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You say the third-best time to negotiate would be now. I can see why you would want that, but you’re not a party to the negotiations. Russia and Ukraine are. And why would Ukraine negotiate now?
As I said from the outset, what Ukraine needs is long term security. Not words on a piece of paper. Actual security. If they don’t get it, the lives they “save” now will be lost double when Russia inevitably invades again. And, yes, I’m sorry, long term security for Ukraine means NATO membership which Putin would not agree to as things stand.
And so we are where we are.
– Konstantin Kisin
The great strength of these [Iranian] protests – the sudden, overwhelming way in which they have spread, fuelled by social media – could also be their undoing. As we saw so tragically in the wake of the Arab Spring, this new generation of leaderless, internet-based movements can lack the coordination, durability and ideological focus to topple the despotic leaders they rage against.
– Tom Slater
In New York Times, John Leland asks,
Real-world ethics question: In a well-used city park, a man with a history of erratic behavior attacks a dog and its owner with a stick; five days later, the dog dies. The man is Black, the dog owner white; the adjoining neighborhood is famously progressive, often critical of the police and jail system. At the same time, crime is up in the neighborhood, with attacks by emotionally disturbed people around the city putting some residents on edge.
In a dog-loving, progressive enclave, where pushing law and order can clash with calls for social justice, what’s the right thing to do? How do you protect the public without furthering injustice against this man?
The question is not theoretical. On August 3rd, Jessica Chrustic and her dog Moose were attacked in Prospect Park, Brooklyn by a homeless man.
According to Ms. Chrustic, he started yelling about immigrants taking over the park,
Had he not been black, that detail would have answered Mr Leland’s question in short order.
then grabbed a bottle of what she later concluded was urine and sloshed it at her and her dog. She tried to run away, but Moose, her 80-pound golden retriever mix, was straining toward the man, trying to protect her.
The man started swinging the stick, she said. One blow hit her, not seriously. Another connected solidly with the dog’s snout. Mary Rowland, 56, a hospital manager who was walking her dog nearby, said she heard the crack of wood on bone and came running toward them, screaming at the man to get away.
The man fled, but the next weekend, Moose developed sepsis from a perforated intestine. Emergency surgery was not enough to save him.
What was done about this unprovoked attack on a woman and her dog? Nothing.
She was especially frustrated that the man, who was well known to people in the park, had not been arrested. “You have a person who is walking around the park who is violent and needs to be removed,” she said. “He’s known by the community. It’s disheartening.”
It was a random incident that might once have been discussed by a group of dog owners. But now it had a forum for a much wider community, with arguments about policing, vigilantism, homelessness, mental health care and progressive obstinacy all feeding into a conversation that evolved beyond the crime that set it off.
“It’s complicated,” said S. Matthew Liao, a professor of bioethics, philosophy and public health at New York University. “It’s a conflict of values, between wanting security and social justice. Everybody has a responsibility in some ways.
All together now… WE ARE ALL GUILTY! Dr Heinz Kiosk has been reborn, but not as funny this time.
I disagree with Professor Liao. It is not complicated at all.
Regarding Mr Leland’s question, “In a dog-loving, progressive enclave, where pushing law and order can clash with calls for social justice, what’s the right thing to do?”, Suzy Weiss of the New York Post described what some of the residents of this dog-loving, progressive enclave did do: “Bizarre meeting of Park Slopers over how to handle murdered pooch”.
Dr. Douglas Young, U. of North Georgia-Gainesville political science professor emeritus.
There’s no shortage of temptations to ignore our First Amendment free expression rights and pervert the law into a billy club to banish disturbing speech. Indeed, ever more people demand we outlaw all “hate speech” and “disinformation” in the name of “equity” and “social justice.”
In this vein, to justify their recent attempt to ban any pro-Israel speaker from the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, the school’s Law Students for Justice in Palestine explains: “Free speech and the exchange of ideas cannot be romanticized when the by-product of such rhetoric causes harm to marginalized communities.” Of course, this “reasoning” can easily justify the suppression of any statement alleged to “harm” some preferred group.
