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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But the U.K.’s climate agenda is now decades old. The Climate Change Act (CCA) was made legislation in 2008, 16 years ago, but the drive towards decarbonisation started much earlier in the days of the Blair Government. The years ahead of the CCA saw the formation of a cross-party Westminster consensus on climate change, rather than a conversation with the public about what it would require of them and to seek their support. Consequently, the apparatus for the climate agenda was established through intergovernmental agencies and agreements, deals with the EU, legally-binding legislative measures to allow the enforcement of the green agenda by wealthy interests in the courts, and the construction of domestic carbon bureaucracies.
Gary Smith was the sole member of the panel at what was intended to be a debate for the same reason that it has not been possible for critics of Net Zero to get answers out of the likes of the U.K. Climate Change Committee (CCC). The CCC, as with any other agency or organisation, does not debate because it does not need to. The matter is settled. The cross-party consensus was established by green lobbyists without debate. And consequently, ostensibly democratic institutions have been wholly aligned to green ideology and the Net Zero policy agenda. It’s not up for debate.
– Ben Pile
But moving away from the obvious and serious to something more jocular.
Borrowing costs imposed on France
And, no, really, just no. Yes, yes, we all know what they’re saying but it doesn’t work as a construction.
Think of the average nutter – the average socialist but I repeat myself – who’ll scream the house down about the power of The City, of “the market”. This is to make a category error, it is to reify the markets. Those markets are not, for all the linguistic ease of our saying so, “a thing”. They’re just you and me and the folk holding our chequebooks, that’s all. There’s no thing there, no market view, no market control – either control of the market or the market controlling other things. Just that interaction of 8 billion people each counting their own pennies.
The markets – as opposed to the market – do not impose borrowing costs upon anyone. They don’t impose anything at all. There’s a price at which people will lend you their pennies, a price at which they won’t. That changes over time. And, erm, that’s it. This is not an imposition.
– Tim Worstall
“The only appropriate responses to Israel’s gallantry, fortitude and skill from us—its nominal allies, especially in the U.S.—are “thank you” and “how can we help?” Instead, time and again Israel’s supposed friends, including the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, have, while expressing sympathy over the outrage of Oct. 7 and uttering the usual support for “Israel’s right to defend itself,” repeatedly tried to restrain it from doing just that. Their early, valuable support has been steadily diminished by the way they have too often connived with the anti-Israel extremists in their own party.”
– Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal ($)
Why does it work? Because, as it turns out, the profitable level of a fish stock is above the sustainable level. More fish around, less diesel and time used to catch enough to feed the market. Profits are thus maximised at stock levels substantially above sustainable levels. That means more fish to gawp at while maximising profits.
Or, alternatively, George Monbiot has got the neoliberal capitalist attitude to fisheries entirely and wholly the wrong way around. The reproductive rate of money, within that neoliberal capitalism, is more fish in the sea than there are currently. Therefore, having neoliberal capitalism running the fisheries (some to many fisheries perhaps not all) would increase the number of fish to gawp at. Exactly and precisely the opposite of what George is claiming.
The problem is about George. For someone who keeps insisting that he’s just critiquing the neolberal capitalist attitide to the environment he knows fuck all about the neoliberal capitalist attitude toward the environment.
But then that’s such a strange thing in public intellectuals, isn’t it? Ignorance?
– Tim Worstall
“We have not built a reservoir since 1992 or a nuclear power station since 1995, but we have raised the age of using sunbeds to 18.”
– Daniel Hannan, Sunday Telegraph.
May have overstated. May!?!
Chief medical officer Chris Whitty has admitted that the government may have overstated the danger of Covid at the start of the pandemic.
Well, it’s a start, I suppose. However, they massively overstated it, destroyed our liberties and economy on the basis of their own panic and inability to follow through with a sensible, rational plan that was already in place. No may about it. They did. Big time and every one of the fuckers should be doing jail time including Half-Whitty.
– Longrider, with whom I agree entirely. There needs to be professional, financial and social consequences or nothing changes. Instead, the fuckers get knighted.
“The overwhelming issue facing any UK government is: what do we stop doing? Governments over the last two decades have pretended, especially to the media, that they can tackle any issue that either journalists or lobby groups get upset about. But that is patently impossible within current resources of people, money & political consent.
So what we get are nonsensical policies to ban advertising of junk food – who knows what that is – online or before the evening watershed. Lots of people waste large amounts of time trying to write & interpret regulations that won’t have the slightest impact on the problem of obesity. This is all displacement activity for governments that are clueless and utterly incompetent. All the signs are that the current government is doomed, both because of the personality of the Prime Minister and the inclinations of his party. Since any outsider can read the runes, why would anyone commit money to underpin economic growth without being heavily bribed to do so? That is not a viable way of turning the ship of state around.”
