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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Incoming from Jamie Whyte:
I have made a programme for Analysis on BBC Radio 4 which will be broadcast on Monday at 8.30pm. It concerns the Conservatives’ wrong headed abandonment of free markets following the financial crisis. You won’t learn anything you don’t already know — but then you are not the target audience! Nevertheless, you may be amazed to hear these things said on the BBC.
Relevant bit of the Radio Times (Monday October 8th):
Internet info from the BBC:
The financial crisis has made many on the political right question their faith in free market capitalism. Jamie Whyte is unaffected by such doubts. The financial crisis, he argues, was caused by too much state interference and an unhealthy collusion between government and corporate power.
Indeed.
David Leigh thinks that broadband needs to be taxed to keep him in his job at The Guardian:
A £2-a-month levy on broadband could save our newspapers. Proceeds could be distributed based on UK online readership and reinvested to protect great journalism
In case you do not know (and why should you in this age of a multiplicity of news sources?), The Guardian is a very pro-statist dead tree newspaper. I was going to explain what I thought of this notion but I will instead just quote the first commenter I saw who replied, someone calling themselves ‘romandavid’:
A £2-a-month levy on automobiles could save our horse and cart business.
Quite. Moreover I have looked over some articles by David Leigh and it is unclear where this ‘great journalism’ is that so desperately needs protection. It is bad enough we have to pay for the crap on the BBC whether we watch it or not.
What Frank J. Fleming says here, to the effect that America has let President Obama down, is, I think, both very funny and nail-on-the-head accurate in describing the sort of man President Obama does indeed seem to be.
The other night I had dinner with a friend and I heard myself saying a couple of things about what might soon be happening in the US presidential election campaign.
First, I speculated that, any week or month now, the mainstream USA media might turn against Obama. All it will take is them deciding that he is going to lose and that nothing they can say will change that, and at that point they’ll stop publicly worshipping him and start reporting on what he says and does and on what people are making of it, almost like he was some kind of Republican or something. Their purpose will not be honesty. Their purpose will be to make the dishonesties they later unleash, upon President Romney in particular and upon the world in general, seem slightly more believable.
And when I got home, I found that something like this was already starting to happen.
Oh, they haven’t all given up on their guy yet, by no means. But they are surely starting to fret quite seriously that just shovelling out nothing but propaganda for him is making them look ever so slightly silly.
And the other thing I said was that if Obama himself decides that he is going to lose, no matter what he says (not least because of all the damn media people selling him out like so many rats running down a ship’s gangplank), he might, at some point between now and election day, say to hell with this, and give America a piece of his mind, rather than just smiling and taking it all on the chin.
He might say things like this, now only the mocking words of Frank J, only for real (here‘s the link to the second page of Frank J’s piece where this is to be found):
These past four years have just proven there is no reasoning with you hillbillies. Obama has given speech after speech after speech explaining things to you, but you never get it. Obama is a fragile flower you oafs keep trampling beneath your feet. You just babble things at him like, “You cain’t make peepul buy health inshuranse! It’s unconstitooshunal!” And then you whine about the national debt, when it’s none of your concern anyway – that’s the government’s business. What is it with you people questioning and ruining everything Obama is trying to do?
For “Obama” read “I”. Also, that “fragile flower” bit would have be changed to something more self-admiring. But otherwise, just like that.
As for my two guesses, the media turning against Obama, and Obama turning against the voters, well, I do admit that the first is a whole lot more likely than the second.
And both are matters of degree rather than absolutes. Some members of the mainstream USA media may change their grovellingly pro-Obama tune a bit, even as others carry right on singing the same old songs like it was 2008. And Obama will probably let his annoyance with the damn voters show a bit, just now and again, but then he’ll rein himself in. There is, after all, a whole big global ruling class out there, and Obama is going to carry on functioning within it just fine and very lucratively, provided he behaves himself reasonably well in the meantime. So a total Obama melt-down is probably too much to hope for. But I would love to hear him say at least some things along Frank J’s lines.
As might quite a few of Obama’s long-suffering supporters, who have surely been saying exactly these kinds of things amongst themselves, and to friendly reporters whose discretion the Obama campaign has, so far, been able to rely on.
Let us salute the heroic secret agent at the Guardian who subverted this quietly sinister article by giving it a brazenly sinister title and undid most of its power to persuade at a stroke: Don’t give climate change heretics an easy ride.