But freedom fans know that, as George (Animal Farm; 1984) Orwell observed, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Indeed, as Justice Harlan Fiske Stone noted, “If only popular causes are entitled to enjoy the benefit of constitutional guarantees, they serve no purpose, and could as well not have been written.” Furthermore, we’re all vulnerable to the whims of speech censors. As Thomas Paine understood, “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression.”
Ironically, totalitarians may appreciate even more the power of freedom and the ideas it conveys. Vladimir Lenin (not good Beatle John, but bad commie Vlad) proclaimed, “It is true that liberty is precious, so precious that it must be rationed.” His even less tolerant and bigger mass-murdering disciple, Joseph Stalin, stated, “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns; why should we let them have ideas?”
Alas, the world has been littered with formerly free lands transformed into totalitarian plantations by snowballing restrictions on individual expression, and usually out of a sincere conviction to stop speech many decent folks find repellent. Anyone wanting the right to voice politically incorrect views is deemed as defending the indefensible.
In today’s U.S., to deter “hate speech” against “LGBTQ+” and other groups preferred by the ruling class, to protect “public health” against “disinformation,” and to “save our democracy,” so many controversial views are excised from Twitter and other media outlets that free public discourse has been substantially restricted.
But, as for unsettling internet content, who’s a better filter for what you read: big tech, the state, or you? Why entrust others to be nannies for your mind? As Thomas Jefferson declared, “We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” So fight bad speech with your own informed judgment and good replies.
Contrary to what 1984 implied, it’s precisely the modern flowering of the means of mass communication that has empowered more people than ever to stand tall for truth and freedom, making it harder for dictators to keep their citizens ignorant and oppressed. Witness the fall of the cruel communist tyrannies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the liberalization of post- Maoist China, and exciting liberty liberation movements, even in a Muslim theocracy like Iran.
The root of censorship is a lack of faith in people. The censor is an arrogant elitist idealist bent on saving the rest of us from our own ignorant, depraved selves. Since he also lacks confidence in his ideas’ currency, he stifles all opposition. Furthermore, as Joe Sobran observed: “If a would-be censor could express himself so well, he’d have no need, or urge, to censor. He’d be content to oppose words with better words. Censorship is a confession of failure…. [A]ll the qualities such people tend to lack [include]: candor, humor, self-confidence, and self-respect.”
This typifies today’s speech cops on so many American campuses who are true totalitarians seeking what censors sought in 1984. As Orwell explained, “It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all, and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought … should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.”
There’s never a dearth of fervent ideologues and purists, secular and religious alike, eager to legally pounce on any deviation from their enlightened orthodoxy. But witness the bitter fruit of such repressive regimes as Revolutionary France, communist Russia and China, Nazi Germany, Muslim theocratic Saudi Arabia and Iran, Castroite Cuba, and socialist Venezuela and Nicaragua. While none would permit the controversial expressions many seek to end here now, neither would any of these statist societies sanction the most basic right of the people to even question their rulers. Remember that our Bill of Rights is a Ten Commandments of thou-shalt-nots restraining the state since rights are granted by God – not government.
For the past two weeks, a stock narrative has been that UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng’s “mini-budget” was reckless and rattled the markets, and he should have been more cautious, set out the debt and borrowing side first, not talked about reversing Rishi Sunak’s tax hikes to corporate tax, NICs, etc, and got fully on board with the idea that what the UK needs are the highest taxes since Clement Attlee. This, apparently, is what the clever people in the Square Mile wanted, happily cheered on by much of the media, and the damper ends of the Tory Party.
But given a few days to think about this, what strikes me as what a lot of hysteria there has been, and how heavy taxes remain. This story in the Telegraph today shows how “fiscal drag” caused by static tax thresholds means millions of UK taxpayers will, in real terms, be worse off because their tax bills are going up, not down.
