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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Joan Brady, a previous winner of the Whitbread literary prize, writes:
Costa Coffee should keep out of book prizes – and town centres
In 1993 I became the first woman to win the Whitbread Prize, and it changed my life. Money! One winner blew it all on a swimming pool for the family’s French villa. Not me. Mine paid off my debts: there are few joys in life to beat clearing the slate.
I suppose I should have given some thought to where the money came from. I didn’t. The shortlist was awarded at the Whitbread brewery –which meant I could hardly avoid knowing it had something to do with beer – but how was I to know that Whitbread saw the whole excitement as just an advertising gimmick?
I liked the comment by scepticalhawkeye:
Most of us would have thought that the executives of a brewery at heart saw their life’s work as promoting English Literature.
Joan Brady appears upset that Whitbread has taken over the Costa Coffee chain, so instead of authors being given dosh by noble brewers they are getting it from effete caffeine-fiends. For a moment the flame of hope flickered within me that Ms Brady might be emulating the staunch heroes of of God Emperor of Didcot, in which mighty vows are made that never more shall the arm of the honest tea drinker be made limp by the latte of foreign oppressors! Alas, she just has a thing against Costa:
Costa is strong-arming its multinational way into small towns and villages all over Britain and plonking down its identical coffee shops even though local people in overwhelming numbers – from Southwold in East Anglia to Cottingham in Yorkshire to Totnes in Devon – make it clear they aren’t wanted.
I lived in Totnes for 30 years, and Totnes outdid itself. Three quarters of its population protested against Costa: Totnes already has more than 40 independent coffee shops. That many people agreeing on anything approaches a miracle, a landslide of public opinion. Costa isn’t bothered. It hasn’t bothered with the populations of other protesting towns either. But isn’t this supposed to be a democracy? Here’s a corporate giant flouting the fully expressed will of local people. And for what? To boost a profit margin that’ll go to build more coffee shops in Russia and Egypt – Costa’s largest is in Dubai – at the expense of UK shopkeepers.
As every second comment says, if local people in overwhelming numbers do not want Costa Coffee then Ms Brady’s problem will not persist long. Local people in overwhelming numbers won’t go there, and Costa will cut their losses and go.
In fact there is an issue worth discussing here. I cannot help wondering what Ms Brady would say if local people in overwhelming numbers expressed the view that they did not want immigrants of a different race, Egyptians for instance, setting up shop in their town and making a profit “at the expense of” UK shopkeepers. Would opposition to incomers on those grounds still count as the “fully expressed will of the people” and if not, why not? Isn’t this supposed to be a democracy? Perhaps if she reads the many pointed comments, the CiF crowd being on the right side for once, Ms Brady will be prompted to question the limits of majoritarianism.
Perhaps she will also be prompted to do as so many of the commenters suggest and send Whitbread / Costa back their money. Given that she thinks that only the involuntary contributions of taxpayers are pure enough to fund a literary prize, that would be the principled course of action.
This whole idea of ‘respect’ – which is a code-word for ‘fear’ – is something we have to get away from.
– Salman Rushdie (interviewed on BBC Radio 4). Indeed. And not just in where the bullying religiose are concerned. Tolerance should not mean pretending to agree.
In the aftermath of electoral defeat, a Labour MP and former minister wrote:
“The new Conservative Government is showing itself the most ideological and reactionary right-wing government that Europe has seen in two decades … Its commitment to lower public spending and its ideology of laissez-faire will mean more poverty, more inequality, a meaner social sector and a worse environment.”
As things turned out, once in power the Conservatives preferred “pragmatism” to an ideology of laissez-faire, and the commitment to lower public spending displayed about the same level of commitment as Ming the Merciless did in his marriage vows to Dale Arden:
PRIEST: Do you, Ming the Merciless, Ruler of the Universe, take this Earthling, Dale Arden Lower Public Spending, to be your Empress of the hour?
MING: Of the hour, yes.
PRIEST: Do you promise to use her as you will?
MING: Certainly!