Fun as it is to play Galileo, the author, an Oxford academic called Jay Griffiths, is not calling for the Holy Office to resume work against climate “deniers”. Oh no, she’s far too nice and British for that sort of thing. She reveres democracy:
One more thing is required of academia: to play its role right at the heart of democracy. Being adequately informed is a democratic duty, just as the vote is a democratic right. A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy. Society needs the expertise of academics in the most important issues: climate science above all.
And
I would propose a system of certification for media articles in which there is a clear issue of social responsibility – a kitemark of quality assurance. It would be awarded by teams of academics, and be given to the article, not the journalist, recognising the facts, not the sometimes spurious credibility of being a “personality”. It would be awarded when the article is accurate, using reliable sources and peer reviewed studies. There already exists the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, which answers journalists’ questions to help them achieve accuracy. A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy.Accuracy must not only be achieved, but be seen to have been achieved.
The certification should be voluntary.
I am relieved that she saw fit to add that it should be voluntary, but even with that, there is a whiff of early Dolores Umbridge here. “A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy.” The modern tendency to make a god of democracy has its own dangers, but it is still the least worst form of government – and a democracy is not denatured by a misinformed electorate, or any other sort of wrong electorate. That’s the point of democracy, actually.
In so far as Jay Griffiths’ proposal is not merely the class interest of an academic talking, I suspect that it is another eddy in the same current of opinion that has led Michael Mann to sue Mark Steyn for libel.
I was tempted to make this, by Peter Mandelson, today’s SQotD, but I might be misunderstood as agreeing with it. As it is, of course, I share the glee that Guido (to whom thanks) feels about it.
Mandelson:
The bigger question is how the domestic media market can be made economic and subject to any form of regulation in an era when, a click away, there is access to information that respects no national boundaries and the laws of no single national parliament or the basic standards of conventional journalism. It is hard to see how some of the best-known sources of quality English-language journalism – the Times, New York Times, the Guardian spring to mind – will ever make money again. We come to grips with the fact that the internet is giving public access to uncorroborated, undigested and unmediated news, all in the name of free speech, is becoming one of the defining issues of the 21st century.
Indeed it is.
And I love the idea of “information that respects no national boundaries”. In the old days information used to be far more respectful.
The world has become a pretty grim place of late. This Mandy moan cheered me up no end.
“People who do otherwise commendable work are capable of rape and other crimes. If presented with rape allegations, they must face them like anybody else, however otherwise worthy their past contributions. Now, these statements should be so self-evidently obvious, it is ludicrous that they need to be said. But the furore over WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sadly makes it necessary. Although now granted political asylum by Ecuador, Assange is a rape suspect who skipped bail. Yet some of his supporters have ended up making arguments that they would never dream of making about anybody else.”
– Owen Jones, writing in the Independent. He is, by the way, a big fan of Wikileaks. I am not so keen, as I have explained here before at Samizdata, such as when Wikileaks affected private bank details.
Here is also a good article on the impact of Wikileaks’ activity on investigative journalism, by Nick Cohen.
Update: George Galloway has, er, tried to defend Assange. With friends like Galloway, Assange doesn’t need enemies.
This item at the Harry’s Place blog, concerning the Guardian newspaper’s coverage of issues such as Israel and Islamists, needs to get the widest possible attention:
“If Guardian journalists are twitchy about what is happening to their newspaper, they have only themselves to blame. The Jews were, as always, the canary in the coal mine. When those journalists stayed silent, either because they didn’t think they could say anything, or because they didn’t care, or even because they partly agreed, they allowed a culture of zaniness and extremism to take root at the newspaper. Now, the guns have been turned on them, over Syria and Middle East reporting generally, and it may well be too late for them to stop it. The Indymediaisation of The Guardian is likely spread further, across its other departments, as experts leave and are replaced by “Open Journalism” monomaniacs.”
It may be a minor thing but why oh why do people who cover the world’s conflicts seem to have so little technical knowledge of the subject they cover? I saw an article in the Telegraph with an image captioned “This image made from amateur video released by the Shaam News Network, purports to show a Syrian military tank in Homs, Syria”… except it is clearly not a “tank”, it is a BMP… an infantry fighting vehicle.
