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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The premise of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels sounds good. The Culture is a society with advanced AI and no scarcity and an inclination to liberate less advanced societies from their scarcity. So I am starting from the beginning with Consider Phlebas. I am reading the novel on my Kindle, which means that I get to see other users’ highlights. The following passage was highlighted by six users, unusual enough to make me wonder why. This might mean that six people thought “wow, man, that’s like, so profound”, or it might mean something else.
experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.
It is a thought that occurs to a human member of the Culture, who is thought of as particularly insightful, when considering another society that went exctinct in a war involving fusion bombs, “delivered by transplanetary guided rocket”. Perhaps the people who highlighted it though it was clever commentary on nuclear proliferation or something like that.
The trouble is that the word “oneself” refers to billions of individuals. Where does that leave “common sense”?
What is interesting to me is the way that people fall for these sorts of rhetorical tricks. Perhaps we can turn it to our favour. After all, experience and common sense indicate that enslaving and stealing from oneself is not the way to get rich.
WUWT has a posting about how Jim Hansen of NASA says that the skeptics are winning the argument, i.e. the argument against him and his fellow CAGW-ers. In the midst of the largely agreeing comments at WUWT (yes you are losing you jackass, and it serves you right, etc.), there was, on the other hand, this from Peter Donaldson (April 10, 3.19am):
I disagree with Hansen, he might believe not enough is being done to reduce CO2 but the global warming concept has been accepted globally, it is rarely challenged in the media it is accepted generally by the media and “saving the planet” and “reducing carbon footprint” are bandied about everywhere, and are foremost in the design of all new product be they cars, buildings, airplanes whatever. There is a huge global industry of solar energy devices and it is expanding rapidly.
The skeptical view is sidelined, reserved for oddballs, at least that is the public conception. It seems to me that this is now a bandwagon rolling on and nothing will stop it, even if warming has stopped or if there was cooling.
The punctuation is a bit sketchy, but the point is a good one. There are times when I suspect that Donaldson will be proved right, and that although winning the argument at the merely intellectual level is totally necessary to overthrowing the vested interests excused by the CAGW scare, these interests may just prove to be too firmly entrenched.
And then I read this, also at WUWT, about how many of Hansen’s colleagues (and not just any old colleagues) at NASA have come out publicly in favour of climate skepticism, and against the bogus certainties of the CAGW tribe:
49 former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden last week admonishing the agency for it’s role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change while neglecting empirical evidence that calls the theory into question.
The group, which includes seven Apollo astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, are dismayed over the failure of NASA, and specifically the Goddard Institute For Space Studies (GISS), to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change. They charge that NASA is relying too heavily on complex climate models that have proven scientifically inadequate in predicting climate only one or two decades in advance.
If NASA changes its public tune, that has to be big.
It’s Hansen who is now starting to look like a sidelined oddball. As Instapundit (that’s him linking to the same WUWT story) would say: well, good.
Let’s hope the political decisions and the money decisions now start to tell the pessimistic Peter Donaldson that he is being too pessimistic. I’m sure he would be delighted if that happened.
Incoming: another of those emails that I get from being on the Cobden Centre insider list that surely won’t mind being reproduced here, this one being from Tom Clougherty:
City AM asked me to make the case for gold in 140-words, for this morning’s comment pages. Not an easy task, but I’m fairly pleased with how it came out.
I’m off out now, and will read this later, but Clougherty’s a good man and I’m sure I’ll like it.
Blog and learn. I just found out that he has his own blog.
Picture of a younger Clougherty (with friends) here.
A bit of a buzz has generated around the idea of Jonathan Haidt, with his notion that some people are born more “conservative” or “liberal” (in the US usage of those terms) than others, and that we can use genetics to explain, or partly explain, why people hold the views they do. It is easy to see why a lot of people might be wary about this sort of thing, as it might smack of determinism, but I think Haidt tries to be very careful to avoid falling down that particular rabbit hole:
“Innate does not mean “hard-wired” or unmalleable. To say that a trait or ability is innate just means it was “organized in advance of experience.” The genes guide the construction of the brain in the uterus, but that’s only the first draft, so to speak. The draft gets revised by childhood experiences. To understand the origins of ideology you have to take a developmental perspective, starting with the genes and ending with an adult voting for a particular candidate or joining a political protest. There are three major steps in the process.”
