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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ELSPA director general Mike Rawlinson said:
The discovery that the Video Recordings Act is not enforceable is obviously very surprising. In the interest of child safety it is essential that this loophole is closed as soon as possible.
In this respect the videogames industry will do all it can to support and assist the government to that effect. ELSPA will therefore advise our members to continue to forward games to be rated as per the current agreement while the legal issues are being resolved.
FFS!
Watch this outstanding commentary on political correctness in academia and the culture and naked lies in the media called MSNBC & The Great Liberal Narrative: The Truth About The Tyranny of Political Correctness.
And I know Bill and he is a really great guy, a true gentleman. But Bill… stop calling them liberal. We are the true liberals.
PJTV really is getting some truly great stuff up lately.
Dan Rather is calling on the state (naturally) to prop up the old mainstream media and had this to say:
“If we do nothing more than stand back and hope that innovation alone will solve this crisis,” he said, “then our best-trained journalists will lose their jobs.”
From your lips to God’s ear, Dan.
But innovation is indeed ‘solving’ this ‘crisis’ as the meteoric spread of blogs and other forms of new media are demonstrating. And Dan, if you think all those bloggers who are pissing on the ashes are trying to help put the flames out, I assure you their motives are rather… different.
(Via Instapundit)
Which is why you can’t trust nature. Anatole Kaletsky is worried about stagflation. Can this be the same Anatole Kaletsky who only six month ago called for government to “punish savers”?
As I wrote at that time,
[Unsubbed original:] The purpose of banks used to be to make a profit by using the deposits in their care productively at second-hand. That is why they pay interest: to bring in funds to be lent. If they don’t do either then they are no longer banks but state-sponsored rentiers.
Far from encouraging productive capital, Mr Kaletsky’s prescription would have us reverting to a pre-capitalist economy where those with savings dare not recycle them. Their personal cash will end up converted to valuables, hoarded, and hidden to keep them safe from predatory tax farmers. Printing money is also a well-tested means of encouraging the same sort of behaviour.
For a recovery we need capitalism and the market to do their work. However painful, that is better than reversion to the Dark Ages because governments and their advisors want to be seen to be doing *something*. Doing nothing may be the best alternative.
Mr Kaletsky has got what he asked for and now finds he does not want it. Human, all too human.
It is revealing in the coverage of the conviction of two racists for expressing their views, that there is a near complete lack of any debate over the profound civil liberties issues involved. It is being flatly reported, but not debated.
The mainstream media are always telling us how ‘essential’ they are for ‘our democracy’. But I have yet to see anyone raise the point that just because the people stating their opinions are crackpots, maybe crackpots should also be allowed to say what they think? I was waiting for the papers to surprise me today…
But no. This is ‘ground breaking‘ we are told, and indeed it is, but that is as far as the reports go. Does the Guardian or Telegraph not have anything to say about the broader implications?
State commissars like Adil Khan in Humberside, who is in charge of making us diverse but cohesive (or face prison if we demur) tells us:
“This case is groundbreaking. The fact is now that we’ve been able to demonstrate that you’ve got nowhere to hide; people have been hiding on [sic] the fact that this server was in the US. Inciting racial hatred is a crime and one which seems to occur too regularly. This kind of material will not be tolerated as this lengthy investigation shows.”
Which is actually quite a misleading statement. The state only regards people stating their extreme opinions as “incitement” if they belong to ritually abominated groups like white racists, whose extreme views must be punished because there is no political cost to doing so. For groups who actually throw bricks when the cops come calling, well, stating their extreme views is treated rather differently.
This is hardly new of course. Incite violence with words, but be unlikely to actually do anything, well you might well go to jail… actually kill people over many years, ah, that eventually gets you invited to help govern. No? I have two words for you: Sinn Fein.
Last time I called Britain a police state, I was dismissed as overheated because, after all, I can run this blog and state my contrary opinions, so this is hardly a police state.
Yet were Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle not just jailed for running a website on a US server (just as Samizdata is on a US server)? If you cast your eyes back through our archives, you will find we have on many occasions called for this or that group to have fairly violent things done to them (Ba’athists for example… and certain Wahhabi folk on occasion too… and certain Serbian nationalists)… and I suspect trawling through the archives of the Daily Telegraph would turn up articles ‘inciting’ not just ‘violence’ but calling for full blown wars.