This is not new. I spent much of the 1990’s in various parts of the former Yugoslavia and was often exasperated to grab a western newspaper in Zagreb and see pictures of “Croatian tanks”… which more often than not captured former Yugoslav OT M-60 APCs pressed into service by the Croatian, HVO or BiH armies… or even rather exotic Croatian improvised armoured personnel carriers (in effect armoured trucks with a machine gun). More recently I also recall a clip on CNN describing “British tanks” in Iraq that were in fact AS-90 artillery vehicles.
It seems odd to me that so few modern war correspondents are ex-military and thus, with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan, far too many of them cannot tell the difference between a Mauser and a javelin (and neither can their editors it seems). This is certainly why I find Michael Yon so refreshing… he actually understands what he is looking at up the sharp end.
Declare free trade unilaterally, says Tim Worstall in the Telegraph. Good and true are his words, but since you all know that already, allow me to draw your attention to an exchange you may not have seen in the comments that manages to be both entertaining and at the same time slightly sad.
“davidaslindsay” wrote:
A perfect illustration of how there is nothing more anti-conservative than capitalism.
The Cold War is long gone, so there is no remaining need for Tories to be corralled out of fear into voting for Conservatives and other such Liberal parties
Imagine, just imagine, if a site not unlike this one in structure, if in nothing else, were to give a platform to people who recognised that there was no patriotism without economic patriotism, set within a broader appreciation of the rural, the provincial, the socially conservative, and the classically (and Classically) Christian, with the consequent pronounced aversion to global capitalism, to American hegemony, to obeisant Zionism, to wars to make the world anew, to wars generally, and so on.
Just imagine such a voice in the debate. Just imagine it. Even if only for one moment, just imagine it.
“TimWorstall” replied
David, this is a blog.
You have a blog. Thus there already is a blog which reflects such views.
Very democratic place, the internet.
What is both funny and sad about David Lindsay’s cri de coeur is that he does not just have a personal blog but has, or had in 2009, a slot in the Telegraph, a privilege that most bloggers would give their best stripy pyjamas to obtain. Lindsay’s cry of “Just imagine such a voice in the debate. Just imagine it. Even if only for one moment, just imagine it” makes him sound like a combination of Galileo facing the Inquisition and Captain Kirk trying to get the Fabrini to believe they are on a generation ship in For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky. Yet he scarcely had to stretch his imagination to conceive of a voice exactly like his being given a platform even beyond the one offered by davidaslindsay.blogspot.com. All he had to do was remember as far back as 2009.
What is the appeal of believing that you are silenced when you are given a megaphone?
Some of it is persecution envy, or to be more accurate, envy of the chance to be heroic. Mr Lindsay is of the nostalgic Right and appears to me to suffer a little from this condition but the phenomenon is most common and strong on the nostalgic Left. How they do hate being the rich, safe, privileged ones. How they love to reminisce about standing up to Thatcher, or at a pinch, their resistance during the grim Bush years. How they would have loved to have been a Freedom Rider. They would have been heroes, honest.
Some of it is a desire to maintain the delusion that the world would heed your message if only it were allowed to hear it. This thought hurts much less than the thought that the world has had ample opportunity to hear your message and heeds it not. Before you laugh at Mr Lindsay – or being realistic, slightly after – remember that (a) in so far as this is a delusion it is one he shares with us (have we not blogs? Seen the libertarian sentiments of the populace lately?) and (b) the belief that the people are being stopped from hearing minority voices by a semi-conscious conspiracy of the mainstream media is only just now ceasing to be true.
We do not quite match the faithfulness in delusion of those communists who have announced the imminence of world revolution every year for close on a century, but many of the bloggers whose writing I love most – Instapundit, Brian Micklethwait, me – have announced the imminent death of the gatekeeper every year for close on a decade. Yet there the decrepit old bastard is each new morning, bleary eyed, swaying on his feet, pretending not to know about the people who slipped past him while he was drunk and incapable the night before – but still manning his old rotten gate most of the time and just damn refusing to die.
Mind you, we were not exactly wrong about the old boy’s morbidity, just premature. He’ll turn up his toes eventually and the patient messengers of every suppressed creed with break through and be heard in all the land, only we’ll be heard most gladly because we are in the right. I hope. I think.
I have been following the Brett Kimberlin case, much linked to of late by Instapundit, with interest, but with some confusion.
It is not that I consider exercises like Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day to be pointless. It is that I remain genuinely confused about what that point might be. Who, exactly, are we all trying to convince, and of what, exactly?
