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The last day of the year is often a time for regrets.* However great our achievements, there are always things that we could have got done during the year but just – somehow – didn’t. Or we did them, but embarrassingly late. Peter Hague extends the idea to humanity as a species:
Silver chloride and ammonia have been produced since antiquity, and the camera obscura is similarly ancient. The only real tech barrier to photography was a lens to allow enough light in to form an image – and Europe has been able to make them for about 800 years. Medieval science just overlooked the idea.
If the right knowledge had been found out, we could now have photographs of Tudor soldiers displaying the body of Richard III, Columbus and his crew ready to depart, and London before the great fire.
Mechanically powered moving pictures may well have followed, and you might be able to see silent film of the US founding fathers.
That the available technologies were not combined for centuries is to me a catastrophic loss of information.
The comments to that tweet add stirrups, wheelbarrows, moveable type, long-distance signalling and many other inexplicably delayed technological advances to the list of missed opportunities.
Bah humbug to the lot of ’em. A load of pointless whining about trivialities. If you ask me what things humanity has to reproach itself for not having invented earlier, I robustly answer, “Zero!”
*Or it bloody well ought to be, anyway. If you are capable of going to a New Year’s party and drunkenly singing “Regrets, I’ve had a few / But then again too few to mention” and not immediately mentioning a long list of regrets, buzz off back to your home planet and leave us humans to enjoy ourselves in our own fashion.
Richard Sennett’s article in the Guardian, “McCarthyism stalked my family. Its paranoia contains a lesson for Trump’s second term” is well titled, but, as usual, the lesson is not the one the Left thinks it is.
Professor Sennett’s article treats the Second Red Scare as if it were simply an eruption of irrational hatred. This treatment of the McCarthy era was the standard one when I was young, but feels quaint now. The Venona Project established that when Senator Joe McCarthy claimed that many senior people in the American federal government were Soviet agents, he was right. The link takes you to a 2015 post by Patrick Crozier that I recommend you read. I also recommend you read Niall Kilmartin’s comment – McCarthy was right, but he was not a nice man. Professor Sennett is correct to say this about how McCarthy and Roy Cohn chose their targets:
They attacked public figures often arbitrarily, but if they met with resolute resistance, they tended to move on and find other targets. People such as the playwright Arthur Miller repelled McCarthyite charges through vociferous counterattacks, while more compromising ex-commies such as the choreographer Jerome Robbins suffered sustained persecution. My uncle, threatened by the FBI, turned the tables by conjuring up personal injury lawsuits naming the agents who menaced him; the FBI then lost interest in his case. Cohn thought of commie-hunting as a matter of profit and loss, pursued only so long as there could be a benefit to the persecutor. If not, ideology did not drive him to persist.
“They attacked public figures often arbitrarily, but if they met with resolute resistance, they tended to move on and find other targets.” Well observed mate, but you didn’t have to wait until the eve of Trump’s second term before making the parallel. Trump did nothing McCarthyite when he was president the first time, and I see no good reason to suppose he will be any different when he becomes president a second time. Professor Sennett, where were you in 2020 when your observations about how political witch-hunts work might have helped people who actually were being targeted in the same way as your parents were? What you are describing – the orgiastic yet opportunistic denunciations of individuals, with their degree of guilt a secondary consideration; the digging up of long-abandoned political flirtations; the way that apologies only excite the mob further – that is not Trumpism. That is Wokism.
I’m not a huge fan of David Lammy, but when the Foreign Secretary and MP for Tottenham sends a tweet on Christmas Eve saying, “To all of my constituents and everyone beyond, I wish you a joyful and peaceful break and a very merry Christmas,” I mentally return his good wishes. OK, I don’t have any constituents, unless you count oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus and assorted other elements, but you know what I mean.
His fellow Labour MP Zarah Sultana is having none of that. She replied,
“Does that include the Palestinian people suffering genocide and being killed with British-made weapons, David?”
To all our readers and everyone beyond, I wish you a joyful and peaceful break and a very merry Christmas.
“I’m BACK. I’m not as back as the Trump folks; they’re SO back. I’m just back.”
The senator from Kentucky is on fine form. Put the mince pies on to warm and read the whole thread.
A writer going by the name “Gurwinder” produces a popular Substack blog. In the following piece Gurwinder writes thoughtfully about the experience of discovering that one of his fans was a cold-blooded murderer:
“The Riddle of Luigi Mangione: My interactions with the alleged CEO assassin”
Quote:
We interacted on social media several times afterward, and each time he seemed as polite and thoughtful as he’d been in our chat. As the summer ended, I largely withdrew from social media to focus on my book, so I didn’t notice Luigi had vanished.
And then, a few months later, Brian Thompson was shot dead.
Many people celebrated the murder, mocking the victim and lionizing the killer. Some were frustrated that health insurance cost so much, and some were outraged that they or a loved one had been denied medical claims. For this they blamed Thompson, the CEO of the US’s largest health insurance company.
But while thousands reacted with laughter emojis to Thompson’s murder, and with love-heart emojis to his alleged murderer, I was sickened. Vigilantism is always wrong. If you celebrate someone gunning down a defenceless person in the street, then you advocate for a world in which this is an acceptable thing for anyone to do. You in fact advocate for a world in which a stranger can decide that you’re also a bad person, and gun you down in the street. In such a world, I promise you, your health insurance would cost much more.
The murder would’ve been shocking even if I didn’t know the murderer. But when Luigi was revealed as the suspect, everything became surreal. My mind raced back to our chat, searching for clues he could’ve done this. The only thing that stuck out was when Luigi briefly mentioned healthcare in the US was expensive, and said we Britons were lucky to have a socialized National Health Service. But even this statement, by itself, gave no indication Luigi was capable of what he was being accused of.
When someone is found to have committed murder, friends and relatives will usually say things like “I can’t believe it, he seemed like such a nice guy.” I instinctively said the same thing about Luigi. But as the shock faded and my wits returned, I ceased to be surprised. I’ve long known that people who are capable of great kindness also tend to be capable of great cruelty, because both extremes are often animated by the same crazed impulsivity. It’s why many of the people celebrating the murder are those who self-identify as “compassionate” leftists. And it’s why most of history’s greatest evils were committed by people who thought they were doing good.
(Emphasis added by me, although Gurwinder himself has chosen to highlight this passage.)
The Observer view on Labour’s plans to reform education is that the “government needs to go further on pay and workload if it is to retain high-quality teachers in schools”:
“. . . schools in England have been facing a worsening teacher for over a decade, and pupil to teacher ratios have risen, particularly in secondary schools. Last year, the teaching workforce grew by fewer than 300 teachers. Too few teachers makes it harder for those in the profession to do their jobs well – further adding to workload and behaviour management pressures, and undermining retention even more.”
I was once a teacher. I have been married to a now-retired teacher for decades. I have met a lot of teachers. The view of almost every teacher, and, equally relevantly, every former teacher that I have ever met was that pay and workload scarcely mattered in themselves. The pay is quite good. The uworkload for a conscientious teacher can be heavy during term time, but, as someone rightly points out every time teachers whinge about how long they spend marking homework and planning lessons, the workload is close to zero during school holidays. What really drives teachers out of the profession is the thing that the Observer editorial mentions as an afterthought, “behaviour management pressures”.
The House of Commons report to which the Observer article links says this:
Pupil behaviour
We recognise that teachers feel pupil behaviour has worsened in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic and we are concerned that this is driving teachers away from the profession as well as dissuading prospective teachers. Valuable work is now being done by Behaviour Hubs to help schools and teachers address pupil behaviour and we recommend that the Department expand this programme to increase capacity. The Department must also reinforce the importance of positive and effective partnerships between schools, pupils and parents in addressing and improving pupil behaviour and attendance
I expect the work of Behaviour Hubs is of some value, like the work of the Behaviour Units, Behaviour Centres, and other Behaviour Things that preceded them over the decades. I truly admire those teachers who choose to deal with the most badly-behaved children, and spreading the word about better techniques can make some difference. But none of these initiatives solved the teacher retention crises of the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s or 2010s, as these Hubs will not solve the crisis of the 2020s.
As for “The Department must also reinforce the importance of positive and effective partnerships between schools, pupils and parents in addressing and improving pupil behaviour and attendance”, I think it would be better if the Department reinforced the importance of dissolving ineffective partnerships. End them at the request of any party. If a so-called partnership between school, pupil and parent is not working, let it die. In no other area of life is an association maintained by force on one or more of the parties called a “partnership”.
In an ideal world, I would like that philosophy of voluntary association to apply across the education of all but the youngest children, but even in this world, it would do a hell of a lot of good for it to apply where the so-called partnership between school, parent and pupil is obviously a rotting corpse.
Pupils behave better if they know their schools can expel them for bad behaviour. We used to know this as a society, but the threat of expulsion has been neutered by making the process so difficult that schools instead strive to pass the bad kids around all the local schools like counterfeit money. Teachers behave better if they know their pupils can leave. Private schools still do know this, and self-employed teachers know it very well.
Most humans enjoy helping others to learn. Those who join the teaching profession do so because they want to do this good thing even more than most people do. But there can be no joy in teaching without a willing learner. It doesn’t have to be constant happy-smiley-type willingness for years on end, just a basic willingness to be there.
“Silence on cousin marriage is the unspeakable face of liberalism”, writes Matthew Syed in the Times (archived version here).
Mr Syed starts with a discussion of the self-censorship on this issue:
Let me start by telling you about Dr Patrick Nash, a somewhat shy legal academic who in 2017 came across an intriguing finding. He noticed that much of the “extremism” emanating from Pakistani communities seemed to have a “clan” component. The perpetrators were linked not just through ideology or religion but by family ties stretching through generations. He noticed something else too: these communities were cemented together by cousin marriage, a common practice in Pakistani culture. By marrying within small, tightknit groups, they ensure everything is kept within the baradari, or brotherhood — property, secrets, loyalty — binding them closer together while sequestering them from wider society.
At this point Dr Nash hadn’t come to understand the genetic risks, the patriarchal oppression and the bloc voting, nor the growing evidence that rates of cousin marriage strongly correlate with corruption and poverty, but — like any good scholar — he thought he’d do a bit more digging.
But then something odd happened: several academics invited him to the pub for a “drink and chat”. He thought nothing of it, but it turned out to be an informal tribunal. “It was put to me that I might consider another line of inquiry that would be more ‘culturally sensitive’, less likely to provide ‘ammo for the right’ and less likely to ‘make life more difficult for myself’ as a junior, untenured academic,” he told me. “It was sinister.”
You might dismiss this as a one-off or perhaps the testimony of an overly sensitive scholar, but bear with me. You see, I sought to study this area during a sabbatical last year. It’s a subject close to home: when I went to Pakistan as a youngster to meet the extended family, my dad half-joked that he could arrange a marriage with a cousin. He said it lightheartedly but the conversation stuck with me. As I grew up, I kept noticing stories that revealed the genetic risks of cousin marriage and how it could lead to cultural separation. It seemed an area ripe for deeper research.
But I quickly discovered that researchers wouldn’t return emails or calls. When I got through to one geneticist, he said: “I can’t go there.” It was like hitting a succession of ever-higher brick walls.
In the next paragraphs, Mr Syed gives other examples of scientific self-censorship. Both libertarians and many traditional conservatives will share his outrage at this, as will many left wingers. But Syed then goes on to draw a conclusion that in libertarian terms sorts the men from the boys:
Eventually I wrote a column calling for a ban on cousin marriage in April last year. I was assisted by Nash, who had continued his research despite being warned off (his trump card was that his salary was paid not by his university but by the Woolf Institute, an independent body committed to free speech). To my surprise, the piece became one of the most-read stories of the year and was picked up in Scandinavia. Not long afterwards Norway, Denmark and Sweden announced plans to prohibit cousin marriage and Tennessee passed legislation.
Last week the movement picked up momentum when the Tory MP Richard Holden gave a brave speech in parliament calling for a ban. He was strongly opposed by Iqbal Mohamed, one of the independent “Gaza bloc” of MPs, who argued that cousin marriage is a good thing since it “strengthens family bonds”, perhaps the most stunning piece of (unintentional) satire in modern political history. Mohamed’s intervention, however, seemed to do the trick. After first implying that it had an open mind on a ban, the government changed its position to “no plans to legislate”, doubtless fearful of losing more seats to the Gaza bloc. I suspect it will come to regret this cowardly retreat.
But the other striking aspect of the debate was the sinister influence of scientific malpractice. MPs on all sides kept referring to the genetic risks of cousin marriage as “double” those of relationships between unrelated couples. This “fact” is endemic throughout the media, from the BBC to The Telegraph, and for good reason: journalists trust what scientists tell them. But the stat isn’t true — indeed, it’s absurd. When inbreeding persists through generations (when cousins get married who are themselves the children of cousins), the risks are far higher, which is why British Pakistanis account for 3.4 per cent of births nationwide but 30 per cent of recessive gene disorders, consanguineous relationships are the cause of one in five child deaths in Redbridge and the NHS hires staff specifically to deal with these afflictions.
Tragic and terrible. But if you once give the State the power to forbid certain couples to have children the consequences might well be more terrible yet.
“Jeremy Corbyn egging: Brexiteer jailed for 28 days”, the BBC reported on 25th March 2019.
“Woman sentenced for hurling milkshake at Farage”, the BBC reports today.
Notice that the BBC report about Jeremy Corbyn’s attacker specified in the headline exactly how long John Murphy was sent to jail for. In contrast, today’s BBC report about Nigel Farage’s attacker, Victoria Thomas Bowen, just says she was “sentenced”. Most people read only the headlines of news stories, and therefore are probably left with the impression that she was sentenced to jail time, as John Murphy was for a similar crime. She wasn’t. Victoria Thomas Bowen was given a suspended sentence.
Oh, and one mustn’t forget that she must complete 15 “rehabilitation activity requirement days”, which usually means something like an anger management course, and pay Farage a massive victim surcharge of £154.
Two British MPs, Jo Cox and Sir David Amess, have been assassinated in recent years. After both murders we heard fervent declarations that attacks on politicians were utterly unacceptable in Our Democracy. Of course we now know that neither Murphy or Thomas-Bowen intended to kill or seriously injure their victims. But when a person is struck by something thrown at them, they do not know at the moment of impact that the missile is harmless.
UPDATE: When I first saw people on Twitter pointing out the judge’s South Asian name, I dismissed the comments as the sort of snide racism that bedevils right wing Twitter. However Toby Young has assembled a list of six judgements by Senior District Judge Tan Ikram that are more than enough to give a rational person cause to doubt his impartiality.
He was last in the news six months ago:
A senior judge has been handed a formal misconduct warning for ‘liking’ a Linkedin post calling for a free Palestine, shortly before he oversaw the criminal trial of three women who displayed paraglider images at a protest.
Deputy Chief Magistrate Tan Ikram found defendants Heba Alhayek, 29, Pauline Ankunda, 26, and Noimutu Olayinka Taiwo, 27, guilty of a terror offence at a pro-Palestinian march in central London, a week after Hamas had carried out the October 7 attack in Israel.
The judge’s handling of the case came in for criticism after he handed conditional discharges to the women and commented that they had “well learned” their lesson.
His impartiality was then called into question when it emerged he had previously ‘liked’ the LinkedIn message from a barrister which read: “Free Free Palestine. To the Israeli terrorist both in the United Kingdom, the United States, and of course Israel you can run, you can bomb but you cannot hide – justice will be coming for you.”
(While I was making this update, commenter John independently brought up the topic of Judge Ikram’s record.)
Danny Cohen was once the Director of BBC Television. When he writes in the Telegraph about the way that the BBC currently reports on Jewish and Israeli issues, one can sense the anger of someone who has been let down by former colleagues. In his latest article he writes,
This week the BBC has been reporting live from Syria as the wretched Assad regime collapsed. It is not clear yet whether Syria is destined for a democratic future or will fall prey to jihadists previously affiliated with the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
It seems though that the BBC is optimistic. Reporting live from Damascus, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet said the following: ‘‘This is one of the most diverse countries in the Middle East with multiple Christian and Muslim sects. And you can see it here in the Old City, all the different Quarters – Jewish, Muslim, Christian. They’re all here. They want to believe they have a space now as Syria embarks on this new chapter.”
For anyone with the slightest knowledge of the 20th century history of Jewish people in the Arab world, this statement is both ignorant and offensive.
There are believed to be three Jews left in Syria. That’s right, three Jews. The rest fled for their lives. After Syria gained independence from France in 1946, Jewish people and their property were repeatedly targeted. In 1947, the Syrian government organised and encouraged Arab inhabitants of Aleppo to attack Jews. Pogroms followed. Synagogues, Jewish schools and orphanages were destroyed. From that point on it was clear that Jews were not welcome in Syria. The community fled to Israel and elsewhere and now there are just those three Jews left in the whole country.
Related post: Examples of spectacular historical ignorance. I will take the liberty of quoting one of my own comments to that post:
…the holes in the knowledge of innocent dupes are frequently – in fact almost always – the evidence that someone in the past succeeded in deliberately fostering a myth, or blanking out a truth.
“Argentina’s Javier Milei has made a horrible mistake”, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph. The article can also be read here.
A year after his landslide victory, Milei is still not letting market forces set the peso exchange rate, and it now looks as if his crawling dollar peg will continue into the middle of next year. He has jammed the process of macroeconomic cleansing.
Argentina is now among the most expensive countries in the world, close to Norway on the Big Mac index. It costs almost twice as much to buy a hamburger in Buenos Aires as it does in Tokyo, even though the pampas are full of cattle, while the rice terraces of Japan are not.
The peso is as overvalued today as it has ever been in Argentine history, or very close. This has suppressed inflation temporarily to a monthly rate of 2.4pc – so has economic contraction – but has in the process strangled the traded sectors of the textile, shoe and toy industries. Car parts, electronics, metallurgy, and heavy manufacturing are the next dominoes.
[…]
He should have taken his chainsaw to currency and capital controls on his first day in office. He is now trapped. Either he claws back lost competitiveness by means of deflationary wage cuts for year after year – nigh impossible in any democracy – or he lets the peso find its level and unleashes a fresh inflation, shattering his reputation at home and abroad as the Friedmanite purist who tamed prices.
A commenter called Krassi Stoyanova says, “Well, Ambrose, having listened to Milei and his plans for the Argentine economy, I have far more confidence in him than I do you.”
I want to agree. But, truth to tell, I do not have a good understanding of this branch of economics. Some of you guys do. What do you think?
Just not in the way the Guardian thinks.
The Guardian view on Romania’s annulled election: a wake-up call for democracies
The unprecedented move by the country’s constitutional court last week to annul the results of the first round of the presidential election, amid allegations of Russian interference, is a landmark moment in the increasingly embattled arena of eastern European politics. The decision followed an astonishing surge to first place by a far-right admirer of Vladimir Putin, who had been polling in low single digits until the eve of the election. According to declassified intelligence reports, Călin Georgescu benefited from a vote that was manipulated by various illicit means, including cyber-attacks and a Russian-funded TikTok campaign. Analysts found that about 25,000 pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts became active only two weeks before the first-round vote.
What form did the “manipulation of the vote” by these cyber-attacks take? One would think the Guardian’s leader-writer would be clearer on this point. If it was something like changing the tallies on voting machines (I do not know if Romania even has voting machines), that absolutely would be illicit manipulation of the vote. No doubt Vladimir Putin would be delighted to literally falsify the numbers of votes cast for candidates in the Romanian election if he could, but did he? Give us evidence, or I am going to assume that these alleged cyber-attacks are of a piece with the 25,000 fake TikTok accounts – that is, not attacks at all, just the issuance of propaganda. As I have frequently said, Vladimir Putin belongs at the end of a rope. But that is because he is a mass-murderer, not because he gets a bunch of drudges and bots to say words on the internet.
When I was a kid, I used to turn the dial of our family’s radio to “Moscow” quite often. Radio Moscow wasn’t as good – by which I mean it wasn’t as bad – as Radio Tirana, whose announcer would say “Good night, dear listeners” in a strange voice eerily reminiscent of the evil Dr Crow in Carry On Spying, who I have just found out after half a century was not played by Hattie Jacques but by Judith Furse, only voiced by John Bluthal in order to sound more asexual. (The character is meant to be the forerunner of a race of artificially created superior beings who have gone beyond being male or female.) Neither the supervillainesque lady in Albania or the main Russian presenter, whose English accent was eerily good, had much luck in turning me communist. But I always thought that one of the things that made the UK a democracy was that I was perfectly free to turn the dial to Tirana or Moscow and let them try.
I saw this comment by Paul Marks to the previous post and thought, “This is huge. Why isn’t this story the main headline on every news outlet?”
It is being reported, somewhat less prominently than the Princess of Wales going to a carol concert. Heartwarming though that is, I would have thought that the fact that a Romanian court has annulled the first round of their presidential election because the Russians allegedly “ran a coordinated online campaign to promote the far-right outsider who won the first round” was bigger news.
So what if they did? Where did this idea come from that the people of a country are not allowed to watch, read or listen to foreigners attempting to persuade them how to vote? Well, certain foreigners at least – those who promote this information Juche never seem to have a problem with the European Union’s taxpayer-funded propagation of its opinion.
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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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