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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As relations with the US deteriorate, China probably has little choice but to continue to strengthen its armed forces. But it should remember that its military advances to date have been underwritten by the wealth and technological capabilities created during the last four decades of reform and globalization. To stay in the game with a richer, more innovative, and more efficient adversary and its allies, China will have to reverse its anti-market economic policies and set its dynamic private sector free.
Today, Xi’s government is doing the opposite. Instead of liberalizing markets and lowering trade barriers, China has been cracking down on private entrepreneurs and driving away foreign investors. Over time, such policies will only widen the gap of economic output with the US and make China poorer and more insecure.
Minxin Pei, columnist at Bloomberg ($). He is also professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.
He wraps up the article thus:
Without “guardrails,” a weaker rival would face two unpalatable choices if an incident spirals out of control — either back down in humiliation (as Soviet leaders did in the Cuban Missile Crisis) or risk defeat. Meanwhile, arms control agreements can help a less wealthy power avoid wasting resources on unnecessary military hardware.
Chinese strategists appear not to appreciate these benefits. Instead of responding positively to US overtures, the Chinese military has suspended dialogue to protest US support for Taiwan. Even worse, China’s recent aggressive intercepts of unarmed US military aircraft near its airspace have elevated the risks of an accidental conflict.
The Cold War may be an imperfect analogy for today’s US-China rivalry. Unless China heeds its lessons, though, the end result may be the same.
“Since apologies are now required. Challenging any consensus is fundamentally important to good science – especially that of an unproven intervention such as lockdown. The onus should have been on those proposing such a radical new policy to justify it, not the reverse. Sweden is the elephant in the room. A nation of relatively similar wealth and standing to us, it largely avoided lockdowns yet has emerged with impressively low excess deaths. Should the inquiry not be asking how? Anders Tegnell, the architect of their successful strategy, should have been a priority witness.”
– Prof Karol Sikora is a consultant oncologist. Daily Telegraph (£)
When the pandemic petered out and lockdowns were – with some reluctance from the powers-that-be – abandoned, there was some speculation about how there needed to be “a reckoning” over the damage done, that we should examine the Swedish case, and re-visit the Great Barrington Declaration’s arguments. But I feared at the time that this was unlikely to happen, at least for some time with the present political establishment. Simple reputation protection is part of it. Also, it appears the large majority of the public in countries such as the UK supported lockdowns. Maybe too many voters did not want to face the full, ugly fact that what had been done was a massive mistake, on a par with entering a war. In this day and age – and I suspect it has been like this since forever – soul searching and honest reflection is not encouraged. Parts of the media probably thought the same about lockdowns and in far too few cases has there been much reflection. You can almost detect a certain awkwardness. I mean, at any social gathering I have been at, among journalists and suchlike, the folly of lockdowns never comes up unless I raise it (I try not to make a habit of it, mind), and if I ever do, I get that “oh, look at that oddball” stare, or desire to shift the conversation to something less controversial.
On the Conservative and Labour sides, and across the public sector, most were invested into lockdowns; already, when I saw journalists have a go at the Boris Johnson government, for example, it was usually that it did not lock down hard enough and early enough. The whole “meta-context” was about repression, speed and duration of lockdown, and the need to throw the full apparatus of the State at it. The idea that ordinary members of the public were already acting to socially distance back in February and early March of 2020, that various methods, freely embraced, might have made a difference (I am not a doctor, so usual disclaimers), were ignored. Not just ignored, but as we saw over the GBD crowd, mocked and scorned.
It became clear to me that there is a clear overlap between the lockdowners, as I call them, and much of today’s Green movement. It was hard for me to ignore an almost pleasurable embrace of lockdowns by the Greens. I mean, we’d stopped most people flying! Look at how clear the canals of Venice are, daaaahling. The Net Zero phenomenon, whatever else it is, is about using the coercive power of the State to force people to change how they behave in ways they will find restrictive and unpleasant for some sort of supposed provable collective goal. The lockdowns were a trial run, in a way, for the sort of repressive measures that such Green activists seek. In one story, an academic suggested that lockdowns were actually a sort of “liberation”.
Clearly, it is possible to be alarmed by all this even if you are, for example, concerned about viruses, possibly cooked up in a lab, or Man-made global temperature increases. These are matters of empirical science. Just because freedom-loving individuals don’t like lockdowns or restrictions on fossil fuels doesn’t mean these fears are unfounded. (The correct approach is to accept the best evidence available without rushing to junk freedom.) But it surely does suggest that in so many cases, top-down responses to this or that threat need to be questioned more. To go back to the quote at the top of this article, there is a need for a burden of proof to sit with those who want to slam measures on the public, not the other way around. And there needs to be more willingness to embrace the solutions and tools to which a free, entrepreneurial society give rise to.
