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.
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“Why has the American center right disappeared from the ballot box?” asks Jan-Werner Müller in the Guardian. Along the way, he takes a minute to say this about Ronald Reagan:
Infamously, he kicked off his 1980 election campaign in Mississippi – close to the site where three civil rights activists had been murdered in 1964 – and endorsed “states’ rights”.
This line of thinking seems odd. Sixteen years had gone by between the murder of the civil rights activists – almost certainly a crime carried out by Democrats – and Reagan launching the Republican campaign at a place nearby. Evidently Professor Müller thinks that a place where a crime occurred must remain off-limits for political activity for longer than sixteen years, lest having a campaign event there be taken as endorsement of the crime. If one took seriously the argument made by Tim Walz and Hillary Clinton that the infamous pro-Nazi German-American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 meant that Trump’s rally in the same venue in 2024 was tainted by co-location, then the time for which a place must not be used for political activity after a crime or extremist political event would be at least 85 years. This would rule out almost all of America. Good thing the limit only seems to apply to Republicans.
Update: having written the post above, I found that the point I wanted to make today had already been made far better in 2011 by David Kopel, writing in the Volokh Conspiracy website (now at Reason magazine): “Reagan’s infamous speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi”.
“Donald Trump closes in on victory with two crucial swing-state wins”, reports the Guardian.
I am glad that lawfare and censorship did not prove to be winning tactics.
“Elderly litter picker who voluntarily cleans up local area fined for forgetting walking stick”, the Telegraph reports.
An elderly volunteer litter picker has been handed a fine for accidentally leaving his walking stick by the roadside.
Alan Davies was “shocked, angry and upset” to be penalised by Walsall Council when he forgot his cane in Aldridge, West Midlands, on Sept 6.
Mr Davies and his friends had been on their daily litter pick along Longwood Lane and Hayhead Wood.
The grandfather said he drove off, forgetting to pick up his walking stick and a bag with his cushion inside, which he had placed by the roadside.
Mr Davies claims Walsall Council tracked him down after trawling through local CCTV footage.
He said council officers found his address by using his car’s number plate and sent him the fine last week.
And this is typical:
Mr Davies’s neighbour Ann said: “£150 is a lot of money for a pensioner. You cannot speak to the council on the phone, it has to be [by] email. Not everyone has the internet. Hopefully when people realise what Alan is being put through the council will back down.”
In the end Walsall Council did rescind the fine, although the story does not say whether Mr Davies ever got his walking stick back.
Some aspects of this story reminded me of the raid a few days ago by multiple agents of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation on Mark and Daniela Longo’s home, which ended with the authorities killing a pet squirrel and raccoon. Why have officials in English-speaking countries become so sluggish in pursuing criminals but so dogged in the pursuit of harmless people? There has always been some incentive for cops and officials to go after someone who will not resist in preference to going after a criminal who might stab them, but why has it got so much worse in recent years? Perhaps it is because the number of bureaucrats has so multiplied that responsibility for a process is always divided.
Someone tweeting under the name of “Lyndon Baines Johnson”, a supporter of Kamala Harris, explains how he would like a Harris administration to deal with technological innovators:
Lyndon Baines Johnson
@lyndonbajohnson
If Harris wins, fairly high on the agenda should be finding new federal contractors so that SpaceX and Starlink are shown the door. -OS
8:05 PM · Nov 3, 2024
For all his grievous faults, the actual LBJ would have known how to describe that proposal in a few choice words. He wanted the Apollo program to succeed.
I was just old enough to read the blue sign bearing the word “POLICE” – and I thought my parents had gone mad. We were on a family walk, going past the local police station when, to my horror, my parents stopped. They stopped walking and stood outside the police station looking at the posters and casually talking about grown-up things. Didn’t they realise the peril we were in? Didn’t they understand that at any moment the door could be flung open and policemen could come rushing out to arrest us and drag us off to the cells?
Well, time went by and eventually my seven year-old self was able to chuckle at the foolish worries of six and a half. I realised that I had misunderstood what was being depicted in a fragment of Dixon of Dock Green that I had glimpsed despite it being on after my official bedtime. I came to understand that, whatever might have been the case in the time of King Herod or Henry VIII, that sort of thing didn’t happen nowadays. The authorities in modern, civilised countries do not randomly decide to ruin the lives of ordinary people.
The young couple who owned Peanut the squirrel and Fred the raccoon probably assumed the same thing.
Peanut, a squirrel made famous by his large and devoted Instagram following, has been euthanised just days after being seized by New York authorities.
The state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) raided the home of Mark Longo on Wednesday following complaints of potentially unsafe housing for the animal.
Earlier this week, Mr Longo pleaded with authorities for Peanut’s safe return, writing on Instagram that there was a “special place in hell” for the DEC.
Authorities, however, said that they put the animal down after he bit an official involved in his seizure. The DEC also said it had euthanised a raccoon named Fred that they took away during the raid from Mr Longo’s home.
