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]
|
What is the phenomenon called when a council faced with budget cuts never says it will have to cut the number of sustainability managers and diversity officers, only that it will have to close the libraries and sell off the public parks? Like NHS “shroud-waving”, but more general?
I genuinely am frightened by the Online Safety Bill, but I suspect that the Wikimedia UK people are waving whatever one waves:
“UK readers may lose access to Wikipedia amid online safety bill requirements”, reports the Guardian.
Wikipedia could be made inaccessible to UK readers due to issues over complying with the online safety bill, a charity affiliated with the website has warned.
Lucy Crompton-Reid, the chief executive of Wikimedia UK, warned the popular site could be blocked because it will not carry out age verification if required to do so by the bill.
Crompton-Reid told the BBC it was “definitely possible that one of the most visited websites in the world – and a vital source of freely accessible knowledge and information for millions of people – won’t be accessible to UK readers (let alone UK-based contributors)”.
[…]
She added: “The increased bureaucracy imposed by this bill will have the effect that only the really big players with significant compliance budgets will be able to operate in the UK market. This could have dire consequences on the information ecosystem here and is, in my view, quite the opposite of what the legislation originally set out to achieve.”
“Heat pumps: How do they work and how do I get one?” asks the BBC. Fun fact: heat pumps are born from magic cabbages that have been pollinated by combi boilers. Obviously you cannot buy a heat pump, but if you promise promise promise to look after it, the government will let you adopt one. Be warned, you may have to outbid all the other prospective heat-pump mummies and daddies out there!
Or maybe not. After the enthusiastic headline, the first paragraph of the BBC article admits that despite the government offering households £5,000 to replace their gas boilers with heat pumps, take-up of the Boiler Upgrade Scheme has been so low that the Lords Net Zero Committee has warned that the national target for green heating is “very unlikely to be met”.
This is scarcely surprising when, as the Telegraph reports,
Heat pumps will still cost households thousands of pounds each even after they have used the Government’s troubled voucher scheme, a minister has admitted.
Lord Callanan, a junior energy minister, said some consumers would pay “as little” as £2,500 for the eco-friendly heating systems after a grant of £5,000 was taken into account.
His admission comes after critics blamed the high cost of heat pumps for the “embarrassingly” low uptake of the £150m-a-year boiler upgrade scheme.
Official figures show that fewer than 10,000 households have taken advantage of the grants since its launch last May.
From what I hear, heat pumps can be a good heating solution for newly built houses, but putting one in an older house costs a lot more than £5k. Where houses are crowded close together, the bulky outdoor unit is just one more ugly council-mandated eco thing to sit next to the ever-increasing number of wheelie bins that block the pavements.
If anything will prompt a revolt against Net Zero in the UK, the proposed ban on gas boilers will be that thing.
“Two men admit removing body parts in ‘eunuch maker’ case”, reports the Guardian.
Two men have admitted removing body parts of a man who is accused of carrying out castrations and broadcasting the footage on his “eunuch maker” website.
Nathan Arnold, 48, a nurse from South Kensington, west London, admitted the partial removal of Marius Gustavson’s nipple in the summer of 2019.
Damien Byrnes, 35, from Tottenham, north London, admitted removing Gustavson’s penis on 18 February 2017.
Gustavson, who is originally from Norway, is said to have been the ringleader in a conspiracy involving up to 29 offences of extreme body modifications, the removal of body parts, the trade in body parts and the uploading of videos.
Given that these people were all consenting adults, I do not understand why their actions (other than the theft of the anaesthetic) should be a criminal offence, particularly as surgical operations to remove people’s penises are legal in male to female sex change operations. Does it make a difference in principle whether the appearance aimed for when surgically removing a penis is female or eunuchoid?
My question is not designed to provoke the reaction “Of course it should be legal to do this, just as it is legal to perform sex change operations”. Nor is it designed to provoke the reaction “Of course it should be illegal to perform sex change operations, just as it is illegal to do this.” I can see reasonable justification for saying that changing someone’s body to be like lots of other people’s bodies is much more likely to go well than changing their body to a form few others have. By “go well”, I mean be likely to increase the wellbeing of the person upon whom the operation is performed, or be less likely to decrease it, and also to go well in the same ways that any surgical operation is judged a success or a failure.
Related earlier Samizdata posts:
Discussion point: circumcision from October 2013.
Discussion point: can children consent to puberty blockers? What about other drastic treatments? from October 2020.
