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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Recently widowed Sarah McKinley from Oklahoma shot and killed a man who broke into her house, according to ABC News, via Huffington Post, via Michael Yon’s Facebook page. An accomplice also broke in, but he ran away after hearing the gun shot and gave himself up to the police. Oddly, he has now been charged with murder.
Says Sarah:
It’s not an easy decision to make, but it was either going to be him or my son. And it wasn’t going to be my son. There’s nothing more dangerous than a woman with a child.
For propaganda purposes it helps that she is media friendly: articulate and not weird. An article on examiner.com mentions other women who have “refused victimisation” recently. I wonder if Feminists for Firearms might make a successful counter-meme to Mothers Against Guns.
The ABC video states that the police called the killing “justified”, and goes on to explain that 30 states, including Oklahoma, have the castle doctrine. In the other states you are required to retreat if you can, though the law expert interviewed could not think of anyone in the USA who had ever been imprisoned for killing an intruder. Most such cases get thrown out by the grand jury, as in the case of Joe Horn even though he shot burglars attacking his neighbour’s property.
What a civilised state of affairs.
The maths doesn’t add up; this is just sinking capital into a loss making project. If you’re going to use the power of the state to do that, then you shouldn’t be surprised that this country is getting poorer.
– Steve Baker MP denounces the plan for a new stretch of high speed rail, quoted (behind a registration wall) at the Financial Times.
I make this today’s QotD here not in spite of Guido having already featured it as his quote of today (and maybe also of the next few days) but because of this. Baker’s soundbite is getting around. Good.
Lots of Americans who read Samizdata but not Guido, and who are also confronting idiot plans to waste their money on high speed rail foolishnesses, will now also read this soundbite. Good again.
Meanwhile, as the FT’s headline proclaims, “economists insist” that this piece of Keynesian pump priming that won’t should go ahead, damn the expense. Well they would, wouldn’t they?
Nicholas Wapshott, a columnist and book author about Reagan and other historical figures, has seen the film, “The Iron Lady” (about Margaret Thatcher). I am going to see the film this evening with my wife and two friends, both of whom are pretty big fans of the lady. Wapshott, writing over at Reuters, hated the film. (Reuters carries signed columns these days, and its writers can be far more open about their biases, which is all to the good).
“But it is the chilling image of a once dominant leader reduced to a fumbling, mumbling old crone that is the movie’s main theme and, while it may pass muster as a sly piece of brutal political theater, as a record of Thatcher and her many achievements, both for good and ill, it is a pitiless, poisonous travesty. Streep has lent her extraordinary acting skills to perhaps the most shameful and cruel piece of political revenge ever to have made it to the screen.”
“Would Henry Fonda have volunteered his name and faultless reputation to “The Deranged Mr. Lincoln”? Anthony Hopkins dignified Oliver Stone’s somber “Nixon” by trying to get beneath the skin of the paranoid president brought down by his private demons. Even Josh Brolin in Stone’s hilarious “W” made America’s most contentious president in recent times a likeable, surprisingly complex eldest son yearning to show his father he was worthy of winning the White House.”
Another paragraph from later in the review:
“It is in the context of Thatcher sharply reducing the size of the state that the violence between picketers and police and the poll tax riots that punctuated her reign can be best understood. There is a high political price to be paid for redrawing the boundaries between the private and public sectors, and for deliberately provoking a recession, in the face of well organized opposition. In “The Iron Lady,” the newsreel shots of cars burning and mounted police beating miners with batons are left unexplained.”
Wapshott’s review is interesting because, as I noted a few weeks back when discussing a review I read in the Spectator, some reviewers from the left have had their brains scrambled by a film that makes them sympathise with a person who has lost some of her mental powers.
So, having read this review, I am still going to see the film with an expectation that this will be an interesting production. For the subject of this remarkable person continues to fascinate, a fact no doubt given heightened interest due to how, for example, the disaster of the eurozone has given some of her old skepticism about the hubris of Eurofederalism new relevance. Her old preaching about the importance of thrift, saving and hard work is hardly irrelevant.