I came across this comment, by a person called Gordon Hughes, in the UnHerd website article about the problems in the current UK government civil service machine and cabinet structure, and thought it was so good and incisive that I take the liberty of sharing it here.
Also, I take the opportunity for another plug for a book that I recommend about how a lot of people, including journalists, seem to think about everything today: Seeing Like A State, by James C Scott.
And yet, once the Ukrainians ask for long-range fires, all of a sudden their importance is downgraded and minimized. There was the widely-discussed piece in Foreign Affairs by Stephen Biddle which recently kick-started this argument—but it was an argument greatly amplified by Defense Secretary Austin a few days ago.
During the latest Ramstein meeting of Ukraine’s partners in Germany Austin basically said long-range fires were not that important. As it was relayed by PBS:
After the talks, Austin pushed back on the idea that long-range strikes would be a game-changer.
“I don’t believe one capability is going to be decisive and I stand by that comment,” Austin said. The Ukrainians have other means to strike long-range targets, he said.
Its hard to know what to make of that extraordinary claim. Is he saying that the US Army’s number 1 priority for modernization is not nearly that important? That would be bold of him—but more than likely he is desperately searching around for an argument because he knows just how important long-range fires are in war.
– Phillips P. OBrien (£)
“If free speech is a measure of a modern liberal democracy, Brazil is in trouble. A crackdown on expression and the denial of due process for those who contradict the state’s version of the truth dates back to 2020. Now it’s getting worse.”
– Mary Anastasia O’Grady Wall Street Journal ($). She is writing about Brazil’s clampdown on X, aka Twitter. Other countries are looking and watching.
I went into my segment with Tucker intent on challenging him if the opportunity presented itself, but the brief appearance focused on my Oxford speech and ended before I’d had the chance to raise my objections to his coverage of the war in Ukraine.
His producer WhatsApped me immediately after to congratulate me on the appearance with the invitation to “Please come back soon!”. ”Here is my moment”, I naively thought to myself and replied with the offer to come back and discuss my disagreements with Tucker on the war in Ukraine.
The response was telling:
”I’m just not sure it would be great TV to have him debate you on the war”.
[…]
The message was clear: we don’t want to have a discussion about this and if you keep pressing the issue you won’t be coming back on the biggest show in America.
There’s nothing wrong with any of this. No one is entitled to appear on anyone’s show to talk about a subject they nominate. Tucker and his producers are perfectly entitled to invite the guests they want to discuss the subjects they want. But the incident made it obvious to me that Tucker was not a truth-seeking journalist and that when it came to Russia and the war in Ukraine, at least, he had no intention of being objective. That much is obvious, especially after the events of the last week. But the real question is why?
– Konstantin Kisin
Like Kisin, I once saw Tucker Carlson as one of the good guys, on the same side. I am wiser now, even if we share a few of the same enemies. But sometimes, the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy.
In a previous post – borrowing from C.S. Lewis – I used the word “unconciliatory” to describe Sir Keir Starmer, and I increasingly find it the most appropriate one when thinking about the tenor of governance to which we are now subject. Labour’s victory in the 2024 election was artificial and its well of support is ankle-deep; since only one in five of the electorate actually voted for the party it was already unpopular at the very point of taking office. Politicians who were not thoroughgoing mediocrities would, finding themselves in such a position, be prudent. They would recognise their priorities to be consolidation, calmness and concession – their aim would be to lay stable foundations for future governance with quiet competence. But the current crop do not really understand the word ‘prudence’, or like it. So we are patently not going to get that. We are instead going to get a programme of improvement imposed upon us from above: eat your greens, do your press-ups, and do as nanny says (oh, and hand over your pocket money while you’re at it).
This will all unravel very quickly. People will not get with the programme, because people never really do, and certainly not when it has been designed by those they actively mistrust and sense have nothing but disdain for them. And therefore, in short order, as the truth dawns on the Government that the people are not on board with its plan of action, the sense of disappointment it feels is going to turn to rage. This will in turn have the inevitable result, as the rage becomes nakedly apparent, that the population will start to kick back – mulishly, and hard.
– David McGrogan
I highly commending this article, read the whole thing.
Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s revelation and its implications for our understanding of the last four years, and what it means for the future.
On many subjects important to public life today, vast numbers of people know the truth, and yet the official channels of information sharing are reluctant to admit it. The Fed admits no fault in inflation and neither do most members of Congress. The food companies don’t admit the harm of the mainstream American diet. The pharmaceutical companies are loath to admit any injury. Media companies deny any bias. So on it goes.
And yet everyone else does know, already and more and more so.
This is why the admission of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so startling. It’s not what he admitted. We already knew what he revealed. What’s new is that he admitted it. We are simply used to living in a world swimming in lies. It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be.
– Jeffrey Tucker
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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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