If you feel moved to comment, please seek neither to be offended nor to offend, and try not to get hung up by questions of terminology.
The race lobby would have us believe that Britain’s minority population is oppressed and victimised. An entire industry now exists to sustain and perpetuate this claim. Many in that lobby seem to believe they will be rendered irrelevant if they ever acknowledge the undeniable progress made by Britain on matters of race and integration. This is one reason why this survey’s data has been given such an overwhelmingly negative spin. A mature anti-racism movement would acknowledge the good news, while working to tackle discrimination where it still exists.
What a shame that these academics felt the need to trash Britain’s record on race relations – especially when their own research tells us that there is so much to be proud of.
– Rakib Ehsan
Brecon Beacons National Park in Wales will not be called that for much longer. The Wikipedia edit war has already begun.
“Brecon Beacons: Park to use Welsh name Bannau Brycheiniog”, reports the BBC. Few would have a problem with both the Welsh and English names being used in parallel, as is done now, but there does seem something a little… monocultural about insisting that only the Welsh name is used. The park is not in a majority Welsh-speaking area. As anyone who has spent more time in Welsh shopping centres than council chambers knows, there is, sadly, considerable hostility to the Welsh language from the English-speaking majority of Welsh people. This high-handed action will increase it.
However, the change of language is not what is really annoying people. Snowdonia, sorry, Eryri National Park has already enacted a similar change with little controversy. Something more than the familiar jostling between languages in a bilingual country has driven this change of name. In a Telegraph article about how he wooed his wife on the Brecon Beacons, John Humphrys quotes, not favourably, Catherine Mealing-Jones, who is the chief executive of the national park authority which runs the Beacons:
“The more we looked into it,” she says, “the more we realised the name Brecon Beacons doesn’t make any sense. It’s a very English description of something that probably never happened. A massive carbon-burning brazier is not a good look for an environmental organisation.”
The gratuitous swipe at the English wasn’t very nice. More importantly, who is “we” here? What gave this group of bureaucrats, whoever they are, the right to have their amateur speculations on etymology taken seriously? Why should their views on the symbolism of the name of a national park be enacted? They were not elected. They don’t own shares in the place. Nor are they the heirs to King Brychan, whose realm this once was. That leaves right of conquest. You may smile, but there is something of “We are the masters now” in this change.
The best comment came from David Williams, a fine Welsh name, to another Telegraph article:
What a good idea and such intelligent insight. Can we please have the dragon taken from the flag as well, fire breathing animals should not be promoted in the spirit of net zero.
Those were reportedly the last words of General John Sedgwick at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House in the American Civil War. (Wikipedia boringly says that he did complete the sentence. Just.)
General Sedgwick was a brave man to stride along the front like that. He sought to encourage his men, some of whom had been seen to flinch as the Confederate bullets landed all around.
I hope our Scottish readers will forgive me if I say that, though all the hearts that beat under Scottish skies are brave, not all of them are quite as brave as General Sedgwick. But some are:
“Deficits are nothing to be afraid of”, writes Jim Byrne for Bylines Scotland. You see, taxes don’t fund spending and a sovereign government can create new money to pay off its debts whenever it likes and so all Scotland needs to do make its deficit disappear is declare independence. This is called “Modern Monetary Theory”. Mr Byrne posts a link to a 14-page Bank of England document that, he says, shows that the Bank agrees with him. Which does make one wonder why the Bank doesn’t just declare “the deficit is nothing to be afraid of, let the rejoicing commence”. Unless it’s a case of “Gary, no”?
I thought they only did that when they were literally digging for dead bodies. Come now, Police Scotland, just because you have arrested the husband of the recently resigned First Minister of Scotland, no need for all the drama. It’s only a few hundred thousand quid.
That link goes to the Wings Over Scotland blog. Stuart Campbell owns this story and has every right to say, “I told you so” to every professional journalist in Scotland, whether Nationalist or Unionist.
By the way, when commenting on this story, remember that “arrested” does not mean “charged” and “charged” does not mean “guilty”. The presumption of innocence is never more important than when a public figure you do not like has his collar felt. A lot of people in the States could do with that reminder following the arrest of Donald Trump.
I am saddened to read that Nigel Lawson, former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, and an articulate advocate of the UK’s departure from the EU (and also a rigorous debunker of global warming catastrophism), has died at the grand age of 91. My condolences to his family and friends.
