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Last night I channel hopped into Question Time, the BBC’s late night political panel show, and caught the beginning of the question they had about climate, etc.. And I can report that, although maybe only temporarily, there has been, I think, a definite change of atmosphere in the argument about climate change.
Melanie Phillips and Marcus Brigstocke said, respectively, yes and no, to the question about whether global warming was a scam. Neither Brigstocke nor Phillips said anything I haven’t heard either say several times before. Brigstocke made much of the fact that the articles he agrees with about melting icecaps were all “peer reviewed”, which Melanie Phillips wasn’t able to come back on, as she was surely itching to do. But Brigstocke wasn’t the sneering, jeering, arrogant shit I’m used to. Melanie Phillips was heard reasonably politely, and the general tone of the event was thoughtful and hesitant rather than dogmatic and intolerant of dissent. David Davis made a point of criticising the use of the word “denier” to describe people who might disagree with you. Science, he said, can’t work like that. Science is never settled, he said. Nobody objected to those claims in any way.
But it wasn’t so much what they all said. It was more how they said it, and the general atmosphere of how it was received. The audience was the usual pro-warming crowd, but its partisanship was not the monstrous thing I usually see on Question Time, and it included at least two brave souls who thought quite differently, because they said so out loud. First, there was the questioner, who dared to use that word: scam. And at the end there was a bloke who claimed, mentioning those familiar (to us lot) historical stories about the medieval warm period, that “only one point of view is allowed”. But as he himself proved, both by how he spoke and by how he was allowed by all others present to speak, i.e. without jeeringly self-righteous interruptions, that he was a bit out of date.
Put it this way. A mere wordsmith like me struggles to get across what the change was. But a theatre or movie director would have known at once that something quite big had happened, and would have been able to itemise quite a few more specifics to back up that observation than I can, to do with body language, tone of voice, crowd noises, and so on and so forth. I hesitate to say that “things will never be the same again”. But I do think this might now be true.
Listening to Brigstocke talking about the problems he said the Inuits have been having, and about retreating icecaps and water that is less saline than usual because of so much ice melting into it, made it clear to me that the question now is: How much evidence is there, still, for the global warming thesis, that has not been taken out, not contaminated (so to speak) by those wretched CRU conspirators. (Later: in connection with that, see this. Even later: I’m not completely sure, but I rather think this may be one of the very best pieces yet on all of this. And whatever you do, don’t miss the final paragraphs about all those bewildered environmental correspondents. Real Samizdata quote of the year stuff.) → Continue reading: Question Time and questioning the Times – how the climate of opinion has changed
Rupert Murdoch is not a stupid chap, but I cannot understand how he can fail to see the absurdity of his latest remarks. His threat to block his online content from search engines is an indication he does not grasp the fact his content is almost entirely fungible in a world where the plentiful alternatives are simply a click away.
Rupert Murdoch says he will remove stories from Google’s search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online.
Let me correct that…
Rupert Murdoch says he will remove stories from Google’s search index as a way to encourage people to find alternative content elsewhere online.
Not only will people not be motivated to pay Rupert Murdoch for content if they cannot find it via google, they will not even be aware of the content Murdoch is hiding from them. In short, Murdoch will become completely irreverent irrelevant on-line almost overnight and I am not sure why he thinks all too many people will care one way or the other. This is a bit like threatening someone that if they do not give him their money, Murdoch will cut his own throat. Er, sure Rupert, whatever. I suspect folks at the Guardian (who may not be my favourites ideologically but they certainly ‘get’ the internet better than most) and elsewhere can hardly believe their good luck.
Sorry to obsess on the subject but I just keep seeing these howlers by the professional journalists who we are told are so essential for democracy/social justice/world rotation/whatever. The latest giggler comes from Ed Pilkington writing in the Guardian:
There is also evidence that Hasan purchased a high-powered pistol three weeks ago as well as several high-capacity ammunition rounds that would allow him to continue firing without reloading.