The alternative possibility – that I was right to be fearful standing outside the police station all those years ago – is not pleasant to contemplate. As a twitter user called “Mason” said,
The squirrel isn’t just a squirrel
Peanut is for everyone who has ever feared that someone more powerful than you could walk into your home and take something that you absolutely cherish away from you, for absolutely no good reason, with no recourse
I know, I know. That’s three things. But there are two more items listed later in Peter Walker’s article for the Guardian, which he probably thought of as a list of things not to like about the newly elected Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch.
Although I have never called myself a Conservative, and have never joined a political party, I do like her. She is my local MP. I have written to her and got a reply that was clearly written with some thought. That is rare. Someone in my family used to be a member of the local Conservative party and I have met her several times at party events, at which she always came across as friendly and convivial. That said, I also like the fact that her smile is not jammed in the “on” position. In their current state the Tories need a leader who will fight – who “would cross the road to bite your ankles” as one of her admirers put it. Sir Keir Starmer had better put on thick socks.
Obviously, the incident in 2008 when Badenoch guessed the password of Harriet Harman’s website, hacked into it, and changed it to say that Harman had defected to the Tories and that everyone should vote for Boris Johnson as Mayor of London was an unspeakably wicked assault on Our Democracy and not funny at all.
In case you’re wondering, the apostrophe in the title is not a contraction for “is”. It marks the possessive and refers to the large amount of garbage in Puerto Rico. Apparently Puerto Rico’s landfill sites are overflowing, and this has been recognised as an environmental problem for years.
It would be amusing to do a whole post about the deficiencies of waste disposal in an unincorporated territory of the United States without ever mentioning what brought the subject to the forefront of my mind. I seek to amuse, so that is what I am going to do, although readers from the future who seek context might like to click on one or two of the names to which I link below.
I did a quick internet search for articles containing reference to “Puerto Rico” and “trash” or “garbage”, but containing no reference to “Hinchcliffe” or “Trump” or “Biden”. Here are some news reports from the last few years that demonstrate that Puerto Rico’s garbage problem is not new:
Trash Crisis Leaves Puerto Rico Near ‘the Brink’ – Global Press Journal, February 16th 2021.
Puerto Rico Landfills: Is the Problem Around Capacity or Noncompliance? – Waste360, August 7th 2019.
An island littered with trash: How Maria highlighted Puerto Rico’s poor waste management. Accuweather, 29th March, 2018 (“Maria” is a reference to Hurricane Maria.)
The following quite lengthy report was apparently published just today. I admire them for resisting the temptation to bring politics into it:
Puerto Rico Trash Problem: Understanding the Crisis and Working Toward Solutions – The Environmental Blog, October 30th 2024.
This video shows a group of women on a London tube train chanting, “Settlers, settlers, go back home, Palestine is not your home.” A minute later the racism is even more explicit. They chant, “Israel out of Palestine. Whities out of Palestine’”.
I saw the video via Andrew Fox (Mr_Andrew_Fox) but it is all over Twitter. Like Mr Fox, I reject the racism and religious bigotry displayed by these women. But I am also confused by it.
It is hard to count the number of women in the group of chanters because the camera and the train are moving, but I can see that about half of them are wearing hijabs and about half of them are dark skinned. In itself, that is not surprising. London is by far the most ethnically and religiously diverse city in the UK.
Do they not see the problem? They may genuinely be ignorant of the fact that the direct ancestors of most Israeli Jews came from the Middle East and North Africa, not Europe – because that statistic, and the whole history of the twentieth-century expulsion of the Mizrahi Jews from Muslim-majority countries in which Jews had lived for centuries, is not reported often in pro-Palestinian circles. But surely these women cannot be honestly unaware that by the same criteria that they demand be used to expel Jews from Israel, they themselves would be expelled from the UK?
A good article by “The Liberal Patriot”, Ruy Teixeira: “The Progressive Moment is Over”. The four main points he addresses to his fellow Democrats are:
1. Loosening restrictions on illegal immigration was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
2. Promoting lax law enforcement and tolerance of social disorder was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
3. Insisting that everyone should look at all issues through the lens of identity politics was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
4. Telling people fossil fuels are evil and they must stop using them was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
Twenty-two years ago, alongside John B. Judis, Mr Teixeira was one of the co-authors of a book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority”, which itself was inspired by a book written in 1969 by Kevin Phillips called “The Emerging Republican Majority”. Judging by the popular vote in US elections over the last two decades, Mr Teixeira wasn’t wrong, but all such theses have an expiry date. I would not care to place a bet on who will win the coming US election in eight days’ time, nor on the next one, but I would place a bet on the winners of the 2028 election not being progressives.
I just liked that headline, so here it is again as a link: “How a slice of cheese almost derailed Europe’s most important rocket test”. There is video.
As you might have guessed, the rocket concerned is small enough to almost spin out of control because of the weight of a slice of packaged cheese strapped to one of its legs. So perhaps Elon Musk need not lose sleep over his rivals, a group of students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, just yet – however the headline from Interesting Engineering describing this as “Europe’s most important rocket test” was more justifiable than one might think at first sight.