My own take on all this is that yes, it might well be very useful to know more about why we hold the views we do, act as we do, and so on. To know thyself is the beginning of understanding and all that. I am struck by this paradox: we are, as humans, a species that, unique among all others, has the desire to “look under the cover”, so to speak, to see how we got to be what we are and why we are the creatures we are, and then, hopefully, overcome whatever shortcomings and problems we find to become, well, hopefully better. In other words, we may not be a blank slate, but we are not prisoners of some sort of ruling, all-powerful genetic code, either. I sometimes worry that some people become beguiled by these new forms of Darwinism to such an extent that they forget that pesky, and awkward thing that we seem to have in us: volition, or Free Will.
Another point I’d make about Haidt’s idea is this: if it is true that people have certain traits like a predisposition to hold certain views because of their genes, how does he deal with those children who rebel against their parents’ views? I know of several libertarians, for instance, who clearly took against their parents’ hard socialist/other collectivist opinions. And in some cultures, children are more conservative than their parents out of rebellion – I am sure this is something that has happened among parts of the Muslim community in the UK, for example.
Anyway, food for thought. Here is a TED lecture by Haidt.
We are in the top four of the annual Classic FM Hall of Fame, in which listeners, aided by diligent wretches paid a pittance to post on Twitter, choose their favourites and they are played in reverse order of popularity. Currently something by Beethoven is playing. Don’t ask me. I quite like classical music but know almost nothing about it, being only slightly better off than Ulysses Grant who knew two tunes, of which one was the Star Spangled Banner and one wasn’t. However, better educated members of my family were ranting about which pieces of classical music should be expelled from the Top Twenty for being over-rated, boring, associated with the European Union or similarly cursed.
My daughter, a musician, threw a particular wobbly at the appearance of Pachelbel’s Canon in the list.
What else would you suggest? And no complaining about that Final Fantasy thing being there; I thought that was nice.
Update: I have the beginnings of a Sociological Observation to make this post respectable. It is that the compère seemed very relaxed about the fact that the diligent wretches paid to post on Twitter were having an effect. He seemed to quite admire the internet campaign that got the Final Fantasy VII music into the top twenty. I am sure that in the old days organised campaigns would have been seen as cheating; now it is just the way things go.
So BBC and other state sector workers may be forced to publish their tax returns… why?
The whole notion of taxing people paid with tax money strikes me as a nonsensical idea, a pointless circular exercise.
Tax costs a great deal of money to collect, so surely just making all state sector workers tax-free would save huge amounts of pointless circular administration which is in affect just giving them other people’s confiscated money with one hand and taking some back with the other. It is a pointless exercise and essentially a category error to treat public sector wages like private sector wages.
Last week I attended that Libertarian Home meeting that I mentioned here, addressed by Tom Burroughes, concerning intellectual property. (Pictures of it, and an outside view of the venue, here.)
I agree with Tom Burroughes about intellectual property. In his talk he sat – learnedly, naming and summarising lots of useful luminaries on both sides of it – on the fence. So do I. When it comes to theism, I am an atheist rather than an agnostic. But concerning IP my agnosticism is as strident as the theism and the atheism, so to speak, of all the other contending parties in this ongoing debate. I think IP has to exist if modern life is to flourish, and will emerge from the contracts people make if by no other means. But, I understand the objections to the various forms of IP that come in such abundance from those who disapprove, not least the fact that so much of IP enforcement seems to depend on the state chucking its weight around. IP needs to exist, but it also needs to be treated with suspicion.