Well… a 5.7mm pistol round is kind of low-powered really, at least in terms of ‘stopping power’ and I suspect the main reason that traitorous Muslim creep at Fort Hood killed so many people was they were defenceless and thus died from multiple point blank shots… therefore I can well believe he purchased several high-capacity magazines… you know, the sticky-down bits that hold the “ammunition rounds” (presumably as opposed to “newspaper rounds” or “doctor’s rounds”)… hehehe…. and I assume he got several so that he could reload quickly during his shooting spree.
It seems a crime reporter writing for a ‘quality newspaper’ does not need to know even the most rudimentary technical terms when describing a firearm used in a crime. The fact the editor of the Guardian lets a journalist make a ass of himself writing about something they obviously both know nothing about tells you a great deal about the state of the ‘indispensable’ news media.
I am grinding my teeth trying to restrain myself from commenting on some of the drivel being written about the recent murder of US soldiers by a muslim US army officer… but this is just a measure of the ignorance that permeates the profession and which is directly responsible for the growth of so called ‘new media’, i.e. things like blogs. Nick Allen writes in the Telegraph in an article titled “gunman used ‘cop killer’ weapon in massacre at US Army base” (a catchy ‘yellow journalism’ title if ever there was one):
Major Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, used an FN Five-Seven, a semi-automatic pistol popular with SWAT teams, that can fire armour-piercing bullets.
Oh for fuck sake. Any weapon can fire ‘armour-piercing bullets’. I know little about Nick Allen, but I assume he is a Brit and therefore knows bugger all about firearms and thus parrots the equally dismal urban US journalist propensity to describe any handgun firing a round capable of penetrating (some) body armour as a “cop killer”. Also I strongly suspect 9mm and 10mm handguns are far more popular with SWAT teams, as SWAT teams have rifles for use against armoured targets.
The weapon is designed for high(-ish) penetration for use against low end body armoured targets (the victims at Fort Hood were almost certainly unarmoured), but it has rather poor stopping power (that said, when it comes to handguns, bullet placement rather than calibre is the largest single determinant of stopping power), making the FN actually a poor choice… presumably the high magazine capacity may have been why the murderer chose it, knowing he was going to commit his crimes at very close range in a ‘target rich’ environment.
If journalists want to be credible, they need to try to avoid loaded (no pun intended) and rather ignorant terms like “cop killer” and not make meaningless remarks about weapons being capable of using “armour piercing” rounds (which is just another way of saying “they can shoot the rounds they are loaded with”). This ghastly incident contains more than enough news fodder that such sloppiness is inexcusable from ‘professionals’.
For the New York Times writer Mr Frank Rich to complain of “Stalinism” among conservatives is interesting, considering that the New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty helped cover up the murder of tens of millions of people in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
Indeed the New York Times won a Pulitzer Price for Mr Duranty’s reports (which were one long cover up of the above mentioned murder of tens of millions of people) a prize that it has been asked to return – and has never done so.
Nor is this ancient history.
The publisher of the New York Times is a far left person who (for example) supported the Communist forces in IndoChina (including in Cambodia where the Marxists exterminated one third of the entire population).
The New York Times also has long supported Barack Obama – a man with a life long record of Marxist links. And should anyone care to deny that Barack Obama is a Marxist (in spite of his recent appointments of such people as Van Jones and Mark Lloyd) would they please give me the date when Obama stopped being a Marxist.
Obama was clearly a Marxist when, for example, he was going to Marxist conferences whilst a post grad at Columbia in New York (by the way can the public please see his thesis on “Soviet Disarmament Policy”) so when did he stop being a Marxist? I am not asking for a particular day – a year will do.
Did he (for example) react to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 by breaking with Bill Ayers and the other Comrades in Chicago – by resigning from all the boards on which they sat together perhaps? I think not.
I mean nothing “racist” when I say that for a New York Times writer to call someone else “Stalinist” is for the pot to be calling the kettle black.