Well it is now clear that we can say what we think, not by right as ‘freeborn Englishmen’ (hah!) but rather at the sufferance of the likes of Adil Khan and the whole apparatus of thought control that people like him represent. They do not feel the urge to come after us because we are not unpopular enough, although I doubt they like folks like us suggesting they prose a vastly greater threat to liberty and, gasp, “social cohesion” than a couple comically wacko racists.
Have you seen this being hotly debated in the media? Even a little? Pah. So much for the fearless and ‘essential’ media guardians of our liberal western order.
The sooner the old media are driven out of business by the internet, the better… ten years tops… except they will of course just rent seek tax money to keep themselves alive (or more accurately undead as no one will actually read them/watch them any more) due to their ‘essential role’ and the ‘public interest’ of having newspapers and TV channels no one really needs and do who not actually do anything essential or even particularly useful.
A friend (you know who you are) informed me that the Economist magazine was “getting better”, for example it had a lead story denouncing government debt. Of course this was the government debt that the Economist had urged government to take on (to bail out banks and other corporations and then to “stimulate the economy”), but it was good that it was denouncing the debt.
So I decided to give the Economist a chance and read their article (“editorial”) on American health care. After drinking a bottle of cider to recover (what a nice new bottle shape Henry Westons have produced) these on my thoughts upon that article:
It starts with a lie – Barack Obama was elected in part because of his plans to “fix American health care”.
In reality it was Hillary Clinton who stressed her health care plan during the Democrat primary campaign (Barack Obama just attacked her plan and made vague noises about his own). And during the general election campaign it was John McCain who came out with a specific health care plan, allowing people to buy health cover over State lines and switching the tax deductibility of buying health care cover from employers to individuals, whereas Barack Obama just (dishonestly) attacked the McCain plan and was vague about his own.
Barack Obama was elected President of the United States for several reasons (white guilt about mistreatment of black people, the total ideological devotion of the education system and the mainstream media, the insane judgement by John McCain to back the bank bailouts…), but stressing some specific plan to “fix American health care” was not one of them.
Still the Economist does not let the truth stand in the way of its articles, so it then outlines its position.
“Starting from scratch their would be a good case for a mostly publicly funded system” even for a magazine “as economically liberal as this one”.
This is a standard Economist trick – propose some form of statism and defend it by saying even we, the free market ones (the European meaning of “economically liberal”), are in favour of this statism. Of course the Economist never actually produces any evidence that it is pro-free market – but it is at trick it has been using since Walter Bagehot (the second editor, the first editor actually was a free market man) so I suppose it is a lie hollowed by history.
However, we are not “starting from scratch” so the Economist reluctantly concedes that some little freedom (about half of American health care is already government funded and the rest is tied up in regulations – facts that the Economist avoids, see later) must remain for awhile – it suggests five years. → Continue reading: The ‘Economist’ and American health care
I rather like the recently-launched magazine of UK current affairs, Standpoint. This item on Ken Loach, the film-maker, is particularly good.
I wish the magazine success and it should give publications such as The Spectator, Prospect and The New Statesman a run for their money.
In an earlier piece here today, Perry de Havilland referred to the great fuss that Britain’s broadcasters are now making about the rather small successes of the BNP in the Euro elections, and their relative silence concerning the much bigger success achieved by UKIP. True. UKIP is indeed being ignored, and the BNP is indeed being talked up. But I don’t think it’s right to dismiss the talking up of the BNP entirely as tactics. I think that genuine fear is being expressed by our former gatekeepers of correct thought. The rise of Adolph Hitler has been obsessively taught in British schools for the last generation or so, as the very definition of that which Must Not Happen, yet now, something not wholly unlike it appears to be happening, here in Britain! Calamity!
I say “former” gatekeepers of correct thought because that is surely the other thing now happening that scares these people. The internet, as we enthusiasts for it have been saying ever since it got started as a mass phenomenon a decade ago or more, entitles people to say whatever they like. They no longer need the permission of anybody more important to reach a quite large audience with an opinion that quite large numbers of people agree with but which the Gatekeepers disapprove of and want suppressed. Very suddenly, in a matter of a year or two, servile and carefully crafted letters to the newspapers, that conceded almost everything but cunningly managed to slip a tiny few incorrect thoughts past the Guardians, could be forgotten about. A blog can now be cranked up, and the blogger can tell it exactly how he reckons it is. Potential supporters can be directed with a link to the manifesto of whatever crank party the blogger happens to approve of or find interesting. If a Gatekeeper now wants to quote a “crank” out of context, Google ensures that the rest of us can read the opinions of said crank, in context, whether the Gatekeeper himself deigns to include an actual link or not.