The changes that Margaret Thatcher wrought in the UK are profound, but it is also worth pointing out that she fell short of what she might have hoped for on a number of fronts. The state continues to take a huge chunk of our money; our higher education system, much of the media and chattering classes are reflexively anti-capitalist and at odds with some of the key features of Western civilisation. Even today, there are those who pine for the old, brutal certainties of Soviet-era collectivism. And from a libertarian/classical liberal point of view, the Thatcher era disappointed: no real change to the Welfare State; erosions of certain civil liberties; imperfect privatisation; missteps on Europe (such as, arguably, the Single European Act). Welfarism and the associated creation of an underclass of feral, uneducatable youngsters, was not really addressed during her time in office (but then again, it has not been addressed for the past 20 years, hence the kind of violence that hit the UK last summer).
And yet those of us old enough to remember what a mess Britain was in during the 1970s, with its hideous inflation, endless strikes, shabby goods and services, eroding willingness to confront foreign aggressions and general crapness, cannot fail to be struck by the scale of what was achieved in Thatcher’s term of office. In the private sector, the union closed shop is no more; inflation, while still a serious problem (as this blog often points out), is not in the double-digit levels it used to be. Some of the old, inefficient state-run industries have been put into mostly private hands; the City of London, despite some criticisms that can be made of the “Big Bang” deregulation, is unquestionably one of the greatest financial hubs on Earth. And consider this detail although it comes across as a bit crass at times: even a state broadcaster such as the BBC has a show called “Dragon’s Den”, which is about would-be entrepreneurs pitching for venture capital funding on TV. Such a celebration of business would have been unthinkable on such a channel 30 years ago. Mrs Thatcher told the British that it was okay to make the most of yourself. For all her faults and errors, that is one of the “vigorous virtues” (to use a term from a book on Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin) that endures.
And to call oneself a socialist is still, let’s not forget, not nearly as easy for a politician to do today if he or she wants to get elected. Somewhere during the 80s and 90s, I think, that term was discredited to a significant degree. Not just by Thatcher, granted – the fall of the Berlin Wall and the associated discrediting of Soviet-style central planning did for that. But her relentless attacks on socialism and central planning, and her championing of the free market, played a significant part.
Here is a good book on Mrs T by Claire Berlinski, published some time ago. Recommended. Another book worth checking out is the new opus on the history of the Conservative Party by Robin Harris. Charles Moore, whose biography of Thatcher comes out after she dies, has a good column up at Vanity Fair.
Anyway, I’ll write about my own impressions at a suitable point.
Newcastle did not beat Manchester United today, because the long term trend is for Manchester United to beat Newcastle.
– Bishop Hill’s quote of the day today. He found it here. This is the game being referred to.
For me, by far the worst aspect of the recent re-trial of the Stephen Lawrence murder case has been the fact that it demonstrates the dangers of the decision, by the former Labour government in the UK, to end the old double jeopardy rule. Some of the perpetrators of the crime may now be behind bars, but the wider issues worry me.
The writer Brendan O’Neill, a Marxist who writes at at the online journal Spiked, sees this in class terms:
“It is clear from the orgy of post-conviction self-congratulation amongst the chattering classes (Dacre says yesterday was ‘a glorious day for British newspapers’) that the trial of Norris and Dobson was a political trial. It was a showtrial, or at least a showy trial, which was relentlessly used to advertise and entrench the morality of the new political elites. Just because Norris and Dobson are lowlifes, whom no one will much miss when they are banged up, doesn’t mean we should give the nod to this bending of the justice system to the whims of the cultural elite.”
And another:
“It is fitting that the Lawrence case should end with a political trial, because this was the most cynically exploited and politicised murder in living memory. Lawrence was not the first young black man to have been murdered by racists, nor was he the first black murder victim to have been failed by a seriously botched police investigation. But he was the first black murder victim whose tragic demise was cynically milked by the cultural elite and used as the lynchpin of a moral crusade against Old Britain and its foul, backward inhabitants. In a triple whammy of murder-milking, Lawrence’s death was used by the elites to demonise the white working classes as the new ‘brutes within’; to redefine racism as a disease of the brain rather than as a relation of power; and to dismantle long-standing legal principles that were once seen as central to the justice system.”
He’s got a point, although I would add that, not being as het up about class as Mr O’Neill is, I don’t see the disgust that many feel about race-related murders as some sort of ruling-class plot to stamp on lots of white proles. There is more than just a whiff of a new victimology here of the sort that far-right groups like to pander to.