PRIEST: Not to blast her into space?
(Pointed silence from Ming)
PRIEST (hurriedly): ….Until such time as you grow weary of her?
MING: I do.
The election concerned was, of course, that of 2010 1990 1979 1970 and the writer was Anthony Crosland, MP. He concluded:
“Perhaps it did not need this lecture to demonstrate that our basic social democratic aims remain as urgent as they have ever been. If proof were needed, Mr Heath has provided it.”
– Anthony Crosland in A Social Democratic Britain, Fabian Tract 404, based on a lecture given in November 1970. (Price 3s / 15p.)
I do not entirely share Perry’s view that between Ruling Lizards Group A and Ruling Lizards Group B there is no difference worth a damn. By gum, though, when you think that Edward Heath was once seriously feared as a rampaging warrior of laissez faire, there is no difference worth much.
Economic wisdom from a rather surprising place:
Since 2007, 15 bridges have collapsed in China. Only three of them were more than 15 years old at the time of their collapse, according to a report by the Shandong Business Daily.
On Aug. 24, a 330-footlong approach ramp of Harbin’s Yangmingtan Bridge fell over, killing three and injuring five. The bridge had been in use less than a year and is the eighth bridge collapse in China this year. The Harbin administration has so far not openly addressed the case.
Zhao Wenjin, the lead commentator of Lanzhou Daily, commented on the incident, saying, “With each collapse, we need to reflect: why are we chasing GDP?”
According to a Jingyang Net report, Wang Yang, Party secretary of Guangdong Province, said at a provincial Party meeting in 2009: “Sometimes the GDP number looks good, but it didn’t really create wealth for society. It was, instead, a waste of society’s wealth.
“For example, building a bridge creates GDP. When the bridge collapses and is taken down, it creates another addition to the GDP. When the bridge is rebuilt, more GDP is created. As such, one bridge resulted in three additions to the GDP. But it was a tremendous waste of resources.”
Mainland media Chinese Business Daily said that sticks and pebbles were found in the concrete that made up the Yangmingtan Bridge, and the metal wires on the surface were also not tied together properly.
The headline above the article that the above paragraphs come from reads: Frequent Bridge Collapses Help Boost China’s GDP.
My thanks to Sean Corrigan of the Cobden Centre for sending out the multi-recipient email that told me about this story.
First of all, I think it is fair to say that no-one who wants to be taken seriously should use the words “Arab Spring” without heavy irony.
The fact is that the First Amendment, no matter how embattled, protects a range of expression unthinkable even in Western Europe. Because of that unique position, and because the U.S. seems doomed to play an outsized diplomatic and military role in the tumultuous Muslim world, it behooves the State Department to constantly explain the vast differences between state-sanctioned and legally protected speech in the so-called Land of the Free. If the U.S. government really was in the business of “firmly reject[ing]” private free-speech acts that “hurt the religious beliefs of others” there would be no time left over for doing anything else.
Matt Welch, stating what is alas not obvious to officials at the US State Department.
Meanwhile, I note – as have others – that the killing of the US ambassador in Libya only made it on page 4 of the New York Times. All the news that’s fit, to, er, print. Okay, I understand the limitations of print journalism, but something tells me that a journalist and editors goofed. A US ambassador got murdered, FFS.
The US elections got a lot more interesting, alas, for horrible reasons. The ghost of Jimmy Carter hangs over it.
Some wise comments, I think, from Walter Russell Mead. He is even-handed in how he regards the options for Obama and his opponent:
The order and competence dimension of a presidential election should not be underestimated. Voters generally don’t want presidents who drive the U.S. government like it was a Ferrari. They want a comfortable, safe ride; their kids are in the back seat of the car. Yesterday’s events damage President Obama because they call into question the story the campaign wants to tell—that President Obama is a calm and laid-back, though ultimately decisive person who brings order to a dangerous world and can be trusted with the car keys. But if Republicans respond by looking wild eyed and excitable (remember John McCain’s response to the financial crisis in 2008?), bad times will actually rally people to stick with the devil they know.
And this:
Yesterday rocked President Obama’s world and gave Governor Romney’s campaign some new openings. But one day in a long campaign is just one day. We still don’t know how these events will reverberate across the Middle East or how the U.S. response will develop. In some ways, trouble overseas distracts attention from the White House’s current domestic problems—the Woodward book and the Chicago strike. And the President can thank his stars that the German Constitutional Court decided not to plunge the world economy into crisis this morning and allowed the German government to complete the ratification of the most recent European bailout agreements.
As he says, we are living through a period where there is a lot of what finance geeks and others call “event risk”. There is a lot of it about.
I am off to Turkey tomorrow. Gulp.
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky and two colleagues from the University of Western Australia published a paper called ‘NASA faked the moon landing – Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax:An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science’.
Johnathan Pearce mentioned it in this post. As I said in the comments, Bishop Hill and other sceptical blogs made scathing criticisms of the survey. For instance, according to Australian Climate Madness, the headline finding about disbelief in the moon landings was produced from a mere ten responses, some or all of which looked likely to be jokers. The whole internet survey had only about 1100 self-selected responses. That self-selection makes it about as reliable as the surveys of the readers of bridal magazines that claim that the average cost of a wedding is £20,273 in the UK, or $26,501 in the US and are every year quoted as fact by credulous journalists.
To their credit, some commenters from the warmist side of the aisle also queried the obviously leading questions. Questions were asked from all sides as to why almost no effort seems to have been made to gather responses from AGW-sceptic blogs, leaving the sceptic responders to come almost entirely from those controversialists who post at warmist blogs. There was a farcical subplot in which Lewandowsky initially refused to reveal which sceptical blogs he had contacted. He does not seem to have asked many of the biggest sceptical blogs, such as Watts Up With That?, or to have made more than token efforts to get noticed by those sceptic blogs he did contact. Shall I go on? There was no option for “don’t know” or “no opinion” in the survey questions. The conspiracies chosen were mainly “right wing” conspiracies, such as Birtherism, rather than “left wing” ones, such as those relating to “Big Oil”. There were inadequate safeguards against multiple returns by the same person, or joke returns by any person. Different versions of the survey were sent out to different people – but not randomly, which would have been defensible; rather some blogs got one version and others got another. Results were being discussed online while the survey was still open, corrupting later responses. I will stop there. If you want to read more, just Google “Lewandowsky”.
Professor Lewandowsky’s response to criticism was revealing.
If I am not mistaken, I can indeed confirm that there were 4—not 3—versions of the survey (unless that was the number of my birth certificates, I am never quite sure, so many numbers to keep track of… Mr. McIntyre’s dog misplaced an email under a pastrami sandwich a mere 8.9253077595543363 days ago, and I have grown at least one tail and several new horns over the last few days, all of which are frightfully independent and hard to keep track of).
Versiongate!
Finally this new friend from Conspirania is getting some legs.
About time, too, I was getting lonely.
Astute readers will have noted that if the Survey ID’s from above are vertically concatenated and then viewed backwards at 33 rpm, they read “Mitt Romney was born in North Korea.”
To understand the relevance of Mr Romney’s place of birth requires a secret code word. This code word, provided below, ought to be committed to memory before burning this post.
So here it is, the secret code. Read it backwards: gnicnalabretnuoc.
Translations are available in any textbook for Methodology 101.
Don’t give up the day job, Professor. On second thoughts, maybe a career in comedy is the way to go. There was a time when a scientist responding to criticism in such a fashion would have had a career change forced upon him.
This survey was published in the journal Psychological Science.
Reported seriously in the Telegraph and other newspapers.
Peer reviewed and everything.