P.S. Unlike Glenn Beck I would take any accusation of being a “McCarthyite” as a complement. But then I have read “Blacklisted by History” by M. Stanton Evans, whereas (sadly) Mr Beck gets his version of events from his memory of the CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow. Although, I suspect, that as an-alcoholic-who-is-not-drinking-today Mr Beck has an understandable bias against Senator Joseph McCarthy, a man who never really faced up to his drinking.
There is obviously plenty of controversy – seen across the internet and the MSM – about the decision by the BBC, the UK state broadcaster, to let the British National Party leader Nick Griffin appear on the BBC’s Question Time current affairs show. For non-Brits, I should explain that QT is a show where a panel of politicians, pundits and the occasional “personality” take questions from an audience. The audience is selected, according to the BBC, from a supposed balanced cross-section of the public. What in fact this means is that such folk are often drawn from a series of pressure groups and the like. The journalist Paul Johnson once said, many years ago, that if the QT audience were representative of the UK population as a whole, he would think of blowing his brains out. I agree. If I ever chance upon the programme, I feel murderous not towards the panelists, but towards a large part of the audience. It fills me with despair.
Even so, the decision of the QT producers to let this man on the show has thrown up some bizarre arguments. This morning, the Labour MP and pundit, Diane Abbott, told the BBC Breakfast TV show that Griffin should not appear. At the core of her argument, if one can dignify it with such a word, was the idea that only “mainstream” parties should be allowed to be panelists. The interviewer did not immediately hit back with the question as to what Ms Abbott defines as “mainstream”. After all, one could object to a Labour, or indeed Conservative politician, appearing on the show on the grounds that both parties support the idea of seizing a large portion of our wealth on pain of imprisonment; support wars against countries that, whatever the justification, involve the deaths of innocent civilians; support the UK’s membership of an oppressive and undemocratic European federal state, have taken away the right of self-defence for householders; have supported, and continue to support, an intrusive, meddling and yet also incompetent state apparatus. On those grounds alone, one could argue that such politicians should not only be banned from Question Time or any other forum, but hanged from a lampost.
Given that the BNP – a party with a hard-left, socialist economic agenda, by the way – has been elected to several seats in the EU Parliament, it would be odd not to allow the leader of a party that has won a million votes not to be held to account in the run-up to a general election next year. Of course, if we had a genuine free market in broadcasting, the editorial judgement of the BBC, which is funded by a tax, would be irrelevant. But given we have a state-financed broadcaster, that broadcaster, under its charter of incorporation, should enable elected political parties to be put to the public test. The BNP is an odious party for a libertarian, and Mr Griffin is, as his background suggests, a nasty piece of work. What have other parties to be afraid of in putting this lot under the media microscope?
The story, which I learned about today, here, has already done the rounds. After all, it happened a whole two days ago. Still, all those interested in new media, and all who fret about where news will come from if newspapers collapse, will find (will have found) the story interesting. It’s the sort of thing they presumably now study in media studies courses. If not, they should. Not that you need to be doing a media studies course to be studying the media (and the rest of us certainly shouldn’t have to pay for you to do this), but you get my drift.
Basically, a London Underground staff member called Ian swore at an unswervingly polite old man who had got his arm stuck in a train door and was trying to explain that fact to Ian. Ian said (shouted more like) that the old man would have to explain himself to the police. At that point a nearby blogger who just happened to be there, Jonathan MacDonald, started up his video camera, and soon afterwards did a blog posting, complete with video footage, about what he had witnessed. In due course the mainstream media tuned in, and went ballistic.
If you do feel inclined to follow this up, I suggest reading the original blog posting, and then some thoughts, also by Jonathan MacDonald, concerning what it all means. He supplies copious further links.
