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“I’m not entirely sure what loving one’s body might mean, beyond the obvious off-colour jokes. But apparently, it’s something that one is supposed to proclaim as an accomplishment, a credential of progressivism. I have, however, noted that it tends to be announced by people whose declared triumph in this matter is not altogether convincing, and whose basis for doing so is generally much slimmer than they are.” – David Thompson. As a take-down of nonsense, this article is brutal. July 16th, 2024 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “After Butler, America has suddenly become a more Jacksonian nation. The shadow of Old Hickory looms larger than ever, and Donald Trump stands taller as his undisputed heir.” – Walter Russell Mead, WSJ ($) For those unfamiliar with the extraordinary politician and general, Andrew Jackson, check out this link for some biographies and studies. July 15th, 2024 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Some people are just too “clever by half” or lack a basic level of human empathy, despite playing the moral outrage card. I saw this comment on my Facebook page. To spare the guy (who is in the US) embarrassment, and as his comments were not meant to be fully public, I will not name him, and I suspect he’s not alone in taking this sort of line:
The penultimate sentence contains the seeds of this writer’s error (such as his words “passive recipient”), and a key point is that, in the writer’s way of thinking, Trump/other shooter victim should only be viewed as a victim. But the writer missed the point, and here is what I wrote in response:
I would go beyond what I said to this person on FB by making a broader point. Today, we live in an age when it is often widely held among supposed intellectuals, scientists and the like that we don’t have free will, and that we are, in varying ways, the consequences of internal and external forces we cannot understand or control. As a result, it is – as the writer I responded to claims – no cause for praise in how anyone reacts to said forces. To have free will is, according to this point of view, an illusion, albeit perhaps a necessary one for mental health and maybe also an aspect of biological evolution. (The latter has the risk of being a “just-so” story explanation.) But if free will is nothing more than a handy, surface appearance, then it is hard to see how it has much value, much cash value, from evolutionary terms. After all, knowing you are not the author of your actions might, for some people, be comforting, rather than a nightmare. And think of how certain well-known writers, such as Sam Harris, argue that free will is an illusion and that, for example, criminals are ill, primarily, rather than wicked. The flipside of this is that a person who shows courage, either physical or mental, gets no praise because, on the determinist view, he had no choice in the matter. Everything, including the words I type right now, I had no choice over. None. We are all in the Matrix. But this is self-contradictory. If determinism is true and judgement is pre-determined, how can we know the truth of determinism if we had no choice but to do so anyway? I think we know from introspection that the sense that we are making a choice to focus our minds or not, to set the course of how we want to think about something (or not), is real as anything is in the universe from an empirical sense. To think is to choose; thinking and volition are intertwined so much as to be one and the same. If introspection is an illusion, then so is sight, smell, taste, hearing, etc. But oddly, determinists rarely in my experience challenge these senses’ validity in conveying reality. Back to Mr Trump’s way of reacting to the would-be assassin and others like him: I think that Mr Trump, whatever else one can say about him, had the kind of character, a character that for better or worse he has developed, to want to assert himself in the face of danger. That’s not always smart or fashionable in these weird times, but it is there. There is a sort of Andrew Jackson-style baddass mind-set that came to the fore on Saturday. (Here are some excellent places to look if you want to understand, as I do, why I think free will is real. See this book, by Christian List, for example, or this or this one by Alfred Mele. And finally this, by Lee Pierson and Monroe Trout, for those who want to burrow deep into the evolutionary argument.) Addendum: The writer is also denouncing the idea that Mr Trump being shot is somehow proof of his virtue. However, I doubt anyone thinks that. Of course, Mr Trump does threaten the agendas of a lot of people, foreign and domestic, but that is not the nub of my point here, although I am sure commenters will want to mention these issues. July 15th, 2024 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
A conclusion is hard to escape: America suffers from an incompetent leadership class. Its problem isn’t ruthlessness but softness, its inability to deal with the world without a media that constantly lies to make it feel better about itself. What we are learning is that much of what Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds sometimes calls the “gentry class” is just not that good, competent, honest, or insightful. And more and more people have noticed. July 7th, 2024 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mark Champion, at Bloomberg ($) nicely skewers the solipsism of those who imagine that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “provoked” and therefore partly the fault of the West.
He has a lot on his plate in the next few months, but Sir Keir Starmer, the new UK prime minister (gulp) will need to grasp this point, along with many others. July 5th, 2024 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
JD Tuccille articulates, brilliantly, one of the main reasons I am a classical liberal who belives in limited, constrained and small government:
The idea of an all-powerful, benevolent Daddy federal state is a lot harder to sustain if it appears the head of it is not playing with a full deck of cards, or even knows he’s in a casino.