There is real danger in ending the DJ principle, as it means the Crown Prosecution Service will not be under the same pressure in future to get all of its legal and evidential facts lined up as strongly as possible when bringing a case for trial, because it knows there will always be a chance that if it does not get a conviction on the first occasion, it can always have another crack at it later if something new turns up. It is a bit like European Union referendums: if the voters don’t give the “right” answer the first time, they can always be polled again. (As argued by a commenter on Tim Worstall’s own post on the issue).
A real concern for me is that the original case is over 18 years old. That is a long time and all kinds of issues about memory recall arise. Like I said, I don’t doubt that the guilty persons are the scum that they are but there are broader issues of due process of law at stake.
Here is another look at double jeopardy. And there has even been a film made using the title, Double Jeopardy. The CATO Institute has written on how this issue plays out in the US legal system.
A very interesting night, and a fairly inconclusive one unless you were in the bottom tier. There is no clear front runner in the Republican camp and one can essentially look at it as three candidates with roughly a quarter of the votes each… and all the rest divvying up the few leftover scraps in the remaining quarter. The fact that we have two top tier candidates in the race who are not that progressive guy from Massachusetts is perhaps the most important outcome of the night.
The outcome is good in another way: with any kind of luck we could end up with a libertarian sitting in the catbird seat in a brokered convention, assuming of course that he does not surprise us all and win it. I do not think many libertarians are expecting that. The concept of winning is a thing to be slowly approached and gotten used to for most of us. So I will not make any assumptions of grandeur. I will only say we have a good shot at a situation where we have a libertarian in the GOP with substantial power at the convention. He will be able to push them our way and at the same time we have an excellent candidate in the LP itself pushing them from the outside. This should have the GOP strategists wondering how to attract voters from our ranks.
The answer to that question is really simple: drop the Big Statism. Make the repeal of the entirety of Obamacare a priority; and for damn sure stop this mandate talk. If you want even a sidewise glance from us, just drop it and pretend you never even thought about it. Individual Mandate is a poison pill for the GOP and the sooner they realise it, the better off we all will be.
PS: You may have noticed that I have gone MSM journalists one better: I wrote this entire Iowa article without mentioning ANY of the candidate names. Those pikers can only manage to ignore one.
There has been a lot of commentary in parts of the English-speaking media and blogosphere about the US presidential elections, and of course this part of it has had its commentary about the candidacy of the likes of Ron Paul and Gary Johnson, for example. The coverage shows how US politics looms quite large over the UK, or at least certain parts of it.
Compare and contrast with the level of commentary one might expect to get about the mid-year polls for the presidency of that neighbour, France. In part, the difference is that the French elections do not hold out any prospect of a pro-free market, limited government candidate making much running, although I may be wrong about that. The language barrier is an obvious issue but it cannot be the only explanation for this difference in coverage. And I also note that in another country, Germany, even the so-called quality papers give pretty scant coverage of the machinations of the Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and the other parties. Considering that the future of the euro might hang on who gets to control the German parliament in Berlin, you might think a bit more interest might be a good idea.
We are told that the European Union was all about bringing the big happy European family closer together, and yet as far as parts of the English-speaking media is concerned, some of the more consequential nations in the world get less coverage than a primary race in a US farm state (Iowa). That, I think, is very telling. And it does suggest that the idea of the Anglosphere, as Brian Micklethwait suggested the other day, has legs.
This story is more than a week old, but the case of how a line from the movie “Serenity”, based on the moronically discontinued TV series Firefly, was used in a free speech crackdown is still worth a mention. Here is a video with Neil Gaiman, the SF writer, about the controversy. (H/T, Huffington Post).
More commentary from FIRE, the group supporting individual rights in the US education system.
Maybe I should wear my own Western-style “browncoat” coat in sympathy. I bought it in Ireland and it gives me a nice “Clint Eastwood” sort of appearance.
