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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Fuck off. I despise Google, but I’d trust them more than I trust Wes Streeting or any of the other narcissistic arseholes in government. I will do whatever I can to foil any attempts to drag me into their net. I, not they, am the owner of myself and my data. At every turn I will put down obstacles and refuse to comply. We’ve been here before – twenty years ago, in fact. Nothing changes. Different faces, but the same lurking evil.
– Longrider quietly musing on the relationship between the state and its subjects.
“It’s not too much to say that if Israel had taken Mr. Biden’s advice, Sinwar, Nasrallah, and the rest of the Hamas-Hezbollah leadership would still be alive.”
– Wall Street Journal editors.
We must be clear about things: A just world required this man to die, and ideally without dignity. I can put it in no blunter terms than that, nor even conceive of them. I am utterly relieved about his death, and more than a bit elated as well — not because I am bloodthirsty, but precisely because I despair over the implacable bloodthirstiness of Hamas, an organization that came to power in the Gaza Strip after it was literally handed to the Palestinians but that, instead of governing for the benefit of its people, harvested its resources and human capital to plot the slaughter, abduction, rape, and eventual genocide of its Jewish neighbors. Sinwar died with a shell through his skull and a roof collapsed upon his bomb-belted body, and I confess my grim satisfaction at the closure of it, if nothing else. He was given the opportunity to be an actual leader, and he invested all of it in hatred and terror. I celebrate, and couldn’t care less if you think differently.
– Jeffrey Blehar
“When competence is rewarded, you get more of it. When the ability to play internal politics is what gets you ahead, then you get more of that. SpaceX has clear goals, short deadlines and clear lines of responsibility. Boeing’s culture, once one that revered engineering, has become one that worships byzantine corporate politics — where you’re more likely to get fired over DEI infractions than over job performance. And it’s not just Boeing; in Oregon, a top forestry official was put on leave after a DEI officer complained he was “seeking only the candidates most qualified for the job,” without emphasizing their “gender and identity.” Ditto the federal government, which has created a self-perpetuating culture of incompetence: It’s virtually impossible to get fired, and failures often bring more resources to the agency, not less.”
– Glenn Reynolds, New York Post.
Just to make the problem clearer. Economies do add up. If this happens here then that over there must also happen. If we don’t see that second then we’re mistaken in our assumption that the first has. If productivity has risen and wages haven’t then the labour share must have fallen. The labour share – up to when PK wrote in 1996 – had not fallen. Therefore that confident blue line from 1970 to 1996 is wrong.
We don’t even have to worry about why it’s wrong. It just is – so bollocks to the rest of it.
Chakrabortty’s getting on a bit to be an enfant terrible of course, his unwillingness to spend time and energy understanding the economics he’s attempting to write about is easier to explain for he’s at The Guardian. In fact, he writes the economic editorials for The Guardian and an actual knowledge of economics in that job – let alone time and effort spent gaining it – would be a positive hindrance.
No, really.
– Tim Worstall putting the boot in 😀
This is the first anniversary of the October 7th attacks. The savage invasion of last year in which Hamas broke through the borders of Israel and proceeded to kill, rape, behead, burn, maim, and kidnap innocent civilians predictably provoked the Israeli government to retaliate.
It was perhaps also unsurprising that Israel’s reprisal would be denounced by the usual unholy alliance of Islamists and leftists. These perennial detractors of Israelis and Jews had, for decades, made a habit of not only excusing Palestinian intransigence but also blaming Israel no matter what.
– Ayaan Hirsi Ali
“Today’s censors wield cudgels with the word ‘information’. Content they don’t like they call ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’. The justification is fake. The protection is faux protection. Pretending to protect people from bad information by means of censorship may be called infaux thuggery. The cudgels are hidden, of course, but it is not hard to see through the pretence and discern the underlying message: knuckle under or we will hurt you.
The UK’s Online Safety Act exemplifies infaux thuggery, as does Brazil’s recent action against X (formerly Twitter). The Australian government is dominated by another gang of infaux thugs. The UK, sadly, not only practices infaux thuggery at home, it tutors the world in infaux thuggery.”
– Daniel Klein
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.
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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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