Exactly. Let’s not forget that the size of the federal debt did not shrink under Mr Trump. And he’s no Calvin Coolidge. Alas. The final paragraph is right on the money:
It appears too few in the commentariat seem to join the dots between the “aren’t the presidential candidates/political classes awful?” with “and perhaps we should constrain government and make it do less” sort of viewpoint. I wonder how much the Founders thought about the problems of an ageing president who was losing his mind, of an opponent such as Trump, and other sort of characters, when they composed the architecture of the republic, with its checks, balances and principles. But at times like these, all the abuse that gets thrown at the Founders (some of them kept slaves, etc) needs to be put in context, and that people should be grateful for their wisdom and understanding of the need for government to be restrained. We could use a bit of that mindset around the world. July 2nd, 2024 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
“However, the implication that a country seeking a Western-focused future can be construed as having brought its fate upon itself because of the assailant’s paranoia is an odd argument to be advanced by a champion of national sovereignty. The Russian bear may well have been poked, but history has taught us that despotic dictators cannot be appeased.” An editorial in the Daily Telegraph (£) today. The author is bemused by Reform leader Nigel Farage’s continued assertion that someone (NATO/EU/West/insert as desired) are to blame for encouraging Putin to invade a sovereign nation state. As the leader writer observes later on, it seems rather curious that a champion of national sovereignty, as Mr Farage claims to be, should regard Ukraine as little more than buffer defence terrain for Russia, and that its own diplomatic ambitions as a nation should be dismissed. I find it more than a little odd, and it is one of the reasons I won’t vote Reform on 4 July. Perry de Havilland wrote back when Russia invaded Ukraine that there is, on the Right as much as much of the Left, a curious desire to make things like wars to be always matters that are about us, which in a way also denies moral agency and choice to actors in many countries around the world. This is a reflexive thing, and ironically, often held by people who claim to hold hard-headed realist views on foreign policy, and yet there is a sort of naivete to it, in my view. June 25th, 2024 | 69 comments - (Comments are closed)
Eye-catching data from this article, by Nicolai Heering, on UK anti-money laudering regulations (AMLR) in the UK:
And
The article refers to this study from the Institute of Economic Affairs about money laundering controls, debanking, and the perverse consequences of forms of regulation. Part of the problem, in my view, is that because banks are not purely free enterprise institutions, but are umbilically linked to the central bank as a lender of last resort, and hedged around and protected by all manner of rules, they are almost obliged to treat clients poorly. There is nothing resembling client confidentiality. Under AML rules, bank staff are required, on pain of serious penalties, to report supposedly suspicious transactions. It means that in many cases that people are obliged to prove they aren’t doing anything wrong. And add to that the cookie-cutter approach embedded in a lot of modern “regtech” software, it is easy to see how you can end up with stories of tens of thousands of innocent people “de-banked” for no good reason. The story last summer of how Reform leader Nigel Farage (he wasn’t leader then, but a GB News presenter) was de-banked by Coutts, (see my related thoughts here) and how evidence surfaced that he was ousted in part because the bank appeared to dislike his views, and also because of possible issues with his being a Politically Exposed Person, hasn’t vanished. There remain serious issues about how banks treat clients. And with a Labour government likely days away from achieving office, I doubt some of the more outrageous examples of “debanking” will be dealt with. As ever, the current Conservative government appears to have missed an opportunity to take decisive action. June 24th, 2024 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
“It is true that taxes and prices have risen. But this did not happen in a vacuum. For much of 2020 and a chunk of 2021, we paid people to stay home, and printed money with wild abandon. What the hell did we think would be the consequences?” June 24th, 2024 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
“When sweeping, idealistic dreams trickle down into sales and marketing channels, AI’s potential uses become unclear. Framing AI as a general-purpose Swiss Army knife for productivity inevitably leads to paralysis for its end users: Where do you even start with a technology that can do everything?” – Parmy Olsen, Bloomberg ($) Along with others, Olsen is freaked out by the skyrocketing ascent of chip-maker Nvidia’s stock price. June 21st, 2024 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Lord (David) Frost is in suitably scornful form this morning in the Daily Telegraph (£). He takes aim at the idea, set out in yesterday’s Labour manifesto, that economic growth can be lifted from its torpor by a mass of councils, committees, agencies and the like, all directed from Whitehall but working, somehow or other, in “partnership” with private sector firms. As he notes, Starmer and the rest of them have learned all the wrong lessons from lockdowns, and in fact they liked the lockdowns precisely because of the ability to order the public around, to mark their movements and somehow command innovations (vaccines) by clapping one’s hands together. The headline of the article is excellent: Lockdown is the inspiration behind Labour’s ‘plan’ for growth. Excerpt:
