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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“Banks have been put on the front line of defense against financial crime. That makes sense because they have the personal data and handle the money, but it takes a lot of work to check out clients’ sources of income and business relationships. To speed up the process and limit costs, banks have turned to third-party data firms and automated systems. The bureaucracy has been industrialized. It could be throwing up too many false positives, but it almost certainly is making it hard for individuals who get wrongly classified as risky to overturn those results. Once you’re in a database that is replicated and resold many times over, it can be an endless task to get yourself scrubbed from it. Politicians have made the most noise and got the regulator’s attention, but it seems likely to be others suffering bureaucratic nightmares. The FCA’s own data shows one in 10 British Muslims don’t have access to banking, compared with 2% of all UK adults. Regulators should look not only at banks’ policies for applying the rules, but also examine their systems for performing the job.”
– Paul J Davies, columnist at Bloomberg ($). He makes excellent points about how banks, using tech services to keep on top of potential money launderers, have allowed their systems to run amok. The analogy here is the “no fly lists” that countries have for people suspected of terrorism, etc. If you get on these lists, and haven’t done anything wrong (such as if your name comes up as a “false positive”) it is a hellish job to get off them.
“At least a few people seem finally to be catching on that the basic idea behind “homelessness” advocacy is to exploit an issue that brings forth great human empathy to generate vast taxpayer funds and then to not solve the problem. The spending continues and increases without limit. There is way too much money — for advocates — in `homelessness’ for the problem ever to get solved, or even to decrease materially.”
– Francis Menton. The same could be said of a number of other problems, either real or imagined.
…”once again the reintroduction of National Service is being mooted by think tanks, this time as a thinly veiled mechanism for enslaving the young. Leave aside the point that, far from bolstering conservative values, the diversity commissars of the Civil Service would turn it into the `national woke service’ from day one. Conscriptin is just about defensive as a way to maintain a military reserve; as a way to extract free labour for the state, it’s morally reprehensible. It’s also economically insane. The public sector is staggeringly unproductive. Labour that is unpaid is labour that is asking to be used in the most inefficient way possible, on jobs that would never be done if the work cost the minimum wage.”
– Sam Ashworth-Hayes, Daily Telegraph (£). This is probably one of the best take-downs of the whole “put ’em in the Army and sort out the kids” trope that I have come across in a while.
“We often read critics of either ideological stripe bemoan the lack of originality in our art, our music, and most certainly, our movies. Old franchises suffer from Woke narratives smuggled into stories that should never have been revived. Nostalgia is the only thing that motivates moviegoers now because we really have no new stories to tell. We’re only entertained by ‘content creators’, influencers, and the next series to watch on Netflix, Hulu, Apple Plus, Paramount, Max, and Amazon Prime. But the Woke left and the TradCon right both suffer from the same affliction — a lack of imagination. That lack of imagination was caused by the death of allegory, metaphor, hyperbole, parable, myth, sarcasm, poetry, and the woodcraft to express it — all replaced by an autistic literalism needed to protect the egos of lazy, mediocre minds.”
– Rollo Tomassi, a US-based writer and podcaster who talks about issues such as intersexual dynamics.
…“some stories stand out. The one that confuses me is the call for Britain to trial some form of ‘universal basic income.’ What exactly do people think we’ve been doing for the past two years?”
– Sam Ashworth Hayes, in the Daily Telegraph (£).
“What strikes you when reading about any number of NHS scandals since then isn’t so much the systemic failures, it’s the instances of individual cruelty to patients. Bereaved parents repeatedly told the Ockenden report about a lack of compassion from staff and some even said they were told they were responsible for their own child’s death. All of this amounts to a sense that the health services continually privileges the institution over the needs of patients at the most vulnerable times of their lives. When you consider how utterly inhumane that is, it becomes easier to understand how the NHS could contain a monster like Letby.” (See here for details on the Ockenden saga.)
– Alys Denby, Editor, CapX, in a weekly letter to subscribers of that platform. Denby writes about Lucy Letby, a nurse convicted last week of murdering a number of babies in a NHS hospital.
Monsters can flourish in certain institutions, and it strikes me that those that are treated as near-sacred institutions provide cover for them. The NHS needs to be nuked from high orbit for various reasons, and these scandals surely add to the list.