“Liberals and centrists seem to have paid attention to conservative boycotts of Bud Light and Target. Then came the scandal surrounding Ibram Kendi’s antiracism center at Boston University. Having burned through over $20 million, he now faces an inquiry from the university. Kendi’s disgrace cracked the window—and the horrific responses to the Hamas attacks opened the door. And yet it is only now—after all the histrionic and outraged statements about #MeToo and BLM and Ukraine and Roe v. Wade—that universities are discovering the virtue of institutional neutrality.”
– Jacob Savage
“Hamas is the enemy not only of Jews, but of the Palestinians themselves. Israel hoped that when Gaza was evacuated it would become an economic powerhouse. Had that happened, many Israelis would have been prepared to withdraw from most of the West Bank. The purpose of Zionism, after all, was to provide a homeland for Jews, not to rule over another people. But Gaza chose a different path, electing Hamas in 2006; and when, in 2017, an Israeli minister said he would help Gaza economically if it renounced terror, Mahmoud al-zahar, a Hamas co-founder, said that if Gaza had wanted to be like Singapore, it would have done so already.”
– Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government, King’s College, London. (Item in Daily Telegraph behind the paywall.) The professor delivers a succinct summation of the moral depravity of Hamas, and by those who, through evasion of the facts, seek to excuse its actions. As an aside, there is another reason that the writer doesn’t spell out for why Hamas will not renounce terror: it is in many ways like the Mafia, or what Sinn Fein/IRA was and became: a gangster group that enjoys the trappings of power, including the money (as shown by how some of its political leaders reside in comfort, hundreds of miles away, in Qatar, etc).
“If nothing else, we have learnt how poisonous the decolonisation agenda is.”
– Daniel Hannan, Sunday Telegraph (£), 15 October.
I suspect this observation from writer Katya Sedgwick that Mr Obama and his circle are increasingly driving the US administration, is going to gain ground and become noisier in the months leading to November 2024:
It’s clear that Joe Biden doesn’t have the mental agility to lead the country, much less control the nuclear briefcase. The subject of his dementia comes up fairly often, especially on the Right. Yet the question of who is actually leading the country is almost never raised, even though there is an obvious candidate. There is zero willingness to investigate the matter.
The gossip about Joe’s presidency being Obama’s third term has been around for some time. In a fantastic conversation printed in Tablet, David Samuels and Obama biographer David Garrow discussed that possibility. Samuels noted that although there is a lot of talk in the capital about the 44th president running the executive branch out of his D.C. mansion, journalists are reluctant to investigate.
The “reluctance” of journalists to investigate issues unflattering to the Obama/Biden administrations – with honorable exceptions – is almost a default assumption of mine these days. (The Hunter Biden laptop episode, etc.)
Texas Senator Ted Cruz recently made a statement that Barack Obama is running the Biden Administration. But this stands in contrast with the rest of the establishment’s silence. And if an occasional quip about the nature of the regime pops up in the media, maybe in the form of a meme, there is no discourse, no attempt to make sense of what is going on in the Oval Office. Even the Right is more comfortable talking about large, powerful groups like the globalists or the swamp ruling through bureaucratic institutions than to consider the meaning of a senile president embodying the executive authority of the U.S. government. This summer, a vague song about power called “Rich Men North of Richmond” became an instant social media sensation. I can’t help thinking that it’s not the single wealthy individuals that we want to hear about, but one specific man, our clandestine leader.
And because we are a country obsessed with race, our first black president can’t be revealed to be subverting our constitutional order. Interracial relations took a dive during Obama’s second term and continue to worsen. The news that the former president is pulling the strings for the incapacitated Biden could bring them to the boiling point.
The idea is too dark for most Americans to consider. Even conservatives who continuously warned that Obama, born in Hawaii to a foreign father and raised abroad, is not aligned with our mentality are not ready for the hard crash of the hope and change circa 2008. It’s one thing to warn about voting for a questionable candidate, and another to see that same candidate upend the constitutional order.