I cannot resist parallels with where we were in 1964. The Conservatives, led at the time by Alec Douglas-Home (a much underestimated politician and a sharply intelligent man), appeared exhausted and “out of touch”. There was this whole thing about the “grass moors” – pictures of toffs shooting game birds on Scottish estates, and speaking in absurd public school accents. The times they were a changin’: the Beatles were exploding, George Best was transforming the world of football, Sean Connery was on the big screen doing battle against Spectre, and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were making us laugh on TV; consumer goods were more accessible in our shops, and Labour sought to go for the “white heat of the technological revolution”. A lot of this was flim-flam, although some wasn’t. Harold Wilson, who smoked a pipe in public to appear more “sound”, apparently, did a lot of arguably good liberal things: censorship of literature more or less ended; the death penalty ended; homosexuality was decriminalised, divorce laws eased. Social conservatives may jib at this, but there was an aspect of genuine liberalism on parts of the Left that have vanished now in these “cancel culture” times. The downsides were still enormous: ugly buildings, the launch of the destruction of grammar schools and encouragement of egalitarian (and mostly bad) ideas in education. (This Dominic Sandbrook article gives a flavour.) We know how things ended. In 1967, there was a serious run on the pound in the foreign exchange markets (the UK was still part of the Bretton Woods system, which was ultimately underpinned by the dollar and the $ was still linked, however tenuously, to gold); attempts to rein in trade unions failed; spending on welfare and health rose. Horrid tower blocks were built to replace older housing, to the questionable benefit of the country. There was a “Brain Drain” – sky-high taxes on the “rich” meant that anyone of note in music, film, entertainment, commerce and industry lived abroad. By 1970 the wheels had come off. Wilson’s government appeared out of ideas, and its enthusiasm for central planning and control appeared as discredited as the Soviet Union. Throw in the turmoil abroad (Vietnam, end of Bretton Woods, the OPEC oil shock, racial and social mayhem in the US,) and things moved fast. Unfortunately, when the Tories were elected on a slim majority in 1970, a promise of radical reform under the horrible Edward Heath did not endure, and by 1974 the country was in deep trouble: strikes, power cuts, civil disorder, the nightmare of Northern Ireland. It wasn’t until 1979, with the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives, that matters improved. And for several years it was turbulent, and not a sure thing. Consider the parallels, even beyond the confines of the Labour manifesto: We have seen a relentless assault on “the rich”; and taxes are rising on them, and there is in the background the threat of a wealth tax, encouraging people who can to get out. The Labour Party wants to impose value added tax on private schools, consolidating the power of unions who hate any form of choice in education. There’s likely to be a lot of house building (something I broadly support), but one has to ask about the likely quality and appearance of it. And to go back to Lord Frost’s point, there is an inability, a sort of complete mental block, to think of bottom-up solutions by individuals doing their own thing to anything. Every problem, in the Labour mind, starts with what government can do about it. I am reminded of the theme of that excellent book, “Seeing Like A State, How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed”, by James C Scott. I doubt that Keir Starmer or his likely future Chancellor and finance minister, Rachel Reeves, have read it. The groundwork for this memory-holing of lessons from the past has been in evidence for some time. I think the 2008 financial crisis, and the way that a poisonous narrative was allowed to build around what caused it (evil bankers, deregulation, etc, when the causes were mostly about government), carries a lot of the blame for this. There’s also just a dreadful complacency among those who just assumed that arguments for free enterprise had been won and we can focus more on gender pronouns or so on. (I have seen plenty of comments like this from “social conservatives” who have even told me, at times, that public debt “does not matter” because immigration is so much more important.) What has happened is that the classical liberalism tradition has gone soft. I was struck by how, for example, you can go into a bookshop such as Waterstones in the UK and almost every tome on politics and economics will be banging on about the alleged evils of neo-liberalism and how such ideas rule the world. If only. (A book, Free Lunch Thinking, by Tom Bergin of Reuters, is one of the more intelligent ones, but it is full of questionable conclusions, such as its attacks on the idea that incentives matter, and has been nicely and politely taken apart by Kristian Niemietz of the IEA.) It is worth recounting all this to understand that while history never exactly repeats itself, it does rhyme. The 60s aren’t coming back as far as music, fashion and films are concerned (shame), but we are likely to get some of the other stuff. June 14th, 2024 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
“I am under no illusion that even the most passionate and articulate defence of classically liberal values would be an enormous vote winner. But in an election likely to return a Labour government who will, by their nature, proselytise about the good the state can do, and with a Conservative Party which has in recent years shown a frankly alarming tendency towards illiberalism, implementing sugar taxes and attempting to ban smoking forever. The country desperately needs a counterweight to slow our seemingly inevitable slide towards an ever expanding state. Even if the Tories don’t get completely annihilated at the ballot box they are likely to spend at least the next six months tearing themselves apart in a leadership election. The Lib Dems will be providing the real opposition for a while and they need to stand for something.” – Emma Revell, in CityAM. June 11th, 2024 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
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