It is ironic that he fell out with Mrs Thatcher in the late 80s over the issue of the UK joining the Exchange Rate Mechanism in Europe. He was opposed to the euro, but saw ERM entry as a necessary way for the UK to try and control inflation. In that sense he was a fixed-exchange rate man, and in the 19th century he’d have been a Gold Standard defender, I suspect. In the end, he was at one with Mrs T. on the dangers of a centralising Europe. And of course, in his time at 11 Downing Street, he cut top rates of tax and simplified the system dramatically. Alas, his successors haven’t continued that trend. Lawson was also the intellectual driving force behind privatisation of state-owned businesses, and while arguably not enough was done to promote competition, the overall benefit in my view was considerable.
His speech explaining why the UK had to leave the EU remains, in my mind, one of the most brilliant and succinct explanations for why this was the right course. He focused, rightly, on the issues of democratic accountability and freedom.
Right to the very end, his mind was as sharp as those of all too many in power are blunt.
[Scottish] Nationalist ideology struggles to integrate debatable lands like this one. Humza Yousaf has taken charge of a party which has become addicted to its fictions. By introducing its gender recognition reforms in the knowledge that the High Court of Justice would probably quash them (as it did), and deciding to treat the next general election as a “de facto referendum”, it was acting out a fantasy. The best hope for Scottish nationalism now is to separate itself from the cause of independence and to fight for a less lop-sided and unrealistic United Kingdom.
– Graham Robb
The choice is between a quivering mound of turds who destroyed this country with their lockdown policies and a heap of wobbling turds who think the lockdown wasn’t destructive enough. I’d sooner lick the floor of my local A&E than vote for either of you.
– Burnside
As a “lukewarmer”, I am more of a believer in climate change than many here. One thing that pulls me towards scepticism is the habitually dishonest language used by advocates of measures against climate change. Take this BBC article: “Climate change: UK risks losing investment in net-zero race, MPs warn”. It says,
The government is set to announce its revised energy strategy on Thursday.
It argues the UK is a “world-leader” in working towards net-zero.
But cross-party MPs fear investors – and jobs – could move elsewhere if the strategy is not ambitious enough.
The BBC article makes me want to riff on Mary McCarthy’s famous quip about Lillian Hellman – every word in it is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.
In particular, the words “race”, “investment” and “jobs” are all used in a sense that means the opposite of their usual meanings. “Investment” means something you buy in the hope that its price will rise so that you can sell it later as a profit. The “investment” the article talks about is simply spending. Argue if you wish that it is justified spending, but that doesn’t make it investment.
The article, taking its tone from the government, talks about “green jobs” as if they are a good thing. As Tim Worstall often points out, all jobs are a cost not a benefit. Perhaps a necessary cost, but a cost. And the purest, costliest, unbeneficialliest jobs of all are jobs that are created solely to comply with government regulations. Not unexpectedly, the people who get these make-work jobs like having them, because they get paid. But the money to pay their wages has to come from somewhere. It comes from (a) taxes, i.e. making everyone a little bit poorer, and (b) companies diverting money that could have been truly invested in making or doing things that people actually wanted made or done (which would have created genuine new jobs) into the hamster-wheel of fulfilling green regulations, filling in government forms to say that they have done so, paying to be trained to fill out the forms, paying protection money to Green organisations to get a little green smiley logo saying they comply, and so on and on and on.
What’s wrong of the word “race” in the phrase “net-zero race”? This word is dishonest because a race is meant to indicate a competition in which some prize or benefit is won by whoever is fastest – and in which said prize or benefit goes in lesser degree or not at all to the other competitors. In this case “the race to net-zero” is a race to lose benefits, a race in which the prize is being hobbled. That is still true even if one accepts the necessity of being hobbled. The choice of the US to hobble itself first by passing Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act” (another example of dishonest language) hands a competitive advantage to the UK, so long as we do not do likewise.
As to why the race to net zero is a racist concept, only a racist needs such an obvious thing explained.
To the majority of people who believe lockdowns were right and necessary, the Covid era was no doubt distressing, but it need not have been cause to re-order their perception of the world. Faced with a new and frightening disease, difficult decisions were taken by the people in charge but we came together and got through it; mistakes were made, but overall we did what we needed to do.
For the dissenting minority, the past three years have been very different. We have had to grapple with the possibility that, through panic and philosophical confusion, our governing class contrived to make a bad situation much worse. Imagine living with the sense that the manifold evils of the lockