impression feeding the famished is now seen by some in Oxfam as an annoying diversion from the far more important work of political activism.
– Andrew Neill, of whom I am not a great fan overall but this is certainly true.
“Humza Yousaf reported to police for breaking his own hate crime law”, reports Guido Fawkes with pardonable glee:
Humza Yousaf has been reported to Police Scotland for appearing to break the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, after claiming double rapist Isla Bryson is “not a genuine trans woman” during the latest SNP leadership debate. The same Hate Crime Act introduced by… Humza Yousaf.
Speaking during the BBC’s debate on Tuesday, Yousaf claimed:
“Isla Bryson should not be in a woman’s prison. Isla Bryson is a rapist who’s completely at it, I don’t think they’re a genuine trans woman, I think they’re trying to play the system.”
Not a “genuine trans woman“, although still using “they” pronouns for some reason. Regardless, Yousaf’s remarks are a criminal offence under the Hate Crime Act, which bans “threatening, abusive or insulting language… based on their protected characteristics, which include gender identity
Mr Yousaf is presently the Health Secretary for the SNP government in Scotland, and is probably the leading candidate to replace Nicola Sturgeon as leader of the scandal-ridden Scottish National Party. Given the events of the last twenty-four hours, I wonder whether Mr Yousaf might not prefer to lose. Given that the man known as “Humza Useless” would be a useless leader of a party I despise, I am not sure whether I might not prefer him to win. He certainly deserves to lose. The following link takes you to previous Samizdata posts with Humza’s name in them, dating from his time as Scottish Justice Secretary and chief incubator of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021. Yousaf was the man who decreed that there should be no exemption for prosecution for hateful speech and conduct just because it took place in a private dwelling.
Why does everything have to be justified on the basis that it will help the NHS? Especially when the NHS is failing its patients so badly? UK healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP now ranks fifth highest in the OECD, yet the system isn’t delivering even the most basic forms of care. Some 2.7 million people are sitting anxiously on the waiting list.
– Kate Andrews
Regular readers of this blog know that politically, the cause for liberty cuts through conventional categories. Over at Wired magazine, which in my view has tilted more Left in recent years and seems to have a lot of “green” material in it these days, it occasionally comes up with an article that is worth reading.
Here’s one on the use of AI technology to track alleged welfare cheats in Denmark. Denmark is one of those supposedly happy, social democratic, tax-and-spend places that the dimmer sort Western politicians, such as US Democrats, like to wax lyrical over. Well, take a look at this:
Denmark isn’t alone in turning to algorithms amid political pressure to crack down on welfare fraud. France adopted the technology in 2010, the Netherlands in 2013, Ireland in 2016, Spain in 2018, Poland in 2021, and Italy in 2022. But it’s the Netherlands that has provided the clearest warning against technological overreach. In 2021, a childcare benefits scandal, in which 20,000 families were wrongly accused of fraud, led to the resignation of the entire Dutch government. It came after officials interpreted small errors, such as a missing signature, as evidence of fraud, and forced welfare recipients to pay back thousands of euros they’d received as benefits payments.
The idea of creative destruction in capitalism is frequently bandied around, particularly among techies, but rarely is it ever allowed to work its magic in today’s world, where seemingly everyone is looking for a handout, from the biggest auto companies to the tiny little community coffee bar at the end of the street, and from the wealthiest financier to the poorest welfare claimant.
– Jeremy Warner, Daily Telegraph (£). The title of his article, which is about the federal government protection of depositors in Silicon Valley Bank, is “Capitalism is dead unless institutions that take bad bets are allowed to fail, nobody ever learns the lessons”.
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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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