Obama was in many ways a very bad president. On foreign policy, his stance towards Iran and subsequent views on it, for example, looks like being a disaster, as we are now finding out. Or consider the domestic side – if you cast your mind back all the way to his encounter with Joe the Plumber (RIP), and his “you didn’t build that” speech, it is a reminder of how hostile this man is to the sort of small business free enterprise that is the backbone of the US. It was not all bad – Obama appeared to pursue a policy of benign neglect around private spacefaring, giving an opening for Elon Musk and others to perform wonders. Maybe Obama just wasn’t interested enough. In any event, he did not try to screw with it, and neither did he – at least that much – try to shut down fracking. (Again, I suspect that he just isn’t that into things like engineering.)
OK, I will try and be fair and make the point that I am sure Obama isn’t the first ex-POTUS to try and pull the strings of a successor – as is claimed – but the sheer frailty and mental decline of Mr Biden (I don’t think this is any longer a controversial statement) makes the point all the more serious if it is true. (In the UK there are suppositions that Tony Blair is exerting a lot of influence over the Labour Party again, which if true is also troubling.)
As regulars might know, I am not a Trump fan at all, and I hope for a better choice of GOP candidate to run against Biden, but given the way the Republican Party has developed an almost cult-like devotion to him, almost because of his problems and very serious flaws (his stance on lockdowns and latitude to Fauci hasn’t impressed some conservatives), we are where we are. As a Brit, it bothers me that the choice at the next US elections is so poor. We need someone who could be a two-term POTUS to undo so much of the damage of recent years and be free of the lawfare that is bound to be a relentless feature of a second Trump term.
Back on the back-seat driving allegation vs Mr Obama, an issue is that it is easy to make that accusation on sort of circumstantial grounds, hard to back it up without smoking gun sort of evidence. And to be honest, I imagine that all presidents do at times take advice from former holders of the office. They may even keep and retain cabinet members from previous administrations (such as Robert Gates at Defense, or how Volcker and Greenspan stayed on at the Fed under different regimes). The question here is more whether, because of Biden’s physical condition and the fact that his vice president is clearly unfit for the job, the back-seat control is more glaring, and more dangerous to notions of democratic accountability.
This matters a lot, particularly given the Irsrael horror. It may be that Biden is taking the decisions on what the US ought to do, but given the involvement of Iran in bankrolling Hamas and other terrorist groups that want to destroy Israel, it would be nice to know that a former POTUS whose judgement on Iran was so poor is spending more time writing another set of self-glorifying memoirs rather than influencing policy.
‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!’ chant the useful idiots at elite institutions and parades in the West. Who are these people? Atheists who support theocratic lunatics, democrats who endorse medieval tyrants, feminists who defend misogynists who parade with the desecrated corpses of women, gays who defend maniacs who would joyfully hang them or toss them off the roof of a tall building. They talk of a secular, democratic and socialist Palestine. As George Orwell observed: ‘One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.’ But the world has now seen what ‘from the river to the sea’ actually means. It is nothing less than a remake of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen.
– Walter E Block & Alan G Futerman, Wall Street Journal ($)
The recent and highly contested decision by London mayor Sadiq Khan to expand ULEZ (ultra-low emissions zone) from central to the outer London boroughs has already caused considerable political pushback. It cost the opposition Labour Party a by-election result. and played a part in encouraging Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to realise, perhaps rather late in the day, that the push to ban sales of new petrol/diesel vehicles in 2030 wasn’t a great one.
It is always wise to heed the Law of Unintended Consequences, and who better to raise that angle than the Institute of Economic Affairs, the think tank. A writer, David Starkie (not the right-wing historian, but another chap), has this:
“The extra ridership on the Tube due to the ULEZ is no doubt tiny compared with daily numbers using the network; this number, about 5 million people a day, is equivalent to more than half the population of the capital. Tiny the extra numbers may be, but these transferees from road vehicles will have their health risk increased as a result of the ULEZ-induced modal shift. Whether this was considered when calculating the statistical numbers of reduced deaths due to the scheme is unknown, but it is by no means apparent that it was considered.”
The article is written in the cool, measured tones of economics. Starkie talks about “modalities” and so on. To translate into blunt language, Starkie argues that people are being encouraged to avoid cars and take dirtier underground public transport instead. The deeper Tube lines are full of dust, such as metal particulates thrown up as wheels grind on the rails. The Tube also, so a friend who used to work for the Tube tells me, has a lot of poison to kill mice and rats. (Here is a page about the mice problem with the Tube.) Starkie notes:
Parts of the Underground suffer from serious air pollution, discovered following research in 2019 sponsored by the Financial Times. According to the newspaper, the deep Tube is by far the most polluted part of the city because of considerable particulate pollution from metal friction, clothing fibre, and dust in general trapped in the tunnels. And there is a lot of it. Using hundreds of measurements inside carriages within Zone 1, dangerously high levels of pollution were found, particularly on the deeper lines. All the deep lines (Piccadilly, Jubilee, Bakerloo, Northern, Victoria and Central) had particulate PM2.5 levels at least five times higher than the World Health Organization’s safe limit and much higher than average levels on the surface, (generally less than PM1.0) particularly in outer London.
