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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Striking Hezbollah is a very low-risk proposition compared to striking targets in Gaza or Iran.
Every single Gaza strike brought the possibility of mass casualties, but in Gaza, this was a feature, not a bug for HAMAS. HAMAS needs civilian casualties because they cannot win a fight against Israel. The world must be so horrified that they end the conflict with a cease-fire and a cease-fire means a HAMAS win.
However, civilians in southern Lebanon can flee north, which is something that cannot be done by residents of Gaza. This makes Hezbollah a much more attractive target and reduces the amount of propaganda that can be released by Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is in a bad situation and they are starting to realize that Iran is not coming to help them.
– Ryan McBeth
Victims are blamed, pressured into keeping quiet, and whistleblowers are pursued. In short, after an initial flurry of activity, we have taken the Rotherham vaccine and become inured to the plight of our young girls, who are foolishly looking to us in hope of salvation, imploring us for help and daily praying for justice – a vain yearning in today’s Britain.
Mentioning the scandal carries a “branding” sentence, which an increasing number of people feel unable to bear, preferring to throttle the source of the sound of suffering than to deal with the root of the problem.
One thing is for sure: it is for us, not the authorities, to judge them on their record.
The mother in Wakefield lived through two-tier policing, as have many thousands of other desperate souls. That is a fact.
– Alex Story
We are witnessing a kind of unwitting absolution of Hamas. It seems the West’s cultural elite, drunk on woke, can only interpret this war through the warping prism of identity politics. So ‘white’ Israel is seen as the only true, conscious actor in the war, while ‘brown’ Hamas are the victims, or at least hapless players whose actions are not worth dwelling on for long. In this twisted vision, Israel acts, Palestine is acted upon – even though it was Hamas’s acting upon Israel on 7 October that started the entire thing. It’s time to stop blaming Israel for everything. It’s time to talk about Hamas’s culpability. It’s time to give evil its due.
– Brendan O’Neill
We’ve all heard the prevailing narrative in recent weeks. The riots that hit our towns and cities were the consequence of a mix of ‘inflammatory rhetoric’ and ‘disinformation’ from malicious actors. Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson, Andrew Tate, Nigel Farage – all these individuals have been depicted as the James-Bond-style villain responsible for the mayhem.
This misguided theory has repeatedly been advanced by various liberal sophisticates on social media – people who always appear so desperate to flaunt their ‘progressive’, high-status opinions (the better to win kudos from their peers, of course).
[…]
What it all shows is that if you scratch a member of the liberal intelligentsia, an anti-democratic authoritarian will bleed. We see time and again that, when it comes to the crunch, the liberal ‘good guys’ are as illiberal as the worst despots.
– Paul Embery
Media reaction to the National Wealth Fund has, in general, been positive, though (predictably) The Economist was critical. Interestingly, The Guardian did not appreciate the fund’s misleading name. Probably the most glowing responses came from the Financial Times. Many might think that this, as well as the various big names involved in the formulation of the policy — including former Bank of England governor Mark Carney and the Chief Executives of Aviva, NatWest, and Barclays — reflects the fact that this policy is well-formulated and fundamentally sensible. They would be wrong. As we have seen, there is nothing sensible about the majority of the ‘preliminary’ sectors chosen.
– Pimlico Journal
“Speech is not violence. Words cannot injure or compel a person to hate or riot. Consequently, the state has very little business policing it, and the outcomes are usually dire when it tries.”
– Institute of Economic Affairs, in an emailed newsletter it sends out. It refers to recent commentaries such as here and here.
A plethora of on-message communicators, embedded in governments and global organisations, are engaged in disseminating messages to the masses urging us all to change our behaviours so as to save the world from purported existential threats. Near the top of the pyramid of these influencers are behavioural scientists, with the U.K. hosting many such ‘nudgers’ skilled in the art of persuading the populace to comply with diktats to ‘save’ the planet from a looming viral or climate apocalypse. But do these various mouthpieces promoting globalist agendas ever pause to question the legitimacy their goals? Recent evidence would suggest not.
– Gary Sidley
Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) controlled more than $11.8 trillion in 2023, beating hedge funds and private equity firms combined, up from $1 trillion in 2000. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) had assets worth $45 trillion in 2020, the equivalent of half of global gross domestic product, up from $13 trillion in 2000. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development calculates that half of the world’s 10 biggest companies and 132 of its 500 biggest are SOEs. The state is not only back. It has burrowed into the heart of the capitalist economy — running companies (often across borders) and shaping capital markets.”
