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.
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From the Radio Times, about a programme this evening on BBC3 TV, entitled I Woke Up Gay:
Documentary about Chris Birch, who used to be a rugby-playing lad with a girlfriend and a job in a bank. However, his life was radically changed by a stroke when he was just 21, and he is now a gay hairdresser with an interest in fashion and interior décor.
The question I ask with my title is of course an attempt to get a smile, if not a lol, but it is also serious. Has anyone gay suffered a stroke and emerged from it straight, with the overwhelming desire to ditch the hairdressing and instead to get a girlfriend and a job in a bank and to take up rugby? Either way, I think the answer would be interesting. Seriously, is this kind of thing a one way street, or can it work in both directions?
Neither answer would obey the gods of Political Correctness. If a stroke can turn you gay, but not make you straight, that would suggest that gays are, at least in some sense, the result of something a lot like brain damage. They are, sort of, a mistake. If a stroke can turn you straight, then maybe those crazy Christians who say that they can straighten out gays may after all be onto something.
A relative of mine recently had a stroke. He lost his peripheral vision and can no longer drive, but otherwise no change. Still no interest in fashion, or not that anyone in the family has heard about.
All this reminds me of that Woody Allen movie (I can’t recall which – they’re all a blur) where someone gets a smack on the head and wakes up right wing.
I entirely realise that strokes are frequently very unfunny. I’m sure we all know about friends or relatives who were not as lucky as my relative, or as Chris Birch was, kind of. I certainly do.
The programme airs at 9pm, and is repeated at 12.30pm in the very small hours of tomorrow morning. I will record it.
Just what I was thinking:
So with one word, Obama both offended the British and made himself a laughingstock with the Latin Americans.
John Hinderaker said it, and Instapundit has just linked to it. The one word being “Maldives” for “Malvinas”. Causing this much derision and contempt with just the one word is indeed quite an achievement. I’m betting the Maldiveans are not that impressed either.
The British media, the BBC in particular, mostly treat Obama, still, as some kind of Holy Sage, whose every word is Truth and whose every enemy is Evil and Stupid. How could any American with brain cells in the plural possibly object to “free health care”?
In the BBC’s parallel universe, only the previous President was capable of gaffes on this globe-spanning scale. But can anyone think of a GWB jnr gaffe that is any gaffer, as it were, than this “Maldives” clanger? Thought: they should call Obama “The Gaffer”.
It will be very interesting to see what the BBC now makes of this, if anything.
The Daily Telegraph’s Jonathan Gilbert describes this error as uncharacteristic, saying that this was the kind of thing Bush did do, but Obama doesn’t. Hinderaker says different:
When did Mr. Bush ever display such geographic ignorance?
Anyone? I can’t remember anything from Bush that was this doltish. Comically non-existent new words, yes. But blunders like this on matters of diplomatic significance? Not that I can remember. But then I never did think Bush was an idiot, and preferred to listen to what he said rather than dwell on the errors he sometimes committed while saying it.
(I don’t think Obama is a complete idiot either. He was, after all, clever enough to get the Presidency, in defiance of the wishes of the Clinton clan. And clever enough then to use it to do real damage to most Americans’ idea of what America is, even if not as much as he might have managed, had he been even cleverer.)
Our own Perry de Havilland wants Obama to win. He reckons the Republican chap with be a Cameronian disaster, who will, by talking free markets but by doing business as usual, will ensure that our side gets blamed for all the ordure that has yet to hurtle towards the fan.
This sort of equal opportunities offensiveness from Obama makes it that much harder for Perry to get his way.
Considering that Taki, the Greek shipping magnate’s son, hard-right scribbler and socialite, owns a webzine, “Takimag”, in which a notorious recent article by John Derbyshire was published, I wondered whether the fellow was going to write about recent events about Derbyshire. You see, Derbyshire, who lives in the US and has written for various publications such as National Review, was recently fired by NR editor Rich Lowry after a storm of protest concerning Derbyshire’s comments about black people in Takimag.
But when I read Taki’s regular column in the Spectator a few days ago, it was all about Ernest Hemingway (and pretty good, too). No mention of the Derbyshire affair. Odd. Maybe the Spectator’s editor had warned the chap off, but he’s written some pretty fiery stuff before that got into print, so I am not sure. But of course, I had completely forgotten the one-and-only Rod Liddle:
“Derbyshire’s piece contained one or two points with which I do not agree, but I suspect that for the most part its advice was precisely the sort of thing which readers of the National Review have probably passed on to their children, anyway.”
