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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The question has recently arisen as to whether it is ever right for a journalist to hoax a person into divulging certain facts or opinions that said person might not otherwise divulge. This week, the English Football Association told England soccer coach Sven Goran Eriksson that his contract would end immediately after the World Cup tournament in July, following comments Eriksson made to a News of the World journalist posing as someone else, the “fake Sheikh”.
Now, in the increasingly trivial world of British public life, all this might be of interest only to those who follow team sports. I know that a good many readers of this site probably do not give a damn about sporting contests but who might be troubled about the News of the World’s antics in this case. That newspaper conned a man into giving an interview. It deliberately misled Eriksson, who divulged some not-terribly-interesting facts about members of the England team and about his ambitions in the future. (Try to suppress your yawns, Ed).
Even so, some might argue that if the News of the World was trying to nail a terrorist suspect, say, that such subterfuge might be okay. Well, maybe. But what this latest episode has done is to further reduce the already-low reputation of the press, sow further paranoia about the media’s activities and hence give further ammunition to those in power who want to shackle the media. And all for a pathetic story about a venal Swede with an eye for the main chance and the ladies. How terribly British.
This writer seems to agree that there has not been nearly enough anger about what the NotW did. I hope that newspaper is made to suffer for its actions, although I suspect nothing much will be done. Had that paper been a business conning trade secrets from a rival, criminal charges might now be on the cards.
Fire up Google and type in “chav stakhanovites“… and you get us!
“We’ve taken the biggest surge in national income in years and squandered it. The punters are spending every cent they can and Canberra is encouraging that by handing back its share of the commodity price loot as tax cuts.”
Who would say such a thing? Sounds like the rantings of some bleeding heart welfarist think tank, rather than Australia’s leading economics consultancy, as Access Economics likes to describe itself.
Yes, Keynesian wannabes Access Economics released a report fretting about interest rate hikes, and it feels the answer is to remove the financial options of individuals and ensure that the government collects and hoards ever more of the people’s income. I suppose one should look at it this way; some day soon you might benefit if you find yourself in a geographic or demographic sweet spot that the government needs to court come election time.
Talking about rum plans, this proposal from Deloitte floats an admirable (though not particularly original) idea – swapping tax deductions on work expenses for across-the-board tax cuts. Liberals will start to choke when they see Deloitte’s adjustment of the progressive income tax rates:
The poorest tax payers would see their rate cut from 15 per cent to 4 per cent, with the 42 per cent tax rate paid by people earning $75,001-$125,000 falling to 33 per cent. The top 47 per cent rate paid by those earning more than $125,000 could be cut to 44 per cent.
Deloitte would surely have access to the masses of theoretical and empirical evidence showing the superior economic benefits of shrinking the gap between top marginal rates of income tax and the lower rates, not to mention the moral argument. Why this EC (and I do not mean European Community, though maybe I do…) drivel, then? Why do Deloitte believe they need to field a taxation proposal that is going to win elections?
Thankfully, the political party that prides itself on its fiscal responsibility and economic liberalism holds government in Australia. Yet we have a curmudgeonly treasurer (chancellor of the exchequer) who steadfastly refuses to budge over our absurdly high top marginal tax rate of 47%. He is more than happy to ladle out benefits to politically useful groups, however. Oddly named, the Liberal Party of Australia, when one considers it is run by big government conservatives.
Couple these few good men with the leading economics consultancies, who seem to be trying to outdo each other in the social crusading stakes.
Have these people never heard of the Chicago school? I despair.
The Tories could simply abolish entire government departments that the ‘man in the street’ really does not give a damn about (such as the DTI for example) and save huge amounts of money… but far from cutting pointless state expenditures, Cameron is in the process of making it politically impossible for him to do anything but ape Blair. Why? Because there has been no meaningful attempt by the Tories to even make the idea of a smaller state something that is simply a feature of normal political discourse. They have left the thinking to the other side and now have to fight every battle on ground Tony Blair has chosen for them.
The Tories have had more than a decade to put in the intellectual ground work for cutting the scope of the state and to argue their positions on the basis of several rights, and yet have done nothing of the sort because that is not what most of them believe. That is hardly surprising given the pathologies of the sort of people who are drawn to politics: they do not get involved because they want to wield less power than the previous guys who ran things. Understanding politicians and what they are likely to do is much easier once you realise that almost everyone in politics (even the ‘nice guys’ who wear sensible cardigans and remind you of Wallace and Gromit) have more in common psychologically and morally with your typical member of a street gang than with most of the people who actually vote for them.
However where does that leave people who do want a less intrusive state and cannot bring themselves to believe the Tory party does not give a damn about them? Well it leaves them trying to convince themselves that Cameron is just playing a clever game because the alternative is just too dreadful. He is the man who will save us from those who are incrementally destroying our competitiveness and strangling our civil liberties because, well, he has to be, who else is there?