So the idea that we are going to move to some sort of Reaganite low-tax country was always a bit overdone. It suggests that fashionable opinion has so totally imbibed forms of socialism that anything a bit different sends people crazy. (The performance of the International Monetary Fund, an organisation that should be shut down, is a case in point.) It suggest that those Tory MPs threatening to unpick even the smaller tax hikes need to ask themselves why they are Tory MPs at all.
Tory MPs didn’t even give Truss a chance. They cut her off at the knees before she could even begin. They don’t appear to want to be in power any more.
– Philip Johnston
I don’t want to take anything away from the Ukrainians, who have basically been a banner case of military transformation, but it also helps that the Russians are really, really bad at the whole “war that involves more than bombing hospitals” thing.
– Adot Crawley
“his attack on Western values including references to transitioning children and other hot-button topics in the West (including family values which may have included an indirect swipe at the new Italian PM) was IMO a touch of brilliance that reflects the old Vladimir rather than the current. I expect to see any attempt to go after such efforts in the West now resulting in accusations of being a Russian stooge/proxy/agent/etc. Yet more Gramscian damage to the West. Well played.” (from Laughing Wolf’s latest)
Although I largely agree, I have three points to make about Laughing Wolf’s phrasing here.
1) Either Putin has rebuked the Russian handler of the first transgender US army officer traitor and returned the information, or I think the sincerity of his opposition to weird wokeness in the west should be questioned. (But I predict the western activists accusing the unwoke of being his stooges won’t question it, so it may have some effect.)
2) Putin’s not such a genius for coming up with this idea. The Clinton campaign floated this story in 2016, and the idea that Trump is a Russian asset and his followers either traitors or dupes was insolently rerun by the Times and others this February and laughably fallen for by this pundit and others in March. So I think a degree of it was happening anyway and would have continued to happen. Putin’s remarks may not add much fresh fuel to that already-burning bonfire on the ice.
3) However, seeing what the usual suspects pretend Trump meant by Vlad’s “genius move” (and how many of the usual dupes swallowed it or pretended to) maybe Laughing Wolf should be more cautious about saying things like “a touch of brilliance that reflects the old Vladimir … Yet more Gramscian damage to the West.”, lest he suffer some ‘Gramscian’ damage himself. 🙂
Also from Laughing Wolf:
For all that the US was the focus of his bitching, Great Britain comes in for a lot of oblique criticism too. In fact, it might could be argued that more was directed at them than most may realize — it depends on how well one knows Russian history and Russian culture.
Nice to know we’re appreciated.
“The point is that Britain was in an economic mess before Ms. Truss took office, and there is no alternative universe in which policies that have failed for 12 years suddenly would start working on the cusp of a global downturn. The choice is the gamble of a major policy overhaul, or the certainty of steeper decline. So yes, U.S. Republicans, do take note of Ms. Truss’s travails in Britain. The Tories squandered their reputation for competent, free-market economic management. They now find that it’s hard to win back at precisely the moment they and the country need it most.”
The Wall Street Journal (I seem to be quoting it a lot these days), giving its transatlantic take on the past 12 years of Conservative fecklessness and some occasional sensible moves. Its verdict on the Bank of England is particularly damning:
The Osborne Treasury and the Bank of England under Governors Mervyn King and Mark Carney set the tone by “looking through” above-target inflation for four years from 2010-13, and again in 2017-19. The central bank ignored its price-stability mandate in order to hold interest rates at historic lows while suppressing government borrowing costs with quantitative easing.
This stoked asset-price inflation, especially in housing, while suppressing productive investment and real wages. Inflation-adjusted pay fell 6.7% from 2009-14.