“Arms contractors get lumped in with tobacco, oil, alcohol and other so-called `sin stocks’ that are regarded as a threat to society. Yet, Ukraine’s predicament has shown that the biggest threat to Western freedom is Putin himself and without the West’s support for Kyiv, Russia may have been able to continue its imperial march beyond Ukrainian territory, further into Europe. City minister Andrew Griffith and defence procurement minister James Cartilidge have warned perfectly reasonably that the UK’s long-term security is being put at risk by the Square Mile’s growing aversion to defence stocks.”
– Ben Marlow, Daily Telegraph (£)
“Really, think about this: A 4.6 billion-year-old planet with an 8000-mile diameter, with a molten core (heat, etc.), with an atmosphere that is only 50 miles/240,000ft thick (being rather generous), that orbits a star only 93 million miles away with 330,000 times the earth’s mass and that emits enough radiation to burn your naked ass in 30 minutes, is having its weather unalterably changed over the course of the next 5/10/15 years (whatever it is now) by the presence of a weak greenhouse gas, CO2, that happens to now be at its lowest level in damn near the entire history of the planet — a history punctuated by global glaciations while that weak greenhouse gas was far higher than it is now — and that also happens to be the basis of plant life (and therefore atmospheric oxygen), a gas whose greenhouse effect is dwarfed by that of water vapor (on a planet with a surface area that consists of 70% water), and that geologically is currently in an interglacial period. The models that generated this political bullshit have predicted nothing correctly — not sea level change, polar ice cover, or weather.”
– Mark Rippetoe. Mr Rippetoe is a strength training coach, based in Wichita Falls, Texas, and a pioneering figure in what is called barbell weight training. (Full disclosure: I use his methods and have got results.) Here he is in full Texan “growl” mode here. He’s also, in my view, very funny and a real character. We need more like him.
“One of the few sensible things Noam Chomsky ever said was that if you want to understand the world, read the New York Times backwards; that is, start at the end of the story and read up.”
– Steven F Hayward, making this comment in a long and damning critique of “climate crisis” viewpoints and suppressors of dissent.
(Thanks to Instapundit for the pointer.)
Anyone who gloated about the “de-banking” of Nigel Farage over his account will now realise, or they should have anyway, that the sword is double-edged:
Monzo initially refused to tell Ms Miller why her “True and Fair” party account would be closed in September. After the BBC contacted the bank about the case, it said it did not allow political party accounts and had made a mistake in allowing it to be opened. Monzo said it recognised the experience would have been “frustrating for the customer and we’re sorry for that”.
It is too easy to roll the eyes, and say “karma is a bitch”. What appears to be the case is that, as discussed in my post here, and in the comments, we just don’t have a fully free market banking system in the UK and much of the world today. The next time you read some idiot going on about “unbridled capitalism” or “neoliberalism”, point this out to them.
(Updates with correction about the dossier. Thanks to eagle-eyed readers for the pointer!)
A few days ago, Patrick Crozier of this parish wrote about the decision by Coutts, a UK bank that is part of NatWest Group, to end an account of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage. At the time, Farage speculated he may have been targeted for cancellation of this account (he was offered a retail, mass-market NatWest account instead) because he was what is called a Politically Exposed Person (PEP), or that someone had flagged him following allegations (which he denies) of receiving lots of money from Russian-backed state media, and he also wondered whether his role in driving Brexit, and his scepticism about a climate crisis, etc, were factors. (Here are some of my comments on the case.)
In the following days, the former CEO of NatWest told a BBC journalist that a reason for the debanking of Farage was that he lacked the funds to justify a particular Coutts account. The BBC journalist ran a story; this was a clear breach of client confidentiality – also possibly a serious regulatory/criminal offence – and Alison Rose, the CEO, resigned this week. Peter Flavel, the Coutts CEO, has also resigned.
It also turned out that NatWest had compiled a dossier about Farage, which was sent to him after he requested it and he later shared this with the Daily Telegraph newspaper, showing that his political views and associations – including friendship with tennis ace Novak Djokovic – were reasons to suspect that Farage was a bad egg, and his “values” did not “align” with those of NatWest. NatWest has championed ESG investing, diversity, equity and inclusion, to a degree that puts it out front of other banks. NatWest is 38.6 per cent owned by the UK government. In the furore about its treatment of Farage – now a presenter on GB News – Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and other ministers, and yes, even columnists in the Guardian, have argued that the treatment of Farage was beyond the pale.