They ate the cheese after its flight. It was “slightly warm, but still quite tasty.”
“Global calls for reparations are only growing louder. Why is Britain still digging in its heels?”, asks Hilary Beckles, the chair of the Caribbean Reparations Commission.
The original version of this post said, “The answer is that even Sir Keir Starmer, the man who suffered the swiftest fall in popularity of any incoming British prime minister since polling began, has enough minimal awareness of political reality not to touch this one.” Then I saw an update to the Guardian‘s daily politics liveblog. It said, “Starmer ‘open to discussing non-cash forms of reparatory justice for slavery'”. Wow. This is like a man on a life-raft being open to discussing non-meat based forms of food justice with the circling sharks.
The BBC has up a story that currently has the headline “Commonwealth leaders to defy UK on slavery reparations”. The BBC’s original headline, under which it was posted to the /r/ukpolitics subreddit, was “Commonwealth heads of government to defy UK on reparatory justice”. The UKpolitics subreddit leans strongly left, but the most-recommended comment was this one by redditor LycanIndarys:
“A report published last year by the University of West Indies – backed by Patrick Robinson, a judge who sits on the International Court of Justice – concluded the UK owed more than £18tn in reparations for its role in slavery in 14 Caribbean countries.”
OK, so just as a rough guide to get your head around that sort of figure, total annual UK government spending is about £1.2tn. So if we scrapped every single thing that the UK government does, and devoted all government spending to paying these reparations, then it would still take 16 years to pay. And of course, the UK would collapse in the mean-time, because we would have no health-service, no military, no roads, no benefits, no education, etc.
Or if we would instead put it on our national debt, then we’d be looking at a significant increase from our current debt of £2.3tn. Effectively increasing our debt by a factor of 8. I assume the repayments on that would also cripple us, but I’ll admit I haven’t calculated the figures.
Put aside any morality on this, or thoughts about why some people seem to think that trans-Atlantic slavery is the only crime ever committed (a suspiciously American outlook), and look at this in pure political terms. Any government that agreed to pay those reparations would lose in a landslide to another party that had “stop giving money to the freeloading bastards” as line one in their manifesto, wouldn’t they?
You know how people always complain about Foreign Aid, because they don’t see the benefit on sending UK taxpayer money abroad? Well imagine the reaction to that, but about a sum of money literally a thousand times bigger.
The news today is full of stories that laud the proposal in the Tobacco and Vapes Bill to ban disposable vapes. The first link takes you to a Guardian report, the second to an almost identical BBC report that says,
“Disposable vapes are difficult to recycle and typically end up landfill, where their batteries can leak harmful waste like battery acid, lithium, and mercury into the environment, the government said.
Batteries thrown into household waste also cause hundreds of fires in bin lorries and waste-processing centres every year.”
I am glad that the BBC has discovered that lithium-ion batteries can cause fires, but I think their focus on the tiny little batteries in disposable vapes might be missing a bigger problem. A report on the British Safety Council website says that,
“Batteries that power electric vehicles such as e-bikes, e-scooters and electric cars were responsible for almost three fires a day across the UK last year, according to data collected by [Business Insurer] QBE from freedom of information requests sent to UK fire services.”
After quoting the Circular Economy Minister (did you know we had one of those?) about how disposable vapes need to be banned to discourage “this nation’s throwaway culture”, the BBC finally gets round to talking about the original reasons that prompted Rishi Sunak’s government to table this legislation and Sir Keir Starmer’s government to continue with it:
“It is already illegal to sell any vape to anyone under 18, but disposable vapes – often sold in smaller, more colourful packaging than refillable ones – are a “key driver behind the alarming rise in youth vaping”, the previous government said when it first set out its plan.
The number of people who vape without ever having smoked has also increased considerably over recent years, driven mostly by young adults.
Vaping is substantially less harmful than smoking, but it has not been around for long enough for its long-term risks to be known, according to the NHS.”
So, vaping is certainly less harmful than smoking, but it might not be completely harmless. The reason I am confident that it is largely harmless is that vaping has, in fact, been around for twenty years at least, and if they had solid evidence of harm they would have told us faster than an e-bike explodes. Personally, I think people have the right to make their own judgement of risk against pleasure in their own lives, and hence should be allowed to buy e-bikes, disposable vapes, non-disposable vapes, and tobacco.
The Sunak/Starmer government disagrees. The long title of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, as stated on the Parliamentary website, is “A Bill to Make provision about the supply of tobacco, vapes and other products, including provision prohibiting the sale of tobacco to people born on or after 1 January 2009; and to enable product requirements to be imposed in connection with tobacco, vapes and other products.”
The British law is modelled after a similar age-discriminatory tobacco prohibition law passed in New Zealand in 2022 when Jacinda Ardern was prime minister: “New Zealand passes legislation banning cigarettes for future generations.” It was reversed by Christopher Luxon’s government. We should be so lucky.
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