|
|||||
|
Supercars are supposed to run over Arthur Scargill and then run over him again for good measure. They are designed to melt ice caps, kill the poor, poison the water table, destroy the ozone layer, decimate indigenous wildlife, recapture the Falkland Islands and turn the entire third world into a huge uninhabitable desert, all that before they nicked all the oil in the world. – Sage and raconteur Jeremy Clarkson. I cannot count the ways we love him. August 24th, 2011 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Here is a long blog post by Timothy Sandefur dissecting the collectivist economics and moral philosophy of Sam Harris. Harris is one of the “new atheists”, who, along with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, have developed a bit of a reputation for bashing religion. I haven’t read Sam Harris, and Sandefur does not make me any more inclined to do so. (Of all these men, Hitchens is the best, in my view.) It is interesting that those who criticise religion on the grounds of reason and logic can, as in the case of Harris, make such basic errors on subjects such as trade, notions of self-ownership, justice and the like. It is as if they are craving a secular god to fill a gap left by the traditional one. I must say I was quite shocked at the incoherence of some of Harris’s comments and his failure to examine and demonstrate his premises, such as when he talks about “fairness” without asking what he might mean by that. It is disappointing. On a related point, Greg Perkins, who writes at the Noodlefood blog, had a point about the big gaps in “new atheist” thinking a few years ago. (That link has been updated). I suggest people brew up a coffee for Sandefur’s posting. It is not a 60-second read. Another case, in fact, of how blogging is often where the quality writing is, whatever some sneerers might once have said about this medium. Welcome, Instapundit readers! Meanwhile, Reason’s Hit & Run blog has a related issue on how supposedly pro-science leftists can make utter tits of themselves. August 23rd, 2011 | 70 comments - (Comments are closed)
Following on from Perry’s post immediately below this one, I see that Guido Fawkes (aka Paul Staines), has, by his standards, a pretty long, and more significantly, very strongly worded item pointing to all the various links between the late, unlamented Labour government, and the equally unlamented Libyan dictator. I wonder how Tony Blair regrets that photo of him shaking hands with Gaddaffi? Maybe not. Maybe, Blair might argue, that yes, the guy was and is a bastard, but he came clean about his own WMD programmes in 2003 after Saddam was toppled and to that limited extent, it was right for the West to “reward” those countries run by people who had shown some signs of seeing sense. But the trouble with this sort of realpolitik is that it requires a country like Britain to turn a sort of Nelsonian blind eye to the manifest wickedness of a regime and its past. And let’s not be partisan here: the same calculations have been taken by rightwing administrations as well. Such statecraft is an ugly business, and not a place for high-falutin sanctimony. That said, the deal to release the guy blamed for the Lockerbie massacre, only to see how this release was treated by the Libyan authorities, stank to high heaven. It also unnecessarily has damaged relations between the UK and US. As for what happens next, I haven’t the foggiest idea. August 22nd, 2011 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
I hope the reports of rebel triumph prove to be the case… and kudos to the UK and France for helping things along whist also resisting the urge to get too deeply involved. But that said, I cannot help but hope the dirty secrets now emerge of how overseas politicians aided and abetted Qadaffi over the years, in particularly the disgusting deal over Abdelbaset al Megrahi. It would be wonderful to see the polities in England and Scotland take one in the face if the unlovely details eventually come out. August 22nd, 2011 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole. – Frank Zappa August 21st, 2011 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money. – Alexis de Tocqueville (attributed to…) August 20th, 2011 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Christians were not supposed to charge interest. Therefore, the most common moneylenders-to-kings were Jews. They could loan money at a profit, and were thus more likely to lend it. But whenever the King’s debts got too large to repay, he began to demonise the Jews. And eventually came a pogrom. And hey-ho, the debt went away along with the Jews. I’m seeing the demonisation of banks. I wonder how long before government throws a pogrom? August 19th, 2011 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
A graph on the growth of the regulatory state, courtesy of the National Review Corner blog. August 19th, 2011 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am now, as if regular readers of my recent stuff here need to be told, paying at least as much attention to the final game, which began this morning, in the England India test match cricket series as I am to such things What To Do About The Deficit. England are already 3-0 up, and are now looking to make it a 4-0 thrashing. This morning England, batting first, made another good start. But then it rained for the rest of the day. Which meant that the radio commentators and their various guests had to talk amongst themselves, rather than commentate on the mostly non-existent action. And one of the things they talked about was the contrast between the general demeanour and attitude of the two teams, as illustrated by how they both warmed up at the start of the game. Compared to the quasi-military drill in perfectly matching attire that was the England warm-up, India looked, they said, like a rabble, and have done all series. The biggest recent change in how the Indians actually play, they all agreed, is that the Indian fast bowlers are now significantly slower than they were two or three years ago, and several inches fatter. Why the contrast? Well, it seems that the top Indian cricketers now play too much cricket of the wrong kind – limited overs slogging basically, which encourages run-restricting rather than wicket-taking bowling, and careless, twist-or-bust batting. And they play not enough cricket of the right kind. Hence their arrival in England in a state combining lack of preparation with apparent exhaustion and general lack of fitness. But, you can’t really blame them, said the commentators. The Indian Premier League now pays its players more in a month than cricketers of an earlier generation would ever see in their entire careers. The reason I mention all this, apart from the fact that I personally find it all very interesting, is that, in among all this cricket chat, somebody said something very Samizdata-friendly that I thought I would pass on. Former England cricketer, now cricket journalist and pundit, Derek Pringle, threw in the following, concerning the impact of the Indian Premier League on the attitude and physical preparedness of the top Indian players:
You might reckon it odd to compare the predicament of men who are being paid rather lavishly to do too much work, but of the wrong sort, with the very different circumstances of people who are being paid very little by comparison to do next to nothing, beyond go through the motions of looking for work without actually doing it. You might also want to ask whether limited overs slog-fests really are “wrong”. After all, if that’s the sort of cricket that people generally, and Indians in particular, will now pay most readily to watch, what is so wrong about it? Good points both, but not the point I want to make now. What my point is about the above soundbite is that Derek Pringle was simply assuming, when he said it, that state welfare makes you fatter and lazier and less industrious than you otherwise might have been. Pringle, famously inclined to being a bit of a fatty himself, just knew that we all knew what he was getting at. It didn’t have to be spelt out. Simply: state welfare rots the body and the mind and the soul. Anything else which, arguably, resembles state welfare in its financial impact upon the individuals concerned is likely to do similarly debilitating and demoralising things to those individuals also. If you are one of those eccentrics who still thinks otherwise, the burden of proof is entirely on you to explain your bizarre and contrarian opinions. The argument that state welfare corrupts – physically, mentally and morally – is not, to put it mildly, new. When the modern British welfare state got under way after World War 2 this argument about the potential impact on its recipients of state money was already centuries old, and it was duly re-presented in opposition to the new welfare arrangements. But, the old argument was dismissed, with scorn, and also with, I believe, much genuine sincerity. These were the days, remember, when the masses of the British people were at a unique summit of mass moral excellence. (Thousands upon thousands of them used to turn up to watch county cricket, in other words the kind of cricket those cricket commentators are saying the Indian cricketers haven’t been playing enough of.) Are you seriously saying, asked the welfare statists, that a bit of help when times are bad is going to turn these good people (good people who had just won the war, don’t forget) into barbarians? Not, as Americans now say, going to happen. Yet, as a crude first approximation, this is what did happen, if not to them then to a horrifying proportion of their descendants. And before any anti-immigration commenters pitch in, let me answer them with two questions and my two answers. Given the same welfare arrangements but no mass immigration, would there now be similar barbarism? I strongly believe so, even if maybe not on the same scale. Given the same mass immigration but no state welfare to speak of, would there now be similar barbarism? Much less, I think. Realising that state welfare corrupts is one thing. Taking state welfare away from the millions of people whose entire lives are now organised around the assumption that state welfare will continue indefinitely is quite another, which is why this radical change of opinion has been somewhat subterranean. So far it has had little practical effect. But, as Derek Pringle’s casual aside illustrates, this changed opinion is now well in place, and sooner or later this will surely have consequences. August 18th, 2011 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was reading an article by Janet Daly, whom I rather like even if I do not always agree with (I met her at a Stockholm Network shindig once and found her sharp and charming), in which she excoriates the NYTimes for a risible screed about the recent riots in Britain:
Good stuff. But what really caught my eye was a comment under this article by a blogger rejoicing in the giggle inducing pseudonym “He’s Spartacus”, which I reproduce entirely here as it is rather splendid:
To which all I can say is… amen to that. August 18th, 2011 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
This person at the Daily Caller appears – with some justification I might add – to take a dim view of Ron Paul, the US congressman and Republican primary contender for the presidential ticket known as “Dr No” on account of his saying no to various government measures and enterprises. He is, famously or infamously, a hardline anti-interventionist in foreign affairs, so much so that his views might be dubbed as almost pacifist. He has called for accountability by the Federal Reserve, and argues that institution ought to be closed down. But he has feet of clay, and this article I link to, which is written in a sort of furious burst of anger, focuses on those flaws and makes light of Paul’s merits. In particular, the article unfairly misrepresents the Austrian school of economics and its methodology. It also seems to smear libertarianism on issues like legalising prostitution and drugs, ignoring the obvious arguments that criminalising consensual acts has created huge costs for society. All the way down at the bottom of a comment thread prompted by this article, is large item by commenter Michael P. Ivy. It is so good that I reproduce it here. There is the odd typo, but it is worth quoting in the raw:
Very good. Ron Paul is very much a mixed bag, and I would not vote for him, and I am troubled by some of his views. But the fact has to be faced that almost unique in Western politics, he has put forward a classical liberal agenda on certain issues, and done so consistently. And he has managed, despite his age, to touch a lot of young people. There is a lesson here somewhere. August 18th, 2011 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sit down. I am about to astonish you. Via the Drudge Report, I found this: Seattle’s ‘green jobs’ program a bust. A green jobs scheme has failed. Over the shock yet? I’ve always meant to ask one of the enthusiasts for these schemes why they do not also support a job-creating proposal to forbid the generation of electricity by any means other than men on treadmills, but I have not done so for fear of giving them ideas. I was lying earlier. I am not surprised at all and do not expect you to be. The best that any government “job creation” scheme can ever do is “create” a few jobs in some specific place or profession while the spotlight is on that place or profession – at the cost of destroying the wealth that actually creates long term jobs, but in a conveniently spread out way so no one much notices. Greens strive to convince us that there are external costs paid by the community as a whole when jets fly or factories produce geegaws. “Look at the whole picture,” they urge. “Don’t be bedazzled by the transitory benefit accruing to a few and fail to see the larger but subtler harm being borne by the many.” They have a point. I wish they could apply it to ‘job creation’. Apparently, however, this Seattle scheme was even a bust in its own terms. It withered even before the spotlight moved on.
I enjoyed the implication that there are others who do not wonder at all, no sir, no sliver of doubt that the original goals might not be met has ever crossed their minds. That was not the only part of this article rich in irony. Look at this:
Market? Where was the market there? The things that have “turned out” (talking as if it all happened by chance) to be “extremely complicated” (that I can believe) are the workings of the interlocking tangle of government rules and protections that people like him and his “economic justice” group advocate. Job standards. Hiring practices. How best to measure energy benefits on some government form. It is sad for all those whose hopes are dashed by these schemes, like the mugs here in the UK who trained as assessors to issue Energy Performance Certificates, or like the unfortunates who got burnt metaphorically and literally in the great Australian insulation debacle. (Not surprisingly, Tim Blair, chronicler of that saga, also has a post about this Seattle fandango. Mine was started first, though.) But what a joke when the very thing that reduces the progressive silver bullet to a twist of mangled brass is… all the stuff that progressives wanted all along. On second thoughts, I need not worry about giving them dangerous ideas. The great ‘men on treadmills’ job creation scheme would never get moving. It would have to be persons on treadmills regardless of gender, age, religious belief or sexual orientation for a start. And what about disabled access? August 17th, 2011 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||