My eldest brother is a UKIP activist, and I sense in him none of the frustration that he and his UKIP brethren used to feel, about being ignored by the masses, because then ignored by “the” (there then being only one great lump of them) media. When he now knocks on a door, the householder knows just what Elder Brother stands for. Conversation can immediately proceed to the matter of what a splendid front garden or front door the householder is presenting to the world, thus establishing that although firm in their opinions, UKIPers are still humans, able to see the world through eyes other than their own. Seemed like a nice enough bloke. Yeah, maybe I’ll vote for him, if I don’t fancy any of the others. That the big media are still trying to ignore Elder Brother now no longer worries him. The Gatekeepers now have to convince him, and all the other people who think as he does, that he and they are wrong. Good luck with that.
As a radical libertarian activist, I built the entire early first half of my career (if you can call it that) contriving to navigate, with cunningly photocopied pamphlets, around Gatekeeper assumptions that such opinions just could not be sincerely held, by anyone who mattered. I helped to contrive a local internet, you might say, for London libertarians, and I helped to feed libertarian memes into low-grade BBC local talk shows. Ever since the real internet came along, I have had a great deal to say for myself, but have nevertheless been feeling somewhat at a loose end.
All of which means, as the title of this posting proclaims, that the burden of proof has now been reversed. It used to be that someone who favoured radical tax cuts, or bringing immigration to a halt, or expunging the EU from British life, or that Jesus Christ is Our Saviour and gayness is evil, or that Islam is not welcome in these islands, or any other such challenge to Gatekeeper orthodoxy, had to prove to the Gatekeepers that his opinion was worth being heard and had some flicker of merit, perhaps because (see John Stuart Mill) it ensured that the Gatekeepers were at least prodded from time to time into keeping their orthodoxies in full working order. Now, the Gatekeepers, their gates electronically melted, have to explain why such notions do not have any merit, and why people should not vote for them. Since the Gatekeepers have spent all their lives loftily refusing to participate in any such arguments, instead only contriving verbal formulae to demonise all such notions as “extreme”, “selfish”, “old fashioned”, “racist”, “far right”, and so on, they are, not surprisingly, very frightened at suddenly having to overturn the habits of a lifetime. What, they wonder, if they make even greater fools of themselves than the internet, by telling voters directly about all these wickednesses, has made of them already? What if they join in these arguments, but then lose? Well, indeed.
Last night, for instance, I watched a lady cabinet minister carefully refusing to reply to what the man from the BNP was actually saying, and instead insisting that the BNP is “really”, “essentially”, racist. By all means throw that last point in incidentally, but ad hominem attack and nothing else no longer works as an argumentative technique, because the argument is now raging anyway and Milady Cabinet Minister can only decide whether or not she joins in. The BNP can decide what it will now say, and say it. It does not need permission from Her Ladyship, or from her friends in the BBC or in the big national newspapers, to say whatever it wants to say, to anyone who wants to listen. The man from the BNP oozed confidence. The Lady Cabinet Minister looked uncomfortable.
As it happens, I share quite a few Gatekeeper objections to some of these “extreme” ideas, even as I am enthusiastic about others of them. I quite like immigration, especially from Eastern Europe. Jesus Christ is not my saviour, and gayness is fine by me. I fear that if Britain leaves EUrope, economic freedom (let alone any other kind) may not erupt, but rather something far nastier and stupider and more xenophobic and more economically wrong-headed. And so on. But, I do favour radical libertarianism. And I do not like Islam at all, and believe that the only defence of its unchallenged presence in our midst that makes any sense is based on believing that what it actually says will be almost unanimously ignored by its supposed supporters in favour of far kinder and far gentler mis-readings of it.
But then, I am not saying which opinions I think should be allowed and which not allowed. I say: allow them all. In fact, the nastier and more belligerent they are, the better it is for us all to be able to acquaint ourselves with them. Where I agree I will say so, and where I disagree I will say so. I just did.
And when it comes to voting, vote for one of the little parties, that actually believes in stuff. Don’t waste your vote on the Conservatives, LibDems or Labour. What will voting for them accomplish? How will voting for those people tell anyone what you actually think and actually want?
At the bottom of this, you can read this:
This is a parody and in no way expresses any political ideology, nor does it intend to defame the BBC.
But don’t let that put you off. My thanks to this guy.