I won’t say any more about IP than that. When I later emailed Simon Gibbs about what a good meeting I thought he had arranged and compered, adding that I hoped some time soon to be writing something to that effect for Samizdata, he suggested I might want to wait for the video. When it comes to us all arguing about what Tom Burroughes said about IP, that probably makes sense. But I also want to elaborate a bit about what a good meeting it was, as a distinct point. My basic point being that it really was very good. → Continue reading: The Libertarian Home meeting last Thursday and the difference that a speaker makes
Indeed. I’m watching it on telly now. Someone, a youngish man by the look of him, swam across the course, in front of the boats, and both boats had to stop. They will have a restart, at the approximate point where the race was interrupted. Which will turn the event into two sprints laid end to end, instead of something more like a middle distance event.
The commentators are saying that it was some kind of demo. They are now showing the bloke narrowly missing being decapitated by the oars of one of the boats. It seemed like a very deliberate disruption. They are calling him “a protester”, and they are now reporting that he “has a big smile on his face”, and that he has clearly accomplished what he wanted.
So what do you suppose he was on about? Any bets? Maybe in times gone by, the message being pushed by this demo, if message there was, could have been entirely suppressed by the powers that be, in the event that they wanted it suppressed. These days, no chance.
This is not something that usually happens in the Boat Race. (Yes, yes, there are indeed many other boat races. This one is the Boat Race.) “This has never happened before in the Boat Race”, says an expert talking head.
The race will soon start again. At the time the race was interrupted, the two boats were both very close together. Oxford were apparently heavy favourites at the start. Now, not so much. It was turning into a very good race. How will this affect the result, and be judged to have affected it?
The Boat Race is usually, frankly, a very dull affair, or so I think. Often the race is won and lost within the first half a minute, and the rest of it is a tedious procession. This kind of thing livens it up, in many eyes.
But best of all is when the finish is, as is extremely rare, very close. This one could still end like that, but it’s very unlikely.
I see that in that earlier piece, dated 2003, I wrote this:
I overheard another interesting titbit in among the preparatory waffling. Apparently 90% of these oarsmen go into “banking”, by which I think they meant “merchant” banking. I don’t know what this proves. It could be that rowing is a fine preparation for financial titans. Or it could be that the financial services industry contains a lot of people with more ex-brawn than current brain. A bit of both, I should guess. They don’t get paid anything to be in this race, but it seems that they clean up afterwards. Investment in networking. Speculate to accumulate. Apparently they were racing for the “Aberdeen Asset Management Trophy”. It figures.
So this latest little drama is the kind of thing that Instapundit flags up under the heading of: “metaphor alert”.
And: they’re off!
Again.
Oh my god! An Oxford rower has lost the whole end of his oar. It’s just a stick! The race continues, because the umpire reckons it was Oxford’s fault, following a clash of oars. It’s a procession. Another metaphor alert! The sure fire winner is now doomed!
If you care, this is all terrible. But for me it’s more a case of LOL. Whether that’s right is an argument, but that, for me, is how it was.
This comment, from “James R”, made me laugh, in fact it made me LOL:
We need to avoid conflagrating copyright with patents.
If enough people say that confragrating conflagrating and conflating mean the same thing, then they do. But, I hope that isn’t what gets decided.
This comment was attached to a piece by Tom Burroughes about intellectual property, about which Tom will be speaking, at an event organised by Libertarian Home this evening, in Southwark. I hope to be there myself.
LATER: Oh dear. Another correction is required. The piece I linked to is not by tonight’s speaker Tom Burroughes, but by Libertarian Home’s Simon Gibbs. Apologies to both persons.
Further to my brief remarks yesterday on the UK government’s plans to intensify scrutiny of the internet (although it may be that the government is changing its tack), comes this piece of crap from Dan Hodges, a Labour Party supporter who writes approvingly of the Big Brother state. This man is beyond irony.
Take this as an example of his thinking:
“I don’t want less surveillance, I want more of the stuff. My idea of the perfect society is one where every street corner has a CCTV camera, everyone has a nice shiny ID card tucked in their wallet and no extremist can even think of logging onto a dodgy website without an SAS squad abseiling swiftly through their window.”