Sir Christopher Bland (somewhat unfortunate surname, Ed) has a debate in the latest edition of the UK magazine, Standpoint, with Charles Moore, former Daily Telegraph and Spectator editor, as his opponent. Moore – who has vowed not to pay the BBC licence fee tax until Jonathan Ross – a boorish chatshow host and radio DJ – is sacked for a certain incident, challenges the whole idea of tax-financed broadcasting. His arguments are forceful, not least the point that the BBC, as a privileged recipient of funds raised on pain of imprisonment, can and does undermine would-be commercial competitors, therby stifling potential new ideas and models of broadcasting. He points out that while the BBC claims to not be biased, it is in fact biased, and it would be better for such biases to be upfront rather than concealed. I am sure that Samizdata readers are mostly familiar with the standard liberal critique of the BBC’s very existence, so I will not rehearse the argument here again.
What struck me, however, is how lame Sir Christopher’s debating points are. Check them out for yourself, gentle reader. Pretty much most of his comments fall into the “only a fool could deny how wonderful the BBC is” and gives variations on how the sky will fall in on the quality of UK television if the licence fee system is scrapped. We get the now-standard sneer about American and foreign TV. Zzzzz. In fact, he rarely engages very energetically with Moore’s points; rather, he harrumphs that Moore is some sort of free marketeer zealot, and of course, brings out the standard BS line that anyone who disagrees with tax-financed broadcasting is a “philistine”. The lameness, the refusal to think in principles of any coherent kind, is really quite striking. It is hard not to smell a certain whiff of defeat.
The attitudes of Sir Christopher – no doubt a most civilised and agreeable member of what might pass for the “establishment” in this country – are pretty widely shared across much of the population. His worldview, his inability to understand a world in which the state did not grab such a huge share of our lives and attempt to manage it, is shared, for example, by all those who cannot consider how healthcare will be delivered without a Soviet-model system such as the NHS. Moore makes this point; he even points to the parallel between the old Church of England, and its now-abolished tithe on parishioners, be they Anglicans or not, and the licence fee, which is paid by those who either watch the BBC, or who do not. Bland, of course, just brushes it aside. One suspects that much of his worldview is shared by the likes of David Cameron.
Incidentally, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Standpoint. It is a definite plus in the UK magazine scene.
It’s no secret. No secret at all. Every second or third blog I read has stuff about it. Film Director Roman Polanksi (Repulsion, The Pianist) did something bad of a rape-like nature to a teenage girl several decades ago, and lived in Europe from then on.
But now they are going to extradite him or not as the case may be, from France or Switzerland (somewhere European), and big cheese lists of Hollywood big cheeses are saying he’s a great artist and therefore regular morals and laws and suchlike don’t apply to him, ease up, forget about it, freedom of artistic expression, it wasn’t really rape (“rape-rape” as Whoopi Goldberg (Ghost, Girl, Interrupted, Rat Race) has famously put it), it was her fault, it was her mother’s fault, it was the judge’s fault, blah blah, and the rest of us are saying: bullshit you evil bastards.
If you care about the details you now know them. I care about the details, a bit, and I too am of the bullshit you evil bastards tendency. Not my point here. No, what interests me about this ruckus is how the internet has so completely changed the rules of such debates, and so completely wrong-footed the big cheese evil bastard team. → Continue reading: How the internet has put Roman Polanski and his idiot Hollywood defenders in the spotlight
The other day, I criticised a short programme slot about how the Chicago school of economics – to use that rather loose term – might have to carry some responsibility for the credit crisis. The programme was put together by the Channel 4 news programme. Anyway, someone at the show noticed my comments, and the journalist who put the programme together, Faisal Islam, was kind enough to comment at some length in an email to our editors. Here goes:
“Hello Johnathan,”
“I saw your comments on the piece on economics that aired on C4 News last month. I thank you for your understanding of the limitations of television. Even C4 News would be hard-pushed to do a piece on the history of economic thought. It was really meant to be the entree for a main course of red-blooded economic debate, but that didn’t quite come off. Anyway, clearly I would dispute the notion that it was ‘propaganda’. I think it’s a bit harsh when the main protagonist is a chicago professor who does a fairly good job of defending his position, yet also recognises that they did get some things wrong.”