It does make you wonder. Compared to most readers of this blog, I am still a warmist. But ever since I first saw the term “climate denier” I have worried about what an opinion becoming a cause would do to scientists. I feared, and still do fear, that if having a certain scientific opinion can get a scientist bracketed with Holocaust deniers, then perhaps researchers might unconsciously shy away from results that might have that result. Now that fear is joined by another. As for sticks, so for carrots. If a scientist can be published and lauded for coming up with the equivalent of “nine out of ten cats we tested prefer KittyTwinks to swamp mud” so long as his or her findings promote the Cause, then perhaps researchers might unconsciously prefer results that get that result.
It says here “Egyptian protesters condemned what they said was the humiliation of the Prophet of Islam under the pretext of freedom of speech”… Pretext? I don’t think that word means what they think it does, unless it lost something in translation.
– from a conversation overheard between two people in a cafe in London, reading the news on their iThingies.
Occasionally a taxi driver will complain to me about the costs of licensing or the expensive safety test he is about to send his car in for. I always suggest that there is no need for taxi licensing at all. The taxi driver does not like this one bit. Of course not: the main purpose of licensing is to restrict supply and keep prices high.
This is rarely admitted. Instead we are warned of the dangers of unlicensed taxis. And dangers there are, but it is nothing that can not be solved with private certification schemes or branding.
The makers of a smartphone app called Uber are currently having various battles with taxi licensing authorities. They want to make it easier for people to order and pay for taxis and presumably in return take a cut of the fares. Price controls, metering and rules about how drivers are paid are getting in their way.
Meanwhile in Chennai, auto-rickshaws (known elsewhere as tuk tuks) are not metered. There is a campaign to have meters installed in them to fix the prices along with “proper” regulation and licensing. One problem people are complaining about is high prices; another is the behaviour of drivers, such as choosing customers and forcing people to share rides. These problems suggest to me that there is a shortage of auto-rickshaws, but my friend from Chennai disagrees. She explains that there are plenty of drivers, but they agree amongst themselves who will take which passenger so that passengers can not choose between drivers to get a better deal. This sounds like union behaviour, and an obvious question with perhaps an obvious answer is: what stops drivers operating outside of the union?
Here is a typical comment from the Missing Meter Facebook page:
the auto stand in my area itself (near perungudi bus stop – OMR)…… they will ask triple the charge if they see me in urge of going (dressed like professional)…. they will not let the autos to stop which are passing by… so we will end up in negotiating with those guys & pay atleast double the amount of real charge… apprx – 20 rs / km… this happens almost all the time….
Establishing free markets is never easy.
Well, contrary to my title it actually does matter a damn who wins the US election, even if policy-wise they are largely fungible.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who has called for scrapping President Barack Obama’s 2010 U.S. healthcare law, said in remarks aired on Sunday that he likes key parts of “Obamacare” despite his party’s loathing of it and wants to retain them.
I want Barack ObamaCare to win, or more accurately, I want Mitt RomneyCare to lose so that the Tea Party have a better chance of completely and utterly destroying the Republican establishment that decided to run a jackanapes like Romney. The objective I would like to see is that the Republican party either collapses completely to make room for something else or actually reinvents itself to make it worth voting for (also fine by me).
Romney is what happens when the Stupid Party (USA Branch) realise they only have to be ever so slightly less evil than the Evil Party (USA Branch) in order to get your vote.
British politics is very boring compared to American politics just now, a fact reflected in the content of recent Samizdata postings. What is there to say about Britain now? They almost all agree, or pretend to agree. They are almost all mistaken. That about covers it. At least in the USA there is occasional debate about something resembling principles.
Perhaps principles are easier to observe from a distance, uncluttered by nearby clutter, rather as skyscrapers loom larger when viewed from a distance. But from where I sit, in Britain, part of the reason for this British political boringness is that Prime Minister Cameron has no apparent objective other than to remain Prime Minister Cameron. What he does at any given moment seems to be entirely the consequence of the various directions in which, and the varying force with which, he is being pulled, pushed, kicked, bribed or threatened. He himself never makes a decision, other than a decision about the combined effect upon him of these various forces.
I seem to recall reading, not long after the coalition government was formed, that Cameron may actually prefer coalition government to regular government. That way, interpreting and constantly rebalancing all those forces is his basic job.