There is no doubt that – apart from some smart writers like Liam Halligan – not many people in the financial journalist profession saw the current crisis coming or predicted its full extent. Clive Davis, over at his blog, makes that point by linking to an article that goes into what is rather mysteriously called the “shadow banking” sector: ie, any institution that gets involved in trading in or holding credit, such as hedge fund. I wrote about misconceptions surrounding this issue the other day.
So why were financial journalists or many economists unaware of the gathering storms? Well, assuming that they were oblivious, my explanations are as follows. I’d be interested in the comments. Here goes:
First, over-specialisation in the economics profession. One of the great benefits to me in discovering those Austrian economists such as Ludwig von Mises and writers like Henry Hazlitt all those years ago as a callow youth was that it reintroduced me to the days when “political economy”, as it was known in the 19th Century, was not hung up on mathematical models or big, wooly macro-economic systems, but addressed the incentives, laws, and actions of man. I had the benefit of getting a good grounding in microeconomics, in understanding an economy as a dynamic process that changes through time, not a set of artificial “games” with nonsense such as models of “perfect competition”.
Second, I think that for many journalists who did learn economics, the sort of ideas that have given me and other classical liberals/libertarians some insight into the gathering storms are simply not on their intellectual radar, or if they are, they are led to believe that people with surnames such as Hayek, or von Mises, or Friedman, are somehow eccentric, even malevolent creatures. Most of them have either read their JK Galbraiths, or their Krugmans, and get their views from the still-powerful tradition of Keynesian economics. The idea that fiat, state-monopoly money and Big Government – the two are related issues – lie at the core of the issue just does not apply to a group of folk who generally tilt left in their politics (although this is far less the case than in other parts of journalism, in my experience).
Also, as a result of overspecialisation, a journalist who writes about, say, the government bond market may not always join the dots when it comes to information coming out in a different area of the economy. There is also the fact that as sectoral journalists covering their beats such as energy, retail, telecoms, etc, get involved in the day-to-day job of covering these things, that the broader trends get obscured because of the sheer volume of stuff that journalists deal with. Given how financial journalism has developed as a profession in the last two decades – I have some insight into this via my day job – I am not too sure how to deal with this. Part of the trouble may even be what I might call the “showbiz” trend in financial journalism: reporters at channels such as CNBC often talk about the market in a sort of sports-coverage way: who’s up, who’s down, etc.
There are reporters – the FT’s Gillian Tett springs to mind – who have been very good at trying to keep on top of how the credit markets have evolved and some of the risks associated with that. And there are commentators and investors such as Jim Rogers, for instance, who have been pretty astute at seeing the disaster and warning about it. But a lot of people, as Clive Davis says, have not been aware of the magnitude of what has hit us. Maybe, however, Mr Davis has to remember the flip-side of this coin: we may now be blind to the chances of a pretty rapid recovery, at least in some parts of the world.
In its ironically titled ‘Lexington’ section the Economist magazine attacks those who point at the influence of collectivist ideologies on American government policy. Rather than refuting the evidence and argument the critics of government policy produce, the Economist (in the best education system and mainstream media tradition) just ignores evidence and argument, and denounces those who point to Marxist and Fascist origins of much modern “Progressive” government policy.
One example of the Economist approach really caught my eye:
For years Glenn Beck has denounced wild spending Republicans (especially President Bush) and since moving to Fox News he has continued to do this. He has also (with the help of many people who have written scholarly books on these matters) continued to try and explain the influence of collectivist philosophies on American politics over the last century – from Teddy Roosevelt to Barack Obama.
The Economist collapses all of this into – Glenn-Beck-claims-Obama-leading-the-United-States-to-Fascism.
If ‘Lexington’ was attacking me this would make some sort of sense, as I have often pointed out the Marxist background of Barack Obama (and Marxists sometimes evolve into Fascists – as this involves no rejection of their basic collectivism). However, Glenn Beck has clearly stated (many times) that he does not believe that that Barack Obama is a Communist or a Fascist – what Beck is trying to do is to show how collectivist philosophies have increasingly influenced American government policies over time, often without the leading politicians being fully aware of the origins and nature of the principles they try and put into practice.
Anyone who has seen the show, as opposed to tiny bits of the show taken out of context, would know this.
However, ‘Lexington’ would rather write about something without bothering to watch it – getting his “information” from the far left smear site “mediamatters” instead.
And the mainstream media wonder why libertarians and conservatives despise them.
Why we should shut these bastards down now and add TV Licensing to the unemployment figures.
The arrest. The outcome.
Raze White City to the ground and cast salt upon the earth…
Hat tip: Biased BBC
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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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