“Likewise we ran almost unchallenged a piece featuring Jim Rogers’ Austrian-ish critique of Obama/ Brown’s global stimuli. so I’d like to think we are more eclectic than you seem to indicate.”
“Anyway, you’ll be interested to see the rest of the Robert Lucas interview. I put it on the blog as a balance to the Paul Krugman NY Times magazine article. It’s all here, I’m sure it might stimulate some debate on your excellent blog.”
Here is Faisal’s link.
Good for Channel 4 for its reponse to what was a fairly grumpy posting by me. I guess I should have mentioned its Jim Rogers interview. I actually did link to it a while ago on this site. Jim Rogers is great value.
Anyway, I think my original point still stands, although in the light of the reaction, I will be a bit easier on Mr Islam from now on. It is gratifying that we got a response, and that Mr Islam even understood the significance of why we are writing about this topic and get annoyed if schools of economic thought are presented in a seemingly unfair way. If parts of the MSM pick up on the idea that the credit crisis cannot be blamed on “greedy bankers” and derivatives – although these instruments can be aggravating factors – but has origins in erroneous ideas of printing money, “too big to fail” bailouts and the rest, then we might be making progress. By continuing to slog away at it, we can influence ideas that are held in the media/academy and even public affairs more broadly. And influencing a guy who presents economic and business news for a major UK news channel is a pretty big deal.
Rod Liddle, in his role as knuckle-dragger-in-chief at the Spectator, has an article bearing a most arresting headline. Now the writers of such articles often don’t get to choose the headlines, so this might even have taken Mr Liddle aback somewhat:
“We should seize whatever opportunity we are given to be racist”.
The Spectator now has a new editor in the form of Fraser Nelson, one of journalism’s good guys. Well, I know it is good to start one’s term in the editor’s chair with a bang, but er, isn’t this a bit off? Actually, if you read the article, it is quite clear that Rod Liddle, despite his salty turn of phrase and spirit of cheerful nastiness, is not saying that being a racist is a good thing.
The journalists who produce the UK’s Channel 4 news programme produced a rather sly piece of leftist propoganda last night (Quelle surprise? Ed). Faisal Islam – whom I have met – had a brief slot on last night’s daily broadcast suggesting that the Chicago school of economics, most famously associated with the likes of Milton Friedman, is somehow partly to blame for the credit crunch. Yes, you read that right.
Mr Islam went on about the “complex models” that were used by these economists and somehow sought to draw a link between the Chicago School, and the decisions taken by banks, both central and private. That seems a bit rum. I don’t recall Dr Friedman or his associates granting a sort of blanket blessing to financial engineering techniques of the kind associated with recent turmoil, suchas using derivatives to put bank liabilities off the balance sheet. That school has also hardly been in favour of encouraging sub-prime lending by legislation. After all, quite a lot of economists with conventional “soft Keyensian” views pretty much signed up to how banking has operated in the last few decades, and of course signed up to the idea that former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, and his successor, Ben Bernanke, did a spiffing job.
There was no apparent attempt – admittedly quite difficult in a short TV spot – to explain what the key arguments of the Chicago school of economics actually are. Nor was there any attempt to point out that this “school” is only one of the centres of free market economics. The Austrian viewpoint, which tends to eschew statistical formulae completely, went unmentioned. And yet it is the latter approach, as exemplified by the likes of Thomas Woods, that has been most active in pointing out the sheer folly of central bank activity in the past decade or so. And this central bank activity is what has been the prime culprit, a fact that Mr Islam’s documentary left unmentioned.
The programme also failed to ask any questions of the Keynesian tradition, with its love of big, artificial aggregates such as “consumer demand” etc. If one is going to point to the hubris of statistical models of economic behaviour, then the Keynesian macroeconomic tradition is surely as much in the firing line as the Chicago one.
As propoganda, it was very effective on anyone who might not understand the issues. It might have been put together by that performance artist, Naomi Klein.
Maybe the problem is that these issues are often highly complex and difficult to portray intelligently in a 5-minute news slot. Well indeed.
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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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