Well, he may be right that that is what readers of that publication tell their children. Who knows, maybe they are all telling their youngsters things such as this:
“Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.”
(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.
(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.
This also:
In that pool of forty million, there are nonetheless many intelligent and well-socialized blacks. (I’ll use IWSB as an ad hoc abbreviation.) You should consciously seek opportunities to make friends with IWSBs. In addition to the ordinary pleasures of friendship, you will gain an amulet against potentially career-destroying accusations of prejudice.
(14) Be aware, however, that there is an issue of supply and demand here. Demand comes from organizations and businesses keen to display racial propriety by employing IWSBs, especially in positions at the interface with the general public—corporate sales reps, TV news presenters, press officers for government agencies, etc.—with corresponding depletion in less visible positions. There is also strong private demand from middle- and upper-class whites for personal bonds with IWSBs, for reasons given in the previous paragraph and also (next paragraph) as status markers.
(15) Unfortunately the demand is greater than the supply, so IWSBs are something of a luxury good, like antique furniture or corporate jets: boasted of by upper-class whites and wealthy organizations, coveted by the less prosperous. To be an IWSB in present-day US society is a height of felicity rarely before attained by any group of human beings in history
It is worth reading the whole piece, if only to get the full, patronising, vileness of much of it; the tragedy is that there might be one or two things he says that actually make some sort of sense (there are issues concerning crime rates among different ethnic groups that need to be discussed, openly and without pandering to PCness). If this article was meant as satire, it failed. An argument I have seen in defence of the piece is that Derbyshire wrote it in response to another idea of what black parents are telling their children about white people. But even if that is true, do two wrongs make a right? I just cannot see how that is the case here.
But what I found particularly bad, from a libertarian perspective, about this item was that Derbyshire, working backwards from some highly debatable statistical assertions, then used them as a sort of rule of thumb test of how to treat a black man as an individual. And this is proof, in my view, of his racial collectivism.
As already has happened, a number of people, no doubt sympathising with these comments, have said they will cancel their NR subscriptions, etc, etc. This is a terrible blow of freedom of speech, etc, etc. It is not. NR would not be obliged to print this material, and as Lowry said in his announcement of the parting of the ways, he would not have done so. If an editor feels a writer is so incendiary that he no longer wants to be associated with such a person, then he or she is entitled to act on that view, however mistaken. That is part of the freedom to act on judgements that, ironically, Mr Derbyshire might claim to be defending, however hamfistedly, in his article. We live in the world of massively expanding internet-based news and views; I am sure that the British-born Mr Derbyshire will find outlets for his opinions.
Update: It seems another NR contributor has got the boot, by the name of Robert Weissberg. Crikey.
There are a whole bunch of intact, carefully packed Spitfires coming home to roost. It may be the case that parts are swapped into a couple to get some in the air quickly, but my bet is that all 20 will fly within then next 15 years.
And there may be a lot more of them if they can find the other sites.
A post at Climate Lessons reminded my of my own childhood experiences of environmentalist indoctrination at school. It could have been any post – the whole blog is about how children are frightened and mislead by environmentalists in the classroom.
The topic is closer to home now that I have my own two-year-old son, and it cropped up sooner than I expected. Someone bought him a book about Noah’s Ark. It is perfectly charming: thick cardboard pages; bright colours; but on the last page:
Noah helped save the animals of the earth hundreds of years ago by building an ark. Now we must help to save them too — not from floods, but from human beings who are hunting them, and cutting down the forests where they live.
I mean, come on! It is a story book for toddlers. A silly story from the Bible I can handle, but children should not be worried about this nonsense.
At the turn of the nineties I was at secondary school putting up with some of this. Most of it came from geography class. Deforestation was the big one. An area the size of Wales was destroyed every so often, we were told. Apart from all the extinct animals, the rain forests were needed to turn the carbon dioxide into oxygen. They are the lungs of the planet. These days the rain forests still seem to be there and I am fairly sure that, carbon going round in a cycle, the rain forests are only the lungs of the rain forests. The plants that I (and the animals I eat) eat produce enough oxygen for me.
We also learnt about acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer. Both these problems seem to have gone away, arguably as a result of timely state intervention but more likely because the problems were not so bad in the first place and now they have been replaced by more urgent and dire concerns.
Assuming the BBC exam revision guide is a good proxy for what is taught in GCSE geography lessons in schools, acid rain and the ozone layer are gone from the curriculum. Deforestation is still there, and now we have to worry about climate change, pollution and (oh no!) globalisation. If you follow that last link you will learn about Thomas Malthus and Esther Boserup but not Norman Borlaug.