I get the impression that all those blogging about this do know their answers to this question, but to them, it’s obvious, and if they ever did spell it out, that was many days ago. So, what are those answers?
Kimberlin is a bad, bad man, who has a history of villainy generally, and in particular of trying to intimidate bloggers who point this fact out. So yes, the cost in potential intimidation from Brett Kimberlin of lots of us blogging about Brett Kimberlin is small, and all the smaller for lots and lots of us doing this, especially from a nice safe distance like from London. But what exactly does me mentioning the name of Brett Kimberlin, on the blog that I write for, accomplish?
Does it intimidate Brett Kimberlin himself, and thereby stop him intimidating any more bloggers and from intimidating any more the bloggers he is intimidating now? How? Isn’t Kimberlin rather pleased to have got up the noses of so many bloggers whom he already detests and despises, and turned into a minor internet celebrity like this?
Does it persuade the forces of law and order to stomp all over Kimberlin, more than they have been doing lately? Again, how?
Is the idea to show to mainstream Americans that the mainstream media are rubbish, for not mentioning this story? If so, what exactly is the plan for reaching mainstream America with this proposition?
Leading directly on from the previous question, is the idea to embarrass the mainstream media into mentioning the story? Their current opinion of all this is, presumably, that a lot of stupid right wing blogs are making a gigantic fuss about a small-time crook, who has gone some way towards rejoining polite society by making himself useful to the left-wing cause, which just goes to show that Kimberlin is doing something good, having annoyed all the right right wing nutters. And given that not even that opinion will find its way into the mainstream media any time soon, nothing much would seem to be being accomplished on that front either.
The pieces I have been reading during the last week or so have entirely convinced me that Brett Kimberlin is a bad man, and that those who support him with money, or who did once upon a time, are at best very stupid, and probably not at all stupid but very, very bad also, arguably even worse than Kimberlin himself, in particular Barbra Streisand and Brett Kimberlin’s evil and/or stupid aunt. My opinion of George Soros, to mention another Kimberliner, has gone done (even further). I had not realised until now quite what a brazen villain he is. But convincing someone like me of things as simple as these hardly amounts to much by way of an objective. I have no objection in principle to preaching to the choir. This can often be a very valuable exercise. I am positively asking for exactly such preaching now. But what valuable lesson might this particular chorister be learning from the Kimberlin affair, that I might otherwise have neglected? Or is it that all this just makes me … think about things?
Is it a case of all of the above? The matter is easily blogged about, fun to blog about, and will achieve a wide variety of relatively small but desirable things.
My questions are genuine, rather than sneeringly rhetorical. If I truly thought that Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day was pointless, I would not have mentioned it here at all. But, please somebody tell me why it is not pointless, and not perhaps even counter-productive on account of being so over-the-top for what it is actually accomplishing.
I am sure that our commentariat will have useful answers to offer me, and I look forward to reading them.
At the moment I am a daily Instapundit reader, which is because at the moment I find American politics a whole lot more interesting than British politics. At least Obama is interesting! Cameron just makes me want to give up thinking about British politics altogether.
But the interesting American question for me is not who will win their next Presidential election. Personally – in defiance of our Dear Leader (although time may well prove to me the error of my ways), for all the grief it may bring, and for whatever miniscule difference it may make to anything – I support Anyone-But-Obama for President rather than the man himself. No, what interests me about America just now is to what extent the old mainstream media really are in the process of being dethroned.
This is what is so interesting about things like the Obama Eats Dogs story. In itself it is about nothing. Its only significance is that Obama’s cheerleaders want this story to stop, while Obama’s detractors want it to rock on. But that is exactly why it is so interesting. It is pure media. It’s like one of those enemas that doctors inflict upon you, to enable them to see what is happening inside you. It does nothing to you, other than make your insides trackable. Obama Eats Dogs stories tell you about the power of The Media either to suppress a story which they now don’t like, or maybe not to suppress it.
My take on the alleged bias of the American mainstream media is that they have been monstrously biased in a statist direction for well over a century. Every other Media story since the year dot has been about (a) a Problem; and (b), all intertwined with that, what the government is doing about the Problem or ought to be doing about the Problem. There is now a huge constituency of idiots who really do think that the answer to any problem of any sort is for the government to take charge of it, and screw it up some more.
What is now changing is not the bias. What is changing is that now, because of the rise of other media (barium enema media?), this bias is trackable.