But when those forces change, what Cameron does changes with them, and that can be slightly interesting. One such slightly interesting shift happened in the course of the recent cabinet reshuffle, in the form of the appointment of someone called Owen Paterson to be the government’s Environment Secretary. The interesting thing being that apparently Owen Paterson is not nearly as devoted to wind power as the Windies (so to speak) think that such a person ought to be. In general, Paterson lacks green enthusiasm, as Fraser Nelson explains.
Owen Paterson is far from a household name, but the significance of his appointment as Environment Secretary has not been lost on the green lobby groups. As far as they’re concerned, this is war. They are already denouncing him as a “prominent hater of wind turbines” and overall climate change sceptic.
Sounds like good news to me (rather as the news in this posting was), except actually what “climate change sceptics” are really sceptical about is not climate change but climate catastrophe.
So, why the change of public mood, and consequent slight Cameron shift? Well, part of it is that climate catastrophe scepticism is growing and growing. As I keep insisting, the key to all this is catastrophe. If the climate is just changing a bit, and if sea levels are about to rise a bit, then the obvious answer is for us to adapt, and let the market send us whatever signals it is inclined to. Only if climate catastrophe looms does it make any sense to shut down regular economics and switch the entire world over to emergency tyranny mode, of the sort that the people who set the climate catastrophe scam up in the first place yearn for. But more and more people now believe that there is no more reason now than at any other time in human history to expect climate catastrophe. In short, our side is (as it has been for several years now) winning the climate catastrophe argument (which is the bit of the argument that matters), big time.
The wider public, the sort of public (most of it) that is far more bothered about its fuel bills than by any arguments about longer term climate upheavals, is getting the news of this intellectual transformation not just in the form of an abatement of green propaganda, but also in more elusive ways, involving moral atmospherics.
Fraser Nelson again:
For more than a decade, environmental policy has been cursed with cross-party consensus because no one wanted to be seen to oppose so noble a cause.
It is precisely this air of green nobility that is now changing, as Cameron has surely noticed.
Thanks at first to the whistle blowing sceptics like Steve McIntyre, and then to the bloggers and journos who publicised such findings as McIntyre’s, like Andrew Montford, Christopher Booker and James Delingpole, and now to the big-time daily newspapers who have been joining in more recently with similar stories, “climate science” just doesn’t seem as noble as it used to. Frankly it is being presented as downright corrupt. These “scientists” don’t insist upon the truth of their opinions merely because they just do. They do this because this is how they now make their living. Their constant screeching about the venal motives of their opponents is pure projection, and is more and more being presented to the wider public as just that.
Meanwhile, on the back of the climate science scam, a new variety of green entrepreneur (one of them being David Cameron’s own father-in-law) has arisen. In the days of unchallenged green nobility, the people who thought along these lines both set up or participated in green businesses and sat on public bodies whose mission was to impose the very green schemes and regulations that these green businesses depended on for their profitability. Time was when this seemed okay. But not now. Suddenly, being the director of a wind farm company, and at the same time sitting on some government committee which does all it can to block other and more rational forms of energy doesn’t look quite as noble as once it did.
It’s not that the Windies have given up exerting any forces of their own. The point is that these people are now on the defensive. From the green point of view, the times they are a-changing, and when the times change, people like David Cameron change with them.
According to Der Spiegel, the company that makes the AK-47 has gone bankrupt. This is not because of the imminent fulfilment of the words of Isaiah 2:4 but because the Russian army stopped buying Kalashnikovs, and because of competition from cheap Chinese knockoffs. They dare not tell Mikhail Timofeyevich himself; at 92 the shock would kill him.
I draw no moral. I just shake my head at the sheer difference between the world as it is and the world as it used to be. If you had shown me the headline “the company that makes the AK-47 has gone bankrupt” in 1988, I would have assumed it was an unusually amusing randomly generated phrase.
What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they’re not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That’s not a stand, it’s a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.
– Peggy Noonan.
My own prediction: Obama’s finished.
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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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