“American economist Scott Sumner has recently argued that the Fed cannot be blamed for the inflation that led to the Wall Street Crash because the money supply measures that reveal the inflation were not publicly available at the time. As Robert Murphy has responded, the fact that doctors of the time didn’t understand bacteria does not affect the cause of deaths during the bubonic plague. Whether we “blame” central bankers or not is really a secondary consideration to our attempts to understand what happened and why. By assigning blame we suggest that the Fed should have done better. It encourages us to think “if only it did X everything would be ok”. But the problem isn’t that individuals focused on the wrong targets, and the solution isn’t to work out how they can improve. The lesson should be that the nature of central banking – the attempt to centrally plan the monetary system – imposes an epistemic burden on policymakers that they cannot possibly ever fulfil. The Fed wasn’t to blame for the crisis, because any argument for what it “should” have done is insincere. We should absolve it from culpability, and remove the shackles of expectation that we place upon it. It did the best it could be expected to do. And that wasn’t enough.”
– Antony J Evans, economist and what I would call a “sensible-shoes Austrian”.
Don’t worry, I don’t mean the Indian economy or anything like that. Just their cricket team. Indulge me. Or just skip this. I promise you that this posting is pure cricket, and that it will shed no light whatever on Real Life.
Australia are already one up in their four match series, at home against India, and game two just began in Sydney, late last night London time. India lost two earlier wickets, and then nearly lost another when former Australian captain and batting legend Ricky Ponting dropped a sitter, which had he held it would have seen the back of Virendar Sehwag, an Indian batsman of almost equal renown.
At which juncture, someone called Christian was quoted on Cricinfo, saying this:
I have a feeling Ponting just made his decision to retire – seriously. Adam Gilchrist made his decision in similar circumstances (dropping a sitter) and most athletes make their decision when they have that feeling that they just aren’t up to it anymore.
For non-cricketophiles, dropping a sitter means you made a bad mistake. But no worries. At lunch, India were 72-4, Ponting’s error having soon been corrected by Aussie wicketkeeper Haddin, who didn’t drop his sitter.
Cricinfo again:
To state the bleeding obvious, this was Australia’s session all the way.
Australian quick bowler James Pattinson, only twenty one, and only playing in his fourth test match, already has three wickets. A bowling legend of the future? In general, the new crop of Aussie quick bowlers are looking good, and they have other good ones not playing in this game. For India’s aging batting stars, on the other hand, there seem to be few obvious replacements. Now, one of those potential replacements, Virat Kohli, has also been got out. Tendulkar, though, is still batting. For months now Tendulkar has been trying to get that elusive hundredth international hundred. Now would be a good time.
Not everything in the world is improving just now. But, along with such things as escalators, my ability to track interesting international cricket games between two interesting sides neither of which is England just gets better by the year.
Tendulkar is now out. Pattinson gets the big one. India 125-6. Says Cricinfo:
It’s like the Australia of the late 90s and 2000s. Unstoppable.
Certainly unstoppable by India, in their present away form.
Commenting on this reaction from Bishop Hill to a not-all-that-biased-by-their-standards BBC show about windfarms, regular BH commenter Philip Bratby says:
Only an idiot would consider building offshore wind farms (unless there is some other idiot prepared to give you huge sums of money to do it).
Bratby then mentions a website about a campaign called “Slay The Array”. Slay The Array seems to be an alliance between those who oppose these giant propellers on aesthetic grounds, and those who oppose them on economic grounds, and they have set their particular sites on a vast clutch of propellers (the “Atlantic Array”) which some gang of well-connected thieves and/or lunatics intend to build in the spot where the Severn Estuary turns into the Bristol Channel.
Personally I quite like the look of these giant propellers. But then, I like pylons, and skyscrapers, even scaffolding. As for wildlife, some of it will suffer if they build all these propellers, but other life forms will benefit, just as with every other human impact upon the environment.
However, I am entirely persuaded that, economically, these erections are ridiculous, in fact utterly fraudulent. So, for me, the biggest objection to them by far is this one:
The dash for wind energy is massively subsidised, making wind power three times more expensive than other power, paid for by increasing all our fuel bills, pushing millions into fuel poverty.
If Artists Against Windfarms (who get a mention at the Slay The Array website where it says “our friends”) oppose these stupid, larcenous but to me rather handsome propellers on artistic grounds, that’s fine by me.
…the phrase that Geoffrey Howe used when discussing the best policy for Liverpool in the 1980s?
Yes, that’s right: the word “managed”. It is not for the state to decide where people should live or where they should do business and certainly not for the state to use violence to force them to do so.
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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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