I remember another strange lesson: not geography; possibly personal social health and flim flam studies or whatever it was called. I can not imagine why but we were made to watch a video that included abattoir footage and there was a class discussion in which we were asked whether the video made us want to be vegetarians. Some of the girls became vegetarians on the spot. I wonder what their parents made of it.
GCSE Double Science was a mostly sensible affair involving the Carnot cycle and electrons apart from one odd day when a guest speaker came in to tell us that more oil was used in the last ten years than in the entire history of humanity before that. The lesson was that this was because oil use doubled every ten years (or whatever the number was). I recognise it now as the standard limits-to-growth spiel, but what was it doing in a fourth year science class? Some organisation must have bribed the school or something.
What harm did it do? Here I am after all, not believing a word of any of it. At the time I believed it, but I was more interested in tectonic plates, magnetic fields and playing Elite on my computer. Most of the rest of the class was only interested in who was snogging whom. We were bombarded with doom and gloom but it was boring and irrelevant.
But I bet a lot of it stayed there, in most of the rest of the class, deep down, in a way that causes them not to question it when they see it on the news. They are not interested: they think about it when they are forced to; they give money to charity when they want to look like nice people or feel good about themselves; they moan about the taxes and they forget about it and get on with their lives. They do not write to their MPs or vote and they do not rise up.
“Are you concerned about growing income inequality in America? Are you resentful of all that wealth concentrated in the 1 percent? I’ve got the perfect solution, a modest proposal that involves just a small adjustment in the Federal Reserve’s easy monetary policy. Best of all, it will mean that none of us have to work for a living anymore. For several years now, the Fed has been making money available to the financial sector at near-zero interest rates. Big banks and hedge funds, among others, have taken this cheap money and invested it in securities with high yields. This type of profit-making, called the “carry trade,” has been enormously profitable for them. So why not let everyone participate?”
Sheila Bair, Washington Post.
The article gets even better from here.
Paul Marks of this parish commented on an article in the Economist called ‘A lament for America’s Jews’…
…whereupon the magazine deleted it.
However, for your edification and as if by some black internet magic, here is that deleted comment…
Do you not ever fear your nose growing Lexington? Or your pants catching fire?
You know perfectly well that the “mentors” who got Comrade Barack into Columbia and Harvard were not “Zionists” (not even “liberal” ones).
At Columbia his room mate was Sohale Siddiqi. William (Bill) Ayers worked just down the street at Bank Street College of Education (and he and Barack went to the same Marxist conferences – continuing Barack’s Marxism whilst at Occidental – and his the work of his true “mentor” in childhood the Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis).
Bill and Mrs Ayers are the pals of Hamas (part of the unholy alliance between Marxist atheists and radical Islamists — that is so much a feature of the Hyde Park area of Chicago, where both Bill and Barack went to live – of course Frank Marshall Davis was a Chicago CP member till he was ordered to go off to Hawaii).
A teacher and friend of Barack at Columbia was Edward Said (not known for his Zionism). They (and Bill Ayers) continued to be friends after the Columbia years.
And Harvard?
Barack got in because of the letter by Percy Sutton (the attorney of Malcolm X – who Barack’s mother had so admired)
And then there is Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour (again not known for his Zionism) – who started off as Donald Warden.
And on and on…
Lexington, a genuine question… Do you really believe we are so stupid or so ill informed that you can get away with pretending that Barack Obama has a “Zionist” background?
I really want to know.
Do you despise us (the readers) so much, that you believe you can blatantly say things that are untrue (that you must know are untrue) and we will not even notice?
Barack Obama was elected in 2008 because the “liberal” (again I rather think Gladstone and so on would dispute your definition of the word “liberal”) media managed to hide the truth from most voters – and substitute a tidal wave of “Journo-list” disinformation in the place of the truth.
I assure you that the same trick will not work twice.
Before November most people will know Barack Obama for who and what he really.
… the comment taking form once more like some vengeful revenant risen from that un-quiet place where deleted comments supposed slain by a moderator go, reaching through the screen and grasping ‘Lexington’ by the throat.
