We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I am only a very occasional Guardian reader, of things like classical CD reviews and cricket stories, but thanks to Mick Hartley, of whose blog I am a regular reader, I found my way to this classic of the grovelling courtier genre, perpetrated by a ridiculous creep named Stephen Wilkinson.
Wilkinson’s piece concerns the content of a two and half hour speech recently given by Fidel Castro’s younger brother. Although, Raul Castro is young only in the Young Mr Grace sense. Which is what I think we should now call this junior monster: Young Mr Castro. If a full-on comedy TV show about the Castro brothers happens, let it be called: Are You Being Shafted? But I digress.
The only people who will be unreservedly admiring of this piece by Stephen Wilkinson will be the geriatric despots on whose behalf and in pursuit of whose money it was presumably written, although if they realise how little anyone else will be impressed by it, other than for its comic appeal, even they may grumble. What Stephen Wilkinson feels about having written such a thing, one can only imagine. → Continue reading: Stephen Wilkinson slobbers all over Young Mr Castro
“I just caught the last couple of minutes of a cable-TV documentary about Playboy magazine, which featured a clip of Hugh Hefner opining about the huge cultural impact the magazine has had in its 50-plus years of existence. And it struck me as an illustration that, even in the realm of culture and ideas, it’s the supply side that makes the greatest difference. Two young men in the mid-1950s had vastly different ideas of what the American audience really wanted and needed, and ventured forth to create magazines that reflected these views. Hugh Hefner, convinced that America was too sexually conservative and really needed to let its hair down, founded Playboy in 1953. Bill Buckley, convinced that America was too politically liberal and needed to restore its older, small-r republican virtues that had been eroded in the Progressive and New Deal eras, founded National Review in 1955. Now, think about how these ventures must have appeared at the time. Playboy was an outrage to conventional pieties about sexuality. National Review was an outrage to conventional pieties about politics. How much money would you have bet, at the time, that either one would survive for very long? “A dirty magazine? Won’t people be embarrassed to buy it?” “A magazine that’s to the right of Eisenhower and Nixon? Are there that many real fringies out there?” But the supply side takes a chance. And, quite amazingly, both ventures succeeded beyond imagining. Playboy bore fruit in the Sexual Revolution, which may already have reached its high point but shows little sign of receding. And from National Review emerged Reaganism, and conservatism as the broadly dominant system of political thought in recent years.”
Michael Potemra.
It is an interesting piece of commentary. Is it really true, though, that conservatism (however defined) is the “broadly dominant system of political thought in recent years”? I suppose it might be to the extent that the rise of Obama is in fact an aberration rather than anything else. But even if that is true, then it would be nice to see this reflected, long term, in the relative decline, not rise, of state power and spending.
Anyway, Hefner and Buckley were indeed very influential figures, no doubt about it. I have always had a lot of time for Hefner – he upsets the sort of people who need to be upset.
Update: Hefner has taken his business private.
Imagine you are walking down the street and a man in a suit walks up to you holding a large cudgel…
“Excuse me,” he says, “I have seen you walk down this street on a daily basis wearing a tee-shirt and in future I would like you to wear a suit and tie to raise the tone of the neighbourhood.”
“Er, no,” you reply, “I am happy dressed the way I am.”
“I see,” the man replies, “well I would rather not have to threaten to hit you with this cudgel if you do not do what I say so I want you to voluntarily agree to wear a suit and tie.”
“But you are threatening to hit me with that cudgel!” you point out.
“No,” he says, “I will only threaten to hit you with this cudgel if you don’t do what I want voluntarily.”
This statement of the bleedin’ obvious by me was brought on this sadly typical piece of ‘press release’ style journalism:
The three voluntary “responsibility deals” agreed with the food industry are aimed at helping the public to eat more healthily, in a drive to tackle the growing problem of obesity among both adults and children. Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, believes that firms will be more likely to set ambitious targets for themselves if they are negotiated on a voluntary basis. Rather than a “nanny state” approach, he is keen to arm the public with the tools they need to cope in an “obesogenic environment,” where people are bombarded with adverts for unhealthy food.