– Adrian Wooldridge, Bloomberg ($)
I would argue that this issue is as big, or more serious, than the usual complaint that boards of large, mostly listed, companies have gone “woke”. Because as we have seen, as interest rates have risen to curb inflation, some of this wokery has gone into retreat. But sovereign wealth funds are a different kettle of fish. With a few exceptions (Norway), nearly all the countries operating SWFs are commodity-rich autocracies, such as those of the Gulf, of varying levels of opacity. As Wooldridge says, this creates a big problem because the healthy “creative destruction” of free market capitalism cannot so easily work its brutal, if necessary, magic.
Recently, there was an attempt – since thwarted, as far as I can tell – by an Abu Dhabi-backed fund to buy the Telegraph Group, owner of titles including the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph. That caused a political storm. But many other acquisitions, such as of ports, sports clubs and infrastructure, go on and are routine.
A question I have is whether the current Labour government, full of managerialist/statist types with no feel for entrepreneurship and the healthy ups and downs of capitalism, will be tempted to do something similar, although the UK, unlike the oil-rich potentates of the Gulf, is short of funds. But even so, the Starmer government might be tempted, maybe in concert with other countries, to try and get into the state capitalism act. It is probably already doing so.
The question is whether any of the opposition parties have the fortitude and discipline to mount a coherent takedown of all this, and perhaps join it with a similar assault on the growing spread of the “administrative state”. In many ways, the rise of this state, and SWFs, are part the same, troubling trend.
“Economics without price theory is knowledge without wisdom. Any economist can analyze data to estimate how many lives you’d save by requiring car seats for toddlers on airplanes. It takes a price theorist to ask how many lives you’d lose when the resulting increase in airfares prompts families to drive—which is far more dangerous—instead of fly. Price theory breeds wiser policymakers and wiser voters. If we fail to teach it, that’s a tragedy.”
– Steven E. Landsburg
The first piece is how pensions work, and what’s gone wrong with them. In our state pension (I’ll say a little about private schemes at the end), we don’t “save up for our retirement”. When we started the system after the war, we needed to pay retirees immediately. Pensions have therefore always been met each month out of taxes paid by workers that month. At any given moment, there is only a week or two of funds in the government’s “State Pension account”.
While that arrangement solved an immediate problem, it created an enormous structural problem. When the pension scheme was started, life expectancy was about 68. Now it’s about 82. And birth rates started falling in the 1960s, meaning that more and more pensioners incomes are being funded by fewer and fewer workers. The result is that the average person born in 1956 now takes out around £290,000 more in retirement income than she paid over her working life.
The plan for addressing that problem was to grow the economy each year by an amount sufficient to generate enough tax receipts to keep funding the expanding retirement bill. And for most of the 20th century, while we benefitted from a global hydrocarbon and nuclear energy system that for decades doubled in size every 7 years, that plan worked.
“Net Zero” puts an end to that.
– Richard Lyon
The foreign ministers of Australia, Japan, India and the US issued a joint statement after the massacre, saying ‘We underscore the need to prevent the conflict from escalating’. Likewise, Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, has said ‘we are deeply concerned about the risk of further escalation’. These are warnings to Israel, aren’t they? These powerhouses of Western diplomacy, with their noisy teeth-gnashing over ‘escalation’, are essentially telling Israel to chill out. Indeed, one US security analyst told the Guardian that ‘the most pressing task for US officials’ is to ‘delay any Israeli retaliation’ in order that we might ‘achieve de-escalation’. Relax, Israel – it’s only 12 kids.
– Brendan O’Neill
“How will the service rebuild in the wake of its catastrophic failure? The agency might argue that it is striving to bulk up, adding personnel needed to thwart assassins. On Monday, the Secret Service advertised two openings. The positions could be found at the U.S. government’s employment portal, USAJobs. Those hired will each be paid $139,395 annually. With what essential mission will they be tasked? Counter-sniping? Evasive driving? No. The title of both jobs is “Lead Public Affairs Specialist.”
– Eric Felten, Wall Street Journal ($).
The humorous writers and mockers of government idiocies, such as the late H L Mencken and P J O’Rourke, would have had much sport with this sort of story.
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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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