The reputation of Coutts and NatWest has been damaged. Coutts is a “posh” bank, supposedly used by the UK Royal Family – for whatever that’s worth – and in days of yore, having a Coutts account was a bit of a brag point. Well, no longer.
Meanwhile, in the US, the banking group Chase has shut an account of a businessman and those of his relations because, as far as I can tell, he has been a prominent critic of US vaccine policy and the policy response to the pandemic. There is the disgraceful Canadian case of the government freezing accounts of people donating to truckers protesting about vaccine mandates. The PayPal account of the Free Speech Union was closed (PayPal eventually overturned that decision.)
The “debanking” of people for the offence of holding the “wrong” views appears to be a general trend. At HSBC, in what I consider the most shocking act so far, earlier this year it was reported that the UK-headquartered bank, which does most of its business in Asia, had blocked pension payments to Hong Kong dissidents who fled the jurisdiction following Beijing’s national security crackdown. In 2020, when China imposed its law on Hong Kong, HSBC and Standard Chartered, another UK-listed bank, issued public statements supporting this law. So much for their concerns about “sustainability”, “inclusion” or all the other cant expressions of modern finance.
Even so, the optimist in me hopes that these cases, especially the NatWest/Farage one, might signal a high watermark for this sort of nonsense. The mask is well and truly off. People, not just those on the Right side of politics, can see what is going on.
People don’t have a “right” to a bank account, any more than they do to “free” healthcare, but they have the freedom to go about their lawful business unmolested. Now, in conditions of laissez faire capitalism, competition would weed out the idiots and ensure people could have a choice of bank services, with even the most eccentric or troublesome individuals being able to conduct financial affairs, even if with just cash. But we don’t have such a situation. We have a banking system umbilically linked to the State, fed on cheap central bank funny money, resting on a set of monopoly fiat currencies, and hedged by regulations, and as a result, stuffed with people whose main function is compliance with this or that rule, not focusing on building value. The upper reaches of these banks are filled with mediocrities who shuffle between private and public sectors with alarming ease, and who know all the right words.
Farage is an excellent campaigner and he knows how to get a message across. He does not respond well to slights. NatWest chose the wrong man to antagonise and be rude about. Maybe, as investors contemplate the falling share price of NatWest, and the tarnished image of Coutts, they’ll realise that indulging political prejudices instead of doing an honest job is not survivable. Maybe, just maybe, this may be the beginning of the end of the idiocy sweeping through the commercial world. As interest rates go up, and the zombification of corporate life ends after over a decade of QE, the harsh realities of making a profit return to the fore. As Allister Heath argues in the Daily Telegraph today, Milton Friedman’s attacks on the foolishness of corporate “social responsibility” become more relevant by the day.
“Today’s DEI and ESG grievance industries are blowin’ in the wind. Three steps to redemption: Forget merit and striving for the highest level. Push equity over excellence. Feel virtuous. There are uproars because we don’t have enough female crash-test dummies—or paper straws, trigger warnings, unisex bathrooms, wind farms, disarmed police, censored songs or sidewalk tents for the `unhoused.’ These are vacuous 21st-century versions of protest songs. Feels good. Does nothing. Greta Thunberg’s “How Dare You?” topped the charts.”
– Andy Kessler, WSJ ($).
What I like about this article is that it shows how uncreative, indeed often vacuous, many of those who are making so much noise in the public square of opinion are. I mean, what the hell have any of them created that, you might think, will be marvelled over in 50 years’ time? Name one business process, invention, life-changing discovery, major work of art, great novel, work of sculpture, great piece of architecture, new sporting contest, anything. Take all the time you need. (I am not sure that entities such as Bitcoin, blockchain, 3-D printing, reusable rockets or AI count as these are from hated science, which comes from evil Western civilisation.) And that’s a problem, because the disconnect between the “culture wars” racket and the actual, positive stuff going on is becoming more and more chasmic.
Thanks to Instapundit for the pointer.
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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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