In short, some Londoners and those entering or leaving the city on a daily basis are swapping their cars, and where air quality is pretty good, for the Tube, where parts of it have air quality that is far worse. Whatever else Mr Khan may claim about the the expansion of ULEZ, I doubt that a rigorous or honest consideration of air quality is what this is about. It is about raising money and bashing those who own cars.
“Yet the idea that all British Jews are uncritical backers of the Israeli administration is fiction. There are as many vocal opponents of Benjamin Netanyahu and his hardliners as there are supporters. So why should they be blamed en masse for policies decided in Jerusalem? And why must it spill over into violence and vandalism? Indelibly ingrained anti-Semitism can be the only credible explanation.”
“After all, the Left — and it is almost exclusively the Left — don’t hold all British Muslims responsible for the excesses of the Saudi regime. Or attack Chinese restaurants over Beijing’s treatment of Uyghurs. Where are the protests outside the Russian embassy about the illegal war on Ukraine? What also baffles me is why the Left make common cause with fascistic, paramilitary organisations such as Hamas, which represents and practises everything they claim to abhor, including rampant misogyny. How can they make excuses for a terrorist group which rapes and kills women and children?”
– Richard Littlejohn.
Part of the Left (and a few on the crazier ends of the Right) excuses attacks on Israel, and engages in this sort of moronic behaviour, because they are anti-semites. Anti-semitism is a moral sickness, the badge of under-achievers, losers and loons the world over, and has been that way for centuries. Another factor is that for a lot of Leftists, to be on the Left is to support “victims”, particularly if they have cultivated, nurtured and celebrated victimhood, as in the case of say, the Palestinians or wherever. Sometimes there are aspects of genuine justice in these stances, but in the main this is about a search for a cause with a group that is nice and far away, rather than to have to contemplate the more complicated facts on the ground. And another driver of Israel/Jew hatred is that Israel is a modern country in many ways, a tech powerhouse, and the Jewish people have over the centuries excelled in many fields when given the chance. If you are a Leftist, all this achievement cuts against the grain.
I get press releases. Here is the text from one of them, via Ideas Beyond Borders. I repeat most of the content, and I am sure IBB won’t object.
New standards for library book removal left students, parents, teachers, and board members of the Peel District School Board confused recently as they noticed the number of books in various school libraries drop by what may be as much as half. Adding to the confusion is the assertion by some that books, including significant titles such as Harry Potter, The Hungry Caterpillar, and Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, were removed simply because they were published before 2008. The situation has prompted so much discontent that Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce wrote to the PDSB around September 13th, requesting a halt to the removals.
Like most school districts in Canada and other countries across the globe, libraries periodically conduct a process sometimes referred to as “weeding,” where some books are added, some removed, and some replaced with newer editions. Unheard of, however, is removing a book solely because of its publication date, particularly one as seemingly arbitrary as the year 2008. Getting a straight answer to what happened hasn’t been easy for parents, students, community members, or the media. The board’s education director, Rashmi Swarup, said in a statement, “PDSB teacher librarians have not been given the direction to remove all books published with a publication date older than 2008, nor has the board received provincial direction to remove particular books from our collections.” The chair of PDSB’s board of trustees, David Green, claims staff were told to focus on books published around 2008 or older as that was when there was last a major weeding. Students and other community members claim staff told them they were told to remove anything pre-2008.
Documents obtained by a group of parents, teachers, and other community members known as Libraries Not Landfills show that PDSB formulated their weeding methodology to comply with a directive issued by (plot twist!) Education Minister Stephen Lecce himself based upon a 2020 report commenting on systematic discrimination in the district. According to the documents, the first step of the process apparently places the age limit in question before two other measures aimed at improving equity and diversity. The district’s guidelines were written by the non-profit Canadian School Libraries (CSL) and are known as “MUSTIE”.
● M (Misleading) – a book is factually inaccurate/obsolete or contains stereotypes
● U (Ugly) – a book is torn, dirty, moldy, etc.