Mr. Carney’s successor Andrew Bailey poured on generous monetary stimulus during the pandemic, and he has been slow to withdraw it as the inflationary crisis deepens. One day before Mr. Kwarteng’s tax announcement, Mr. Bailey gave markets a bad surprise with a dovish 50-basis-point increase in interest rates rather than a 75-point raise that would follow the Federal Reserve’s lead and match the severity of U.K. inflation.
No wonder markets were primed to question Britain’s policy credibility when Mr. Kwarteng unveiled the new tax plan.
On the bright side, at least we hopefully won’t hear much more about Modern Monetary Theory.
Addendum: I have ordered Edward Chancellor’s book, The Price of Time, and will review it when I get my copy. It is getting good reviews. We shall see!
Sterling is recovering a bit against the dollar. I wonder if some hedge fund types that have shorted the pound have been squeezed out.
Update: In response to bad polls and the fact that many Tory MPs are more or less social democrats with a blue label, the Chancellor has reversed his removal of the 45% top tax rate. So, combined with national insurance and other taxes, top earners face a marginal rate around 60 per cent, which is high even by European standards. Needless to say, this is unlikely to help the party retain power unless there is a dramatic improvement in the economy. And even if there is, the “it’s time for a change” will be hard to resist. Labour can get rid of its nuttier members and get into power.
“Labour surges to 33-point lead over Tories”, reports the Times.
Labour has surged to a 33-point poll lead over the Conservatives after a week of market turmoil triggered by Liz Truss’s tax-cutting budget.
The YouGov poll for The Times finds Tory support has fallen by seven points in the past four days amid fears the government’s plans will lead to spiralling interest rate rises.
It is thought to be the largest poll lead enjoyed by any party with any pollster since the late 1990s.
Labour’s lead is fuelled by voters switching directly from the Conservatives, with 17 per cent of those who backed Boris Johnson in 2019 saying they would vote Labour.
Just 37 per cent of 2019 Conservative voters said they were planning to stick with the party, suggesting a Tory wipeout.
Liz Truss now faces a choice. She can pull back. This might regain her a percentage point or two. She would then be 31 points behind instead of 33. Her place in history would be secure: as an answer to a difficult pub quiz question about who was Prime Minister between Boris Johnson and Sir Keir Starmer. Or she can push onwards. She might still fail, but more gloriously. And if she succeeds, she gets to sit alongside Margaret Thatcher in the Told You So Hall of Fame. Even if, as seems likely, she loses the next election but hands Sir Keir an economy in significantly better shape, she will be remembered as someone who put country before party.
We have about the highest level of taxation we have had in the UK since the 1970s. In the 2021-2022 tax year tax receipts were 30.3% of GDP. In 2009-2010 they were 25% of GDP which was the lowest level in the last 20 years and occurred under a Labour government.
The recently proposed tax changes are: cancel an increase in corporation tax; reverse a recent (unpopular with the left) 1.25% increase in national insurance contributions; cut basic rate of income tax by 1%; change stamp duty nil band from 125,000 to 250,000 (the average house price is 281,000); remove the 45% additional rate of income tax (paid by 629,000 people earning more than £150,000, to the tune of about £1.5bn (thanks to KJP for the correction)).
Such changes are welcome to me, but do not appear to be particularly radical.
And yet everyone, from the IMF to forex traders to buyers of government bonds to Torygraph columnists, not to mention literally everyone on Twitter, is completely freaking out about it.
Most commentators seem to be aghast at the very concept of tax cuts. Few commentators are talking about spending. Are these tax cuts really so big and costly, or is it that nobody believes that a smaller state can lead to economic growth, instead believing that government tax and spending is a zero sum game, and that anything other than a steady increase in tax and spending is terrifying?
“The unemployment rate was 3.5% in July, the same as in February 2020, but the U.S. has three million fewer workers. Where did everyone go? This in an economy with 11.2 million job openings. It’s mostly men 25 to 54 who haven’t come back to work. Now a McKinsey study suggests that 40% of workers are thinking of quitting their jobs. Does anyone want to work anymore?”
– Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal ($).
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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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