Don’t kid yourself that an earlier generation of Old Gents In Suits Who Worshipped Facts were not almost as biased as their now visibly biased progeny. The point about bias is not – or not only – whether you lie. The point is what you say is a story in the first place.
Problem!!! Facts. What is the government doing about it?!? More facts. What does Everyone Important say about what the government ought to be doing about it?!? More facts. There’s no need to lie about anything to skew the way you present the world.
Imagine, on the other hand, a world in which The Media all assumed that problems were there to be solved by humans, and that the “politicians” are just another of those problems that we humans have to deal with from time to time. The “News” would be completely different.
And what interests me about America just now is that this kind of thing is all becoming so much more visible, to the point where it might even be changing, in a good direction.
Considering that Taki, the Greek shipping magnate’s son, hard-right scribbler and socialite, owns a webzine, “Takimag”, in which a notorious recent article by John Derbyshire was published, I wondered whether the fellow was going to write about recent events about Derbyshire. You see, Derbyshire, who lives in the US and has written for various publications such as National Review, was recently fired by NR editor Rich Lowry after a storm of protest concerning Derbyshire’s comments about black people in Takimag.
But when I read Taki’s regular column in the Spectator a few days ago, it was all about Ernest Hemingway (and pretty good, too). No mention of the Derbyshire affair. Odd. Maybe the Spectator’s editor had warned the chap off, but he’s written some pretty fiery stuff before that got into print, so I am not sure. But of course, I had completely forgotten the one-and-only Rod Liddle:
“Derbyshire’s piece contained one or two points with which I do not agree, but I suspect that for the most part its advice was precisely the sort of thing which readers of the National Review have probably passed on to their children, anyway.”
Well, he may be right that that is what readers of that publication tell their children. Who knows, maybe they are all telling their youngsters things such as this:
“Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.”
(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.
(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.
This also:
In that pool of forty million, there are nonetheless many intelligent and well-socialized blacks. (I’ll use IWSB as an ad hoc abbreviation.) You should consciously seek opportunities to make friends with IWSBs. In addition to the ordinary pleasures of friendship, you will gain an amulet against potentially career-destroying accusations of prejudice.
(14) Be aware, however, that there is an issue of supply and demand here. Demand comes from organizations and businesses keen to display racial propriety by employing IWSBs, especially in positions at the interface with the general public—corporate sales reps, TV news presenters, press officers for government agencies, etc.—with corresponding depletion in less visible positions. There is also strong private demand from middle- and upper-class whites for personal bonds with IWSBs, for reasons given in the previous paragraph and also (next paragraph) as status markers.
(15) Unfortunately the demand is greater than the supply, so IWSBs are something of a luxury good, like antique furniture or corporate jets: boasted of by upper-class whites and wealthy organizations, coveted by the less prosperous. To be an IWSB in present-day US society is a height of felicity rarely before attained by any group of human beings in history
It is worth reading the whole piece, if only to get the full, patronising, vileness of much of it; the tragedy is that there might be one or two things he says that actually make some sort of sense (there are issues concerning crime rates among different ethnic groups that need to be discussed, openly and without pandering to PCness). If this article was meant as satire, it failed. An argument I have seen in defence of the piece is that Derbyshire wrote it in response to another idea of what black parents are telling their children about white people. But even if that is true, do two wrongs make a right? I just cannot see how that is the case here.
But what I found particularly bad, from a libertarian perspective, about this item was that Derbyshire, working backwards from some highly debatable statistical assertions, then used them as a sort of rule of thumb test of how to treat a black man as an individual. And this is proof, in my view, of his racial collectivism.
As already has happened, a number of people, no doubt sympathising with these comments, have said they will cancel their NR subscriptions, etc, etc. This is a terrible blow of freedom of speech, etc, etc. It is not. NR would not be obliged to print this material, and as Lowry said in his announcement of the parting of the ways, he would not have done so. If an editor feels a writer is so incendiary that he no longer wants to be associated with such a person, then he or she is entitled to act on that view, however mistaken. That is part of the freedom to act on judgements that, ironically, Mr Derbyshire might claim to be defending, however hamfistedly, in his article. We live in the world of massively expanding internet-based news and views; I am sure that the British-born Mr Derbyshire will find outlets for his opinions.
Update: It seems another NR contributor has got the boot, by the name of Robert Weissberg. Crikey.
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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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