“The current rate of exchange is around $1.50 to the pound. When I tell my American friends that anyone earning the equivalent of $66,900 a year in Britain pays income tax at 40 per cent, they don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Any American politician who suggested such a thing would be vaporised before he could make his first TV advert. Even Mr Obama, the most Left-wing president in a generation, would think it outrageous. In fact, he said last week, in a keynote flog-the-rich speech, that no one earning less than $250,000 a year (the majority of Americans, as he put it) should have his taxes raised. He presumably would not adopt the Cameron-Clegg-Miliband definition of “the wealthy” to mean anybody earning a bit more than the average. Just as a matter of interest, he also stated last week that one exemption that he would not tamper with was the tax relief on charitable giving. Even for a Left-wing president, that would be going too far.”
– Janet Daley
[I]t’s simply no longer the case that killing a few people on board a plane could lead to a hijacking. Never again will a terrorist be able to breach the cockpit simply with a box cutter or a knife. The cockpit doors have been reinforced, and passengers, flight crews and air marshals would intervene.
– Kip Hawley Oh, well done! That only took 10 years.
A retired securocrat would like us to understand a fact that was plainly apparent by noon on September 11th, 2001. A fact that the isolated and terrified passengers of Flight 93 worked out and demonstrated for themselves. In the meantime countless millions of people have been inconvenienced and humiliated in the name of security. And since countless billions have been spent on the pointless bullying, there is now a public superstition and pointless bullying lobby that makes it certain the article will make no difference.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a queue to be groped by a truculent imbecile, to no purpose but your subordination – forever.
“I’ve never been a fan of John Stuart Mill. Yes, he had a massive IQ and a dreadful Tiger Dad. But his thinking is shockingly muddled.”
Bryan Caplan.
Hmm. I haven’t read Mill for many years. Back when I was a student in the mid-80s, I read On Liberty, and like some people I was not entirely happy with the “harm principle” that Mill used in his formulation of a liberal order. And he was a bit flaky on economics, or at least there was enough ambiguity in there to presage the transformation into the “New Liberalism” of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries (ie, greater state involvement).
The Bleeding Heart Libertarians group blog think that Caplan is being unfair on Mill:
Mill’s view is clear: utility is the ultimate determinant of whether an act is (ethically) right or wrong. Given certain empirical assumptions, utility will be maximized overall by restricting the exercise of force over “human beings in the maturity of their faculties” to that which is required to prevent harm to others. Acting paternalistically towards children and incompetent adults is justified, for Mill, for to accord them the same range of liberty as competent adults would not (again, given certain empirical assumptions) maximize utility. To be sure, Mill’s views here are ripe for criticism, especially his (frankly appalling) claim that “barbarians” require a despotic government for their own good. (We might ask, for example, whether any acts can be completely self-regarding, and so harmless to others, and whether Mill’s empirical assumptions are correct.) But this isn’t “awful” philosophy by any means—and it doesn’t require any appeal to “fine and subtle distinctions” to be defended against this charge.
But what if we were to try to defend Mill by making such distinctions? Caplan charges that Mill “piles confusion on confusion” when he attempts this. Quoting Mill’s “I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being” Caplan writes “But a man’s “own good, either physical or moral” surely includes his “utility in the largest sense.” And Mill says that’s ‘not a sufficient warrant’ for violating his liberty.”
But the error here is Caplan’s, not Mill’s. Caplan fails to recognize the difference between the interests of “a man”, and “man as a progressive being”—the former refers to an individual man, the latter to mankind as a whole. A man’s own good thus doesn’t include “utility in the largest sense”, and to think that it does is to commit a simple category mistake.
Interesting stuff. Regardless of such disputes, one thing I am certain of is that Mill was one of the greatest defenders of free speech.
In my recent posting praising that Libertarian Home meeting addressed by Tom Burroughes about IP, I said that people wanting to know what Burroughes actually said about IP should await the video.
This is now available, together with abundant written details of the talk.
Simon Gibbs talks about how people “without means” to enjoy the video can read the text and summary instead. But it isn’t only those who are technically prevented from watching video who will appreciate text instead. Some just prefer text.
Concluding paragraph of the summary:
The talk does not suggest that there is a definite “right” or “wrong” answer, although having considered many of the arguments, I am more favourable to IP than I had expected when I started to explore this issue. It is hugely relevant: patent fights, for example, are frontpage news concerning firms such as Apple. And copyright fights feature regularly in the music and movie business.
Like I said, Burroughes sat on the fence. Watch the start of the video and you’ll see that SImon Gibbs introduced him by saying he would climb down off the fence and tell us all what to think. No such luck.
Fin out more here.
Although, all it does is solve Rubik Cubes faster.
Does something that can do that have any real world uses?
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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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