But even if his conversion to ‘soft socialist’ economics is because he is going after LibDem voters who think high taxes and regulations are a good thing, it would at least require Cameron to also make a pitch based on civil liberties, the one differentiating issue where the LibDems make sense, and yet the main thrust of the inconstant Tory opposition to ID cards is based on their cost.
Those of you who think Cameron is just being clever should go watch Peter Sellers in ‘Being There’ and realise that what you are mistaking for cleverness is in fact just emptiness.
We all knew Galloway was a wanker before now anyway but by going onto Big Brother all he’s managed to do is simply broadcast this to a public who previously didn’t know who he was or thought he was that guy who told the American Senate a thing or two. The funniest thing has been the hard left loonies (and others) who applauded his cock sucking antics with Saddam, Assad, Hamas and the Al Aqsa Bastards Brigade but then decided that robotic manouvers in a leotard were beyond the pale.
– Blognor Regis
As befits his role as grand pyjama person of external trade, Peter Mandelson has paid great attention to his image and position. There are a whole series of photographs of Peter meeting other responsible dignitaries as he promotes the European interest throughout the world. The jolly capers with the Chinese Minister of Commerce, Bo Xilai, are especially heartwarming.
Peter makes great play of his distinguished career at Westminster, detailing the achievements of his tenure at Trade and Industry and Northern Ireland. A mere snippet suffices…
In 1999 Peter Mandelson was appointed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Between 1999 and 2001 he negotiated the creation of Northern Ireland’s power sharing government and the IRA’s announcement that they planned to put their arms beyond use. He also introduced the radical overhaul of the police service in Northern Ireland.
A mere bagatelle of an omission and I am sure that it is unintentionally overlooked. But didn’t he resign a couple of times?
The ‘Conservative’ Party is now admitting what any twit should have figured out long ago: voting Tory will not result in lower taxes. Moreover they are trying to make it seem like a virtue. One sound axiom is that whenever a Tory politician uses the word ‘sensible’, it is time to bend over and think of England because they are using the word as a euphemism for either surrendering power to Brussels or keeping your taxes nice and high, and this is clearly the Tory party at its most ‘sensible’.
It always makes me laugh when people like Cameron and his shadow chancellor George Osborne blather on about how they will provide ‘stability’ as if the economy is something that could not possibly work without constant political interference.
The Tories are quick to tell us how Labour has squandered Britain’s economic advantages (as indeed they have) and yet Cameron’s boys seem to bend over backwards to assure everyone that a Tory government will be nothing more than Blue Rinse Blairism. Yet if ‘stability’ is so important rather than a radical change, surely the most ‘stable’ thing would be to just leave the current Blairites in government.
John Hutton, Work and Pensions Minister, runs a department that has not improved either. Watching Andrew Marr’s impartial televisual feast this morning, Hutton sat down following Fiona Millar’s defence of comprehensive schools and Chris Huhne transferring his skillset from journalism to tax increases. A green paper on welfare will be published this week as a preparation for a new bill on the benefits system. Finding a gap between the latest revolution on criminal justice and educational appeasement, Hutton proposes radical measurements. Doctors will have to monitor and report on how many sicknotes they issue.
Doctors could be offered bonuses for cutting the numbers of long-term sick notes they issue as part of a radical plan to slash incapacity benefit claims,.
Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton said that the proposal was under consideration as part of the Government’s package of welfare reforms.
“It has been mooted and I think, again, this is something we would like to talk to the GPs about,” he told the BBC1 Sunday AM programme.
No doubt league tables and auditing will follow; a harsh judgement but the micromanagement of benefit and dependency that is proposed will not work. Yet again, the response of the government to a perceived problem is measurement and management, in a centralised reporting structure. The policy is reported to have some teeth:
Ministers want to drastically cut the 2.7 million people claiming incapacity benefit (IB) at an annual cost of £12.5 billion, by getting those who are able to do some form of work back into jobs.
It is expected that the green paper will include proposals to cut IB payments by up to £10.93 a week for claimants who refuse to attend a job interview, rising to £21.86 for a second refusal.
The Government is also planning to install employment advisers in GPs surgeries – with claimants being assessed to see what work they are capable of doing before they can qualify for IB.
Even the name of the benefit is to change in order to underline the new approach.
“Incapacity benefit implies that you are incapable of doing anything, it is completely hopeless. I think we shouldn’t take that view,” Mr Hutton said.
Such teeth may be drawn in the face of Labour rebels, since many backbenchers will oppose taking money from those identified as incapacitated by the benefits system. Lo and behold! what remains: some spin as ‘incapacity benefit’ is rebranded, perhaps as ‘Brown’s munificence’ or ‘for the trouble you took to vote Labour’; and lots of shiny new part-time public sector positions to reduce the headline figures.
The real solution is more straightforward: privatise provision with incentives to reduce the figures and get those drawing benefits back to work. If you are filmed playing squash on a ‘bad back’, there may be some bad news: London Transport probably will not employ you but you can still join the RMT.
It is a given in Middle Eastern politics that whenever a politician is feeling the heat, the default tactic for distracting people from whatever woes are pissing them off is to start throwing wild accusations at Israel. For extra added points they can even accuse the ‘Zionist entity’ of whatever it is that you are in fact doing.
Given that Israel had the opportunity to kill Yassir Arafat a thousand times over once he became a (more or less) regular political figure with a regular address in Palestine and a daily routine, for Assad of Syria to start suddenly claiming that Israel assassinated Arafat, a man who was well known to be sick and old and who was really an increasingly irrelevant figure towards the end, strikes me as the sort of thing that would be done by a man who is frantically looking to divert attention away from something else (like maybe his propensity to bump people off in Lebanon).
The Israelis are usually pretty upfront about their willingness to conduct assassination against their enemies, so perhaps it is time the Israeli airforce paid Assad a visit and when asked why they killed him, they should reply “Why not? We wanted to give folks in Lebanon something to smile about and in any case we would have been accused of killing him anyway regardless of how he eventually snuffed it”.
Efforts continue to use powers of eminent domain (UK = compulsory purchase) to take US Supreme Court Judge David Souter’s home away from him in order to use the land for a hotel and tourist attraction called the Lost Liberty Hotel.
However New Hampshire State Representative Neal Kurk, in spite of being behind worthy measures to prohibit in his state the sort of abuses of eminent domain that the US Supreme Court okayed with their monstrous Kelo judgement, is nevertheless opposed to the plan to use eminent domain against Souter.
“Most people here see this as an act of revenge and an improper attack on the judicial system,” Kurk said. “You don’t go after a judge personally because you disagree with his judgments.”
Why not? If Souter was part of the system underwriting a grotesque abridgement of liberty, who not grotesquely abridge his liberty? I suppose being a politician himself, the notion of using laws against the people responsible for them might be a little too close to home for Kurk even if he is sponsoring a measure to prevent such abuses in New Hampshire. Yet why should people whose liberty is abridged and rights to property threatened not want to punish the guilty parties with the tools they themselves have no problem seeing used against others? I am a great believer in revenge.
Do unto others as they do unto you.
Today is the anniversary of the execution of French monarch Louis XVI. If my reading of history is correct, the matter did not end terribly well for France. Not that most Frenchmen would want the Bourbons back, however.
Of course there is a huge body of historical literature on the rights and wrongs of the French Revolution, which in many ways created the model for totalitarianism in Soviet Russia, China and elsewhere. That the Bourbon monarchy was a corrupt institution and that the ordinary folk of France suffered under an oppressive system is not in much doubt, mind. I cannot help but think, however, that the violent overthrow of the monarchy and what followed was, in net terms, a disaster for Europe and sowed the seeds of much eventual trouble.
I recommend this book by Simon Schama and this item, which pinpoints the violent events in France as an example of “totalitarian democracy” and the dangers of folk who claim to have an unique insight into some fictitious entity called the General Will.
One of my favourite actors, Michael Caine, achieved one of his early breakthroughs in the film, The Ipcress File, based on the Len Deighton Cold War thriller of the same name. (I love the fact that Deighton, a fine historian of the air campaigns in the Second World War, used to write a cookery column for the Observer. Very hip). Anyhow, without spoiling the plot of either the book or the film, it hinges around the use of “brainwashing” techniques to make people do one’s bidding or erase the memory of certain information.
How much of this could ever be based on fact or indeed, did either side in the Cold War use such techniques? There is a long entry in the now-indispensable Wikipedia site on this topic, pointing to the origin of the word “brainwash” in the early stages of the Cold War during the Korean campaign. The entries raise some doubts about how widely used such techniques were, or whether the term simply refers to a particularly fierce form of propoganda. I have come across the term in various films of the period, such as the first version of the Manchurian Candidate (forget the remake, which is a pale imitation of the original). But to what extent were such techniques really all that effective in moulding minds? Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”, which I have just finished reading and enjoyed immensely, queries the idea of an infinitely malleable mind, arguing that there are limits to how the brain can be influenced by certain techniques.
If this is true then it is encouraging that there are limits to how far the mind can be moulded in any way that those in authority, whether benign or malign, wish.
Anyway, I can strongly recommend readers rent out the Caine movies based on the Deighton books. Highly entertaining.
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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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