● S (Superseded) – a book has a newer edition
● T (Trivial) – a book has no literary/artistic merit or is poorly written
● I (Irrelevant) – a book doesn’t interest or serve the needs of its target community
● E (Elsewhere) – the book’s info can be better explored in another book or format
Some of these guidelines seem obvious – nobody wants a moldy book lying around. Others can be left to a troubling amount of interpretation – whether or not a book is trivial or irrelevant can vary wildly from student to student. Weeding out books with stereotypes is tricky too – what constitutes a “harmful” stereotype is somewhat subjective, and the line between that and accurately depicting certain cultural tropes can be quite blurry. Too heavy-handed an approach on this metric could lead to such important Canadian authors as Richard Wagamese, Margaret Atwood, and Dionne Brand being unfairly targeted for removal because they tackle race, ethnicity and gender in a manner some may find uncomfortable.
So what happens to the books that get weeded? The physically damaged ones should be thrown away, but what about those that don’t meet the trusted MUSTIE standards? Donating them might be nice, but no, apparently not. According to the documents obtained by Libraries Not Landfills, PDSB is straight up destroying many of the weeded books because “they are not inclusive, culturally responsive, relevant or accurate” and therefore “not suitable for any learners.” Tom Ellard, the founder of Libraries Not Landfills, says a landfill in the area told him they’re looking to hire extra staff because of all the discarded books they’ve received. That’s pretty astonishing (assuming it’s accurate) and incredibly troubling, evoking images and memories of tactics used by authoritarian regimes across history.
Coverage of the removals has been non-existent since Lecce’s letter to Peel District School Board in which he requested the current removal process to “immediately end.” His initial statement was, “Ontario is committed to ensuring that the addition of new books better reflects the rich diversity of our communities. It is offensive, illogical and counterintuitive to remove books from years past that educate students on Canada’s history, antisemitism or celebrated literary classics,” which seems to be a defense of the program overall while criticizing the scope and severity of the removals. His office has not commented since.
There is a website called End Banned Books. Worth supporting.
Canada has become a shitshow, politically and culturally. People like to go on about how “nice” Canadians are, but I always thought that something a bit patronising about that. The Canadians who hit the beaches at Normandy in 1944, liberating the continent from the Nazis, were magnificantly not “nice”. The truckers who objected to the Trudeau insanity over vaccine mandates had some of that old grit. That country could sorely use that spirit now, assuming any of it is left.
“When bureaucrats and politicians (including 17 state attorney generals) attack a successful, entrepreneurial company, is it surprising that it looks like a circus?”
– Pierre Lemieux.
More than 35 years ago, I recall when an old friend of mine (who died all too young in 2006), Chris R Tame, had been appointed the director of an outfit called FOREST. That acronym stood for Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco. The group was backed by sundry folk, including as far as I know, tobacco firms. It made no secret of it. Chris, much to the annoyance of various pressure groups such as ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), was a keep-fit guy, who went jogging (I joined him in runs around Regent’s Park), lifted weights, did not smoke, and drank in moderation.
Chris’s argument was that your life was yours, not the nation’s or the State’s. With so-called “passive smoking” and the “pollution” side of it, he argued that the risk was slight, but where possible, the issue was for owners of private property to decide. A person was not, on this reasoning, forced to work in a pub or restaurant, etc, and people were not forced to go to such places. In a vigorous economy, with lots of consumer choice, there would be non-smoking premises and those who disliked or feared tobacco smoke could patronise places they preferred. It was the sort of messy solution that a market would provide, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. (See a commentary here from the CATO think tank in the US.)
Over the past 30 years, Chris’s argument has lost ground. On a personal level, as someone who doesn’t smoke or like the smell of it, that’s fine by me. But I realise that this is short-sighted to value a loss of others’ liberties. It is nevertheless striking that, when considering how things were 30 or 40 years ago, we have gone from tolerance of smoking (look at old movies and TV shows) to almost total suppression. I still see a few people smoking a ciggie outside an office here in London, but that’s rare. In fact, I am more likely to smell weed than tobacco these days in London, or for that matter, New York.
Today, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, at the annual Conservative Party conference, outlined a few policies and measures. I was struck by how he wants to adopt a New Zealand-style measure to progressively raise the age at which people can buy cigarettes, up to the point where it is illegal in all but name.
I recall many years ago how ASH and others denied to Chris Tame’s face that they wanted to ban cigarettes. Oh no, they said, that’s just propaganda. Well, it turns out that the end-point for all their campaigns was indeed to ban cigarettes completely. They wanted it all along but lacked the cojones to say so honestly.
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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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