And of course this is his idea of the killer argument:
“For one thing, I have a relatively benign view of the state. There are some things it does much better than others, and I realise it’s high time it learnt to cut its coat to suit its cloth. But on balance I view the state as a force for good, rather than some giant, menacing monolith, and that’s especially true when it comes to stopping myself, my family and my friends getting blown up by crazed terrorists.”
“I have an equally benign, if unfashionable, view of our politicians and our security services. I’m not the greatest fan of either Theresa May or David Cameron, but if they say they need to have access to my emails in order to ensure the security of the nation, I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Just having a quick look, my last three were from Middlesex County Cricket Club, Woolworths and the editor of Total Politics magazine. And if the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister are really that bothered, they’re welcome to them.”
Ah, “only the innocent have anything to fear” argument. Mr Hodges is undisturbed by the thought of mistaken identities, or youthful radicalism catching up with anyone. No sir, ordinary good men and women of the UK can rest easy in the knowledge that their innocuous, dull messages to friends and business will not incur the suspicion of those men from GCHQ or wherever.
This sort of thing is mildly terrifying to the extent that it shows how trusting so many people are of the modern state and its apparatus. And there is simply no space in Mr Hodge’s mind, it appears, for any suspicion of how such intelligence might be misused. If the recent allegations of corruption by the UK police over the supply of data to bent journalists has taught us anything, it is that if we aggregate vast caches of data into one place, someone, somewhere, will be tempted to make wrongful use of it. It boggles the mind that Mr Hodges does not see this.
Mr Hodges also argues, not very convincingly, that recent some miscarriages of justice would not have happened had we British not been so precious about privacy:
“The civil libertarians, from both left and right, have been out in force this week. But if you look at any of the most prominent modern miscarriages of justice, they have resulted not from the state accumulating too much intelligence on its citizens, but too little. I wish, for example, the Metropolitan police Operation Kratos team had been able to access, in real time, more information about the true identity of Jean Charles de Menezes, before shooting him dead at Stockwell tube. Those wrongly incarcerated for the Guildford and Birmingham pub bombings spent decades in jail precisely because the police and intelligence services did not have sufficient information on the real perpetrators of those attacks, and buckled to public pressure to bang up the first Irishmen they could lay their hands on.”
Ah, yes, if only Britain had been completely festooned with CCTV and the rest in the early 70s and later, then all those folk banged up for killing people would have been free.
I would recommend Mr Hodges spends some time reading the thoughts of security expert Bruce Schneier before opining again about the “benign” nature of an all-encompassing surveillance state.
The Financial Times reports that from tomorrow there will be
…marked changes to the government’s complex tax credit system. The first reduction is for 850,000 families losing all their child tax credit, worth about £545 a year. The second is up to 212,000 working couples losing their working tax credit – of up to £3,870 a year – if they are unable to increase their weekly working hours from 16 to 24.
Important semantic point: what are tax credits? The HMRC website is unhelpful:
Tax credits are payments from the government.
Wikipedia has a general definition:
A tax credit is a sum deducted from the total amount a taxpayer owes to the state.
So assuming “tax credit” does not mean something else in Britain (and I would not put it past politicians to play such games with words), what we have here is a large tax increase for poor people who nonetheless work.
Here’s a hint to any future chancellor: you get more of what you reward.
Update: In the comments, Paul Marks says that “tax credit” means welfare and that most people who get tax credits do not pay income tax.
Teachers hate legislation. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers is a British teaching union. In 2010 its then president Lesley Ward said:
What was being debated in the 1970s is pretty similar to what is being debated four decades later. I am onto my 15th secretary of state for education and my 29th minister for education. I have lived through, endured, survived, call it what you like, 54 pieces of education legislation since I started teaching. One more and it would be one for each year of my life.
Clearly she wants to get the government out of education and her life. “Trust us and leave us to do our job,” she concludes. Good for her!
Then yesterday:
A motion at the [ATL] conference called on ministers to introduce “stringent legislation” to counter the “negative effects some computer games are having on the very young”.
I imagine that most teachers have no difficulty holding both of these views. Most people would like government to leave them alone and stop other people from annoying them.
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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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