If firms break their promises, the Government will however consider taking compulsory measures.
So rather than writing an article that explains the dynamic of what is going on here, Rosa Prince in effect just delivers a government press release complete with the approved spin… ‘voluntary’… ‘not nanny state’…
Why exactly does The Telegraph need to have a ‘political correspondent’ at all rather than just republishing whatever the government wishes? What value is Rosa Prince actually adding here? The fact that these food industry groups agreed to do something under threat of compulsory measures means that this clearly is a prime example of the ‘Nanny State’ in action… and moreover if there is an explicit threat of legal coercion, how is this in any meaningful sense ‘voluntary’?
From the latest Radio Times, concerning a Radio 4 programme entitled In Denial: Climate on the Couch, to be aired at 9pm this evening. I will listen, and I will set my radio recorder.
Radio Times blurb:
Jolyon Jenkins investigates the psychology of climate change efforts, asking why some people seem unconcerned even though scientists are forecasting terrible changes to the planet. He questions whether environmentalists and the Government have been putting out messages that are counterproductive, and whether trying to scare people into action might actually be causing them to consume more.
My suspicion is that what I and all others who listen to this programme will hear will be an explanation of the failure of the Greenists to convince that omits the crucial matter of the mere truth, and what is now sincerely believed to be the truth by more and more of the mere people. The phrase “In Denial” does strongly suggest this. And “On the Couch” suggests that they think that some people, presumably all who deny, are mad.
You know the kind of thing: People don’t think there’s anything they can do! – No wonder they’re being crazy! – We have not communicated successfully! – We have not got our message across properly!
It probably was rather a bad idea to make it look like they want to blow up children who disagree with them. But what if, despite such communicational ineptness, they have got their message across, but people just think it’s a pack of lies? If that is what people now think, then no amount of improved communicational expertise that doesn’t deal with the mere truth of things will make much difference.
But, my suspicions may prove to be unjustified. As of now, I live in hope that the truth, both what it is and what it is now believed to be, will at least get a semi-respectful mention, in among all the psychologising.
LATER:
This programme isn’t about climate science so it’s going to assume that the scientific consensus is true.
And a moment later, someone described (it may have been Jolyon Jenkins) this consensus as “undeniable”. Which was an odd word to use, given the title.
Well, at least it has just been admitted that people sometimes say that it’s all being exaggerated, even if it is assumed that this is mistaken and evasive. That it might be an honest opinion is not up for discussion, because that would mean discussing climate science.
So, the early and pessimistic commenters here are right. It looks like being a long discussion of what a bunch of true-believers can do to save the world, given that a huge tranche of people has decided that the world doesn’t need saving, but will have to be convinced in the true-believer stuff is to even make sense let alone accomplish anything.
The elephant in their room is that they have lost this argument, in the sense that they need unanimity in this, but are drifting further and further away from unanimity. They are ignoring this elephant. They are behaving like that economist, stuck on a desert island with various other sorts of experts, who is wondering how to contrive a tin-opener. “Let’s assume we have a tin-opener.” This won’t work.
LATER: Thinking about this some more, I should perhaps stress that the people who sincerely disagree that CAGW is happening were not called mad, as I feared they might be. They were simply ignored. All were assumed to really believe in CAGW, but to be using some kind of psychological doublethink to evade what they knew they ought to be doing really. Like I say: let’s assume we’ve won.
I know this kind of thing has long been known about and talked about, but the single thing that I most like about David Cameron’s speech about multiculturalism, terrorism, and so on, which he gave in Munich on Saturday, is that I can read it, in its entirety. I don’t have to rely on a journalist, however conscientious he may or may not have tried to be, to pass on to me whatever small fragments of the speech he considers to be significant, along with hostile reactions to such fragments that he has got or read from various people with axes to grind, many of these reactions having probably been supplied by people who haven’t actually heard or read the original speech and are only going on what the journalist tells them it said. And then somebody else gets angry about one of these critical reactions, and it all spirals away from anything that actually got said in the original speech. And the bloke who gave the original speech says to himself: why do I bother? Time was when that kind of thing was all that most people had to go on. But those days are now long gone. Good riddance. Disintermediation, I think this is called.
As I say, hardly a blindingly original observation, but in the matter of this speech, I have never before felt this internet-induced improvement so strongly. The subject matter of Cameron’s speech is a minefield. Although I do not agree with everything that he said (see below), I am glad that he is at least talking about this stuff, at a time when many of our more thoughtful political leaders are scared to. The existence of the internet is the difference between a much-overdue, semi-intelligent public conversation about these vexed issues and mere mudslinging.
So, given that I am able to read it all, what did I make of it? Here are a few early thoughts.
One of Cameron’s most important points is that insofar as “multiculturalism” means double standards in how Muslims are treated by the British law, them being allowed to behave far worse than us indigenous ones, then multiculturalism is a bad idea. It is also a bad idea if it involves state support and encouragement for groups which encourage terrorism. Well said, and about time too.
He makes many other points, which I agree with rather less. He uses, for instance, the now established habit of curtailing the freedom of speech of racists and fascists to justify further curtailments of free speech, for Muslims. But if we all get to hear what they all have to say, fascists, Muslims, (fascist Muslims?), then we can take issue with such notions. And whenever something nasty happens that some nasty has said should happen, the police will at least know where to start looking. Free speech, quite aside from being a human right and everything, is actually quite a practical policy for maintaining civil peace. It helps a lot that most of us think that merely saying nasty things shouldn’t be a crime, and that in a world where people can say pretty much what they like, the police must confine themselves to chasing after those who actually do nasty things.
I also take issue with the way that Cameron muddles together two distinct, although related ideas. On the one hand there is the idea that Islam itself is a problem, rather than just “Islamic extremism”. And then there is the further idea that therefore Muslims ought to be deported, forbidden from speaking their minds, from building mosques, and generally from going around being Muslims. He opposes the second idea, but makes it seem like that necessarily means opposing the first idea also. I support the first idea, but not the second. I definitely think that Islam itself is a problem, but I believe that the answer (see my previous paragraph) is to argue with it, to tell it that it is a problem and why it is a problem, and to invite people who are wondering about it to leave or stay away from it, rather than stick with it or join it. If you must be a believer in something religious, let that religion be something like Christianity rather than Islam, because Christianity, although at least as odd from the merely is-it-true? point of view is, at the moment, so very much nicer than Islam.
Everything I observe in the reactions of the nastier kinds of Muslim tells me that they are acutely sensitive to such arguments, to the point where they would very much like such arguments to be banned, whether such arguments include deportation demands, mosque-banning and so forth, or not. To me, Cameron’s thinking says, first, that banning free expression for racists and fascists is absolutely fine, and that therefore banning free speech for “Islamic extremists” is fine also. But what next? Banning people from even saying (as I do not say) that Muslims should be deported and mosque-building banned? Or even from saying (as I do say) that Islam itself is a disgusting and evil body of thought and that the only absolutely morally correct thing to do if you are a Muslim is to damn well stop being a Muslim?
Which means that I was disappointed, but not surprised, that Cameron made no mention of the right of a person to stop being a Muslim, without being subjected to death threats and worse. Disappointed, but not surprised. For Cameron, being a “devout Muslim” (as opposed to an extreme Islamist) is more than sufficient, as far as he is concerned. As Prime Minister, he is not in the business of wanting anyone to convert this way or that, other than in the very feeble sense of wanting people to vote for him and for his political party. I see that. But he ought, I think to be ready to defend the rights of those who really do want to convert, from anything to anything else, and in particular out of Islam. Cameron called for “muscular liberalism”. So, when push next comes to shove in the form of a big ruckus (will this be that?) concerning someone who has stopped being a Muslim, will Cameron apply a dose of muscular liberalism to that argument, to allow such a person to believe whatever they want to believe, and to be as public as they like about it?
I confess that the phrase “muscular liberalism” did appeal to me when I first read it, and no doubt this phrase has tested positive with the focus groups. But what exactly will it mean in reality? Might it mutate into the government telling people like me that we can’t be rude about devout, law-abiding Muslims and the things that such people say they believe in? (“Muscular liberalism” in the USA would be a terrifying idea.) I am sure that many Muslims already fear – are being encouraged by each other to fear – that it may degenerate into a mere excuse for Muslim bashing, in the physical and wrong sense, by the government and its employees, and by many others. Perhaps (actually I’m inclined, as I read this through before posting it, to make that: probably), as we all challenge the phrase from our various different positions, muscular liberalism will degenerate into one of those mush phrases that mean whatever anyone listening wants it to mean, and then by and by, whatever the powers that be want it to mean. In other words it may degenerate into meaning nothing, just like the words “Big Society” have, in the minds of nearly everyone I meet or read.
But I want to end where I began, with the pleasure I feel that I and all others who choose to comment on this speech, here or anywhere else, are at least able, if we want to, to read the speech itself. Last night, for example, at the Christian Michel evening that I alluded to in an earlier posting, I got talking with an acquaintance about Cameron’s speech. After he had begun to opine about it, rather intelligently, I asked him: Have you actually read the speech? Yes, he said. Me too, I said. This exchange pleased me then and it pleases me still.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Emma Jay grossly misled Delingpole as to the nature of the programme.
It does occur to me though that in the internet age, this kind of thing, while remaining possible, will be hard to sustain in the long run. Anyone who is ever approached by Ms Jay can immediately put her name into Google and discover that she cannot be taken at her word. In the internet age a TV producer or journalist stands or falls on their integrity.
Emma Jay’s looks to be gone, as does that of Rupert Murray, the guy who dissembled his way into Monckton’s confidence. I wonder what these question marks over their trustworthiness will do for their career prospects.
– Bishop Hill, in a posting entitled Integrity in the internet age reflects on the lack of integrity that was involved in the making of two recent BBC attempts to drive a stake into the climate sceptics. The thing about Bishop Hill is that he does not make such judgements lightly. He does not indulge in thoughtless abuse, and constantly posts little homilies discouraging it among his commenters. If he says you lack integrity, the chances are, overwhelmingly, that you do.
Presumably, many will want to defend these deceptions as being beneficial in the same way as has been claimed on behalf of whoever it was who revealed all those Climategate emails. But the fact remains that if you are dealing with either of the two above mentioned people, you should not trust them to tell you the truth about what sort of progamme they are really making. Their cover is now, as Bishop Hill says, blown.
Strange to see an article like this in what is still sometimes called the Torygraph:
Mortgage lenders penalising couples with children
Mortgage lenders are penalising home owners with children by reducing the amount they can borrow. The crackdown could potentially prevent them from switching to cheaper deals when interest rates rise.
Many banks and building societies have tightened their affordability criteria in light of the Financial Services Authority’s post-credit-crunch review of the mortgage market. But it has emerged that families with children are being hit hard.
Emphasis added by me. All the terms emphasised relate to a metaphor of punishment. But it is not meant to depict just punishment; the author, Teresa Hunter, apparently feels that parents who are lent less money than non-parents are having something unfair done to them. This is reinforced by having the first person quoted in the piece as saying:
“It is absolutely unfair to penalise people with children by reducing their capacity to borrow compared with a single person or a childless couple.”
The whole story is presented as being one of discrimination akin to racial discrimination. Did the author notice that there was a little financial unpleasantness in 2008 that had something to do with indiscriminate lending? Does she feel that encouraging people to to borrow more than they can afford is doing them any favours? Has she not noticed that children cost money?
As in BBC Radio 4, this coming Monday, January 31st, 8.30 pm:
That’s from the current Radio Times. As you can tell from the pink, I will be paying close attention. My thanks to fellow Samizdatista Chris Cooper for alerting me to this radio programme.
But will it be an attempt at a hatchet job? It seems not:
This week, Jamie Whyte looks at the free market Austrian School of F A Hayek. The global recession has revived interest in this area of economics which many experts and politicians had believed dead and gone. “Austrian” economists focus not on the bust but on the boom that came before it. At the heart of their argument is that low interest rates sent out the wrong signals to investors, causing them to borrow to spend on “malinvestments”, such as overpriced housing. The solution is not for government to fill the gap which private money has now left. Markets work better, Austrians believe, if left alone. Analysis asks how these libertarian economists interpret the state we’re in and why they’re back in fashion. Is it time to reassess one of the defining periods of economic history? Consensus would have it that the Great Depression of the 1930s was brought to an end by Franklin D Roosevelt’s Keynesian policies. But is that right? Jamie Whyte asks whether we’d all have got better quicker with a strong dose of Austrian medicine and whether the same applies now?
I think I first encountered Jamie Whyte at a Cobden Centre dinner.
I was disappointed with the recent Robert Peston TV show about the banking crisis, despite appearances on it by Toby Baxendale, the founder of and Chairman of the Cobden Centre. All the fault of the banks was the basic message, with governments looking on helplessly. No mention (that I can now recall) of those same governments monopolising the supply of money and relentlessly determining the price of borrowing it, all day and every day, all the time.
But, my understanding of Baxendale and of the Cobden Centre is that he (it) is playing a long game, giving broadcasters whatever they ask for (in Peston’s case Baxendale messing about with fish), while all the time asking them to give the Cobden Centre’s ideas at least something resembling a decent hearing. Don’t compromise on the ideas, but be endlessly mellow and accommodating at the personal level, intellectual steel in velvet glove, and so on and so forth. If that’s right, then it may be starting to work.
The other night, when I had the TV on, I saw that one of the programmes, featuring the BBC top economics and business correspondent, Robert Peston, was all about the financial panic of recent years. Oh dear, I thought, I can just imagine the usual line about how it was all the fault of greedy bankers, insufficient regulation, “unregulated laissez faire capitalism”, and on and on. Well, not quite. Yes, some of those elements were there, but there was also quite a lot of sophisticated explanation of how a combination of forces – leverage, “too big to fail bailout protection, over-confidence in newfangled ideas of risk management and misalignment of incentives for bankers – combined to create the storm. I would have liked to see more focus on the role of ultra-low central bank interest rates in creating the crisis, as well as government intervention in the housing market and through deposit insurance, but to be fair, this was mentioned, several times. There was little in the show with which someone like Kevin Dowd, recently referred to here, would dispute, although I imagine Kevin might want to make more about the vexed issue of ownership of banks and limited liability.
And about three-quarters of the way into the show was Toby Baxendale, founder of the Cobden Centre, the organisation founded last year to flag up the problems caused by central banking fiat money, and which sets out alternative ideas, such as the possibility of giving depositors in no-notice cash accounts the right to demand that their cash is properly looked after, not lent out for months in a risky play. (Yup, it is that pesky fractional reserve banking issue again). Toby was very forceful and his views were treated respectfully by Peston. There was no sneering.
In short, this was and is a pretty good programme as far as the MSM goes. I give it about 8 out of 10. Yes, I am not drunk.
As regulars may know, there is no hard editorial line in these parts about certain views, such as intellectual property rights (steady on, old chap, Ed). Take the case of the “whistleblower” site Wikileaks. Samizdata’s founder, Perry de Havilland, has come round to taking the view that whatever collateral damage might be caused by Wikileaks, that the benefits outweigh the bad. I am less sanguine than that; I fear that the activities of Wikileaks may make governments become even more secretive. I admit that much of this stems around attempts forecast the unknowable. For all I know, Perry may be proven right and my reservations are unfounded.
But as they say about making omelettes and breaking eggs, a lot of eggs can be broken on the way to culinary goals. And this latest story, concerning a fired Julius Baer banker who has decided to publish reams of client data on Wikileaks two days before he goes before a court, is instructive. Sure, some people who use offshore bank accounts via Zurich or wherever are up to no good, and deserve to be exposed. This is particularly the case if such persons are politicians who favour high taxes, socialist economics and the rest. When it turns out that such folk are salting away their wealth in Zurich, Zug or Geneva, it is delicious to see their discomfiture. But – and it is a big but – many people who bank offshore are not primarily looking to hide ill-gotten gains or adopting a double standard; they are people who wish to take advantage of free capital movement and “vote” with their wallets for a low tax jurisdiction. “Exit” is often more powerful than “voice”; the ability to leave a jurisdiction, as I have said before, is one of the few incentives to make oppressive regimes marginally better behaved.
Consider what Wikileaks might want to expose next: health records? The insured art collections of certain people? You can see how leaking such data could be a gift to would-be kidnappers and extortion artists. This is not a theoretical issue. Dan Mitchell and Chris Edwards, in their book, “Global Tax Revolution: the Rise of Tax Competition and the Battle to Defend It”, published in 2008 by the Cato Institute, point out that in some parts of the world, a high proportion of individuals bank offshore because their domestic governments have habitually robbed them in the past. Disclosure of financial details can lead to a person having his daughter’s body parts mailed through with a letter threatening further horrors unless a payment is made. Bank privacy is not, therefore, something that only criminals take advantage of, although that business is often portrayed that way.
Like I said, omelettes and broken eggs. We’ll see how this dish turns out.
This posting is about politics in the USA. Please realise that it is a simplification, what mathematicians call a first approximation, more true than false, and sufficiently true to be worth saying so that it may perhaps then be modified and qualified towards the actual truth.
I ought also to admit that I have never set foot in the USA, and that I got the notions that follow from the Internet, and before that from watching (as I still now watch) USA television shows (mostly comedy and cop shows). We here in Britain get lots of those. I freely admit that distance, instead of lending clarity to my eye, could merely have lent and be lending bullshit to it. In fact, I do admit it. But the bullshit it has lent includes the kind of bullshit that wins and loses USA elections. First approximation truth about what is being perceived, about what big bullshit picture is being believed in, is often sufficient to win or lose an election. For as we all know, a big part of reality in politics is perception. Voters in the USA get a lot of their ideas about politics in the USA from the Internet and from television shows, or so it says on the Internet and on television.
So here goes.
In political USA now, there are now four important groups of people. There are Democrats, Old School Republicans, Tea Partiers, and Voters. Political outcomes were determined by what the Voters decided about the first two. They are now determined by what the Voters decide about the other three.
Voters used to think that Democrats were good people with bad ideas, clever, but mostly only at excusing their bad ideas. Democrats sincerely believed in bloating the government, taxing, regulating and generally screwing things up. But they applied these bad ideas to all, without fear or favour. Personally, they had blue collars and were honest hardworking folks. They did not lie or cheat. They looked you in the eye and treated you right.
Voters used to think that Old School Republicans were bad people with good ideas. Republicans believed in business success, low taxes, less regulation, and generally getting the US economy motoring along. Trouble is that they were also rich and nasty snobs, and corrupt. They used their grasp of economics mostly to get rich themselves. Politically, they applied their ideas only in ways that suited them. If a tax or a regulation happened to suit them or their huge country club network of rich and nasty and snobbish friends, then they would, on the quiet, be for it. For them, business-friendly government meant a government friendly to their own businesses. If, on the other hand, your collar was blue, they’d deregulate and tax-cut the hell out of you, for the good of all, and for the good of themselves especially.
Hard to choose, wasn’t it? No wonder it was a dead heat, decade after decade. Good but stupid idiots versus clever but sneaky bastards.
It still is a dead heat, between Democrats and Old School Republicans, but this is because things are now moving towards Voters thinking that Democrats are bad people with bad ideas, and that Old School Republicans are bad people with bad ideas. Democrats now look like (or are being revealed as always having been) greedy and malevolent bastards with the same old bad ideas as ever. Old School Republicans are the same rich and greedy snobbish bastards they always were, but are now seen to be infected by (or revealed as always having believed in) bad ideas much like those of their opponents.
Enter the Tea Party.
The Tea Partiers started out as people whom the Voters regarded as dubious people with dubious ideas, and are moving towards being people whom the Voters believe to be …
I need some way to emphasise this next bit. Pay careful attention. I know, I’ll put the next five words into the title of this posting.
… good people with good ideas. The Tea Partiers have good ideas, which they sincerely want to apply to all without fear or favour. They are good people who work or worked for their living, will look you in the eye and treat you right, no matter what colour your collar, or anything else about you.
The Tea Partiers thus threaten to destroy both the Democrats and the Old School Republicans. They threaten to destroy the Democrats by destroying them, and to destroy the Old School Republicans by replacing them with different Republicans, Tea Party Republicans.
The Democrats say that the Tea Partiers are “extreme” Republicans, Republicans who are even nastier. They wish. The Tea Partiers are indeed creating a new sort of Republican, but not an even nastier Republican. They are creating nice Republicans. Electorally, the Tea Partiers are cleansing the selfish richness and snobbishness and nastiness out of the Republican brand, leaving the ideas that the Republicans appeared once to believe in untouched, and renewed in strength and quality. If the Republican brand resists too much, the Tea Partiers will destroy it and make another.
The recent financial melt-down is, of course, crucial to all of the above. In a crisis, ideas matter. And the Internet, the new idea spreader, is also crucial. USA citizens need no longer submit to being told what they think about bad times, by the bad people with bad ideas who are to blame for these bad times. Democrats are being revealed as nasty, by the melt-down and the Internet. Old School Republicans are being revealed as stupid, by the melt-down and the Internet. The Tea Partiers are being revealed as being good people with good ideas, by the melt-down and the Internet. No melt-down and no Internet, and you are back to the old dead heat between nice idiot Democrats and sneaky bastard Old School Republicans. And the Tea Party? Without the melt-down and the Internet, there is no Tea Party. (According to television, there is, still, no Tea Party, only criminals.)
No wonder the Democrats and the Old School Republicans hate and fear the Tea Party and are trying anything and everything they can think of to make it seem like bad people with bad ideas. Trouble is, all that the critics of the Tea Party can now think of to say about the Tea Party just adds to the impression that such critics are nasty and stupid bastards.
This is a snapshot of now, not a prophecy about the next century. This is how USA politics is now and the direction that USA politics is moving in now. I don’t say that things will continue this way indefinitely. In particular, how will the Tea Partiers take to being part of the government, to having to grapple face-to-face with the melt-down? The continuing melt-down and the Internet might then turn round and reveal the Tea Partiers to be just another bunch of good idiots or nasty bastards, or just nasty idiots. But, the melt-down and the Internet are not doing that now. They are doing the exact opposite of that.
As has already recently been noted here by Michael Jennings, Australia is just now doing rather badly at cricket. The first day of the recently concluded Melbourne game was, for Australia, particularly calamitous. Australia all out 98, England 157 for no wicket. That, trust me, was very bad indeed for Australia. Bear in mind that this was not just any old bad day; this was Boxing Day at the MCG, against England, one of the great days of the Australian sporting calendar, like Derby Day or Grand National day in England or Superbowl Sunday in the USA. After that first day disaster, there looked to be no way back in this particular game for the Australians, and so it proved. England, having won the Ashes back in 2009 in England, will now keep them. If I am optimistic about England’s chances of avoiding a deeply disappointing 2-2 draw in the series in the forthcoming final test at Sydney, it is because I believe that the leaders of the England team agree with me that if they lose in Sydney that will seriously take the shine off their entire campaign.
Okay, sport hurrah! Blah blah blah. But last night, as I settled down to watch the televised highlights of the final spasms of that Melbourne game on ITV4, I realised something else that was, for me, new and different, besides England thrashing Australia in Australia at cricket. Someone else was suffering, if my behaviour was anything to go by, besides Aussie cricketers and cricket fans.
In the past, when a major sports team that I am fond of (usually either the England cricket team or the England rugby team) has done really well, I go out and buy an armful of newspapers and have a good wallow, with newspaper pages spread out all over my living room floor. I know, I know, the internet has been with us for at least a decade. But the habit of newspaper buying has been a hard one for me entirely to break, especially at times like these. Well, now, finally, I seem to be cured of it. I made no conscious “decision”. I simply, I now realise, didn’t buy any newspapers. Never even thought about it.
It seems that I have learned enough about surfing the internet to no longer want newspapers even for sporting excitements, even when I would actually enjoy reading about a quarter of what is in them, and might learn all kinds of other things if I at least glanced through the rest of them. Recent newspaper purchases, made for this or that forgotten reason, have only resulted in them being almost totally unread.
It also helped that, this time around, I now have a brand spanking new computer, with several tons more RAM than before, and quick as lightning compared to anything I’ve ever had until now.
It seems that I am not the only one now thinking like this about newspapers, and more to the point buying (as in not buying) like this. (My thanks for that link to Guido Fawkes.)
If one newspaper puts itself behind a paywall, well, there are plenty of others who have yet to do this. If they all, sometime soonish, go behind a paywall, well, I’ll deal with that problem when it happens. Meanwhile, plenty of verbiage is now given away on big sports dramas, and I can now find all I want about England cricket successes for nothing, and in a paperlessly calm manner. Personally, I don’t believe that there ever will be any great lack of good free-to-read stuff about cricket, even if the “professional” journalists do all end up requiring payment to be read (as well they might). The amateurs will happily step forward, I say, in fact I’m pretty sure that they already have. It’s just that for as long as the old school media mostly give their cricket stuff away, I haven’t bothered to find out which new websites and blogs I could go to. I’d welcome suggestions as to where else I might be reading about cricket, besides Cricinfo and the big newspaper websites of the cricketing world.
Part of my point here is: although these kinds of changes are absolute in nature, and very abrupt in historic time, at the time they happen they are often experienced as oddly gradual, and even preventable should you happen to want them prevented. What is later clear to have been a total wipe-out happens at the time as single figure percentage drops. This particular bit of writing has long been on the wall, but it often takes a bit of a while for sufficient numbers to read such writing and to make the long-prophesied on-off switch actually do its switch. For one thing, the hardware often needs to evolve, speed up, get easier and nicer, and so on. In this case, gradually, they (we) are, and it is. And in this case, the phrase “writing on the wall” seems peculiarly apt, even if the wall in question is virtual and electronic rather than literal.
What seems to be happening is that many are now willing to pay pennies to read professional media stuff, on their iPads and iPhones and Google-Android equivalents. How much of a real business this will turn into remains to be seen. Very big but very different from the recent past would be my current guess. I don’t believe that Rupert Murdoch has necessarily made a big mistake with his Times paywall decision, by the way. His old regime couldn’t last, and had to be changed. He has merely decided which bit of the new internet business he wants the Times to be in. The Times now faces turmoil as it adjusts to its new reality, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t adjust.
Meanwhile, all those who, like me, want also to write about it (whatever it might be) and to link to other writings about it will continue to want free stuff. It’s absolutely not – or not only – that we amateurs are cheap. The key is linkage. If we can’t say to everyone reading our own free stuff: hey, have a read of this (no link there because that is my exact point), there is, for us amateur writers, no point in us reading it either.
Another way of putting all this is to say that whereas it used to be that the Mainstream Media were … the mainstream media, while us internetters all lived in our dusty little caves of off-message opinion, gibbering and cursing with only our closest friends, now it is the pay-as-you-read ex-mainstream media who will be the ones living, if not in caves, then at least indoors, so to speak, and hence ever more cut off from “public” opinion. Think: Palace of Versailles. That this switch is already happening explains a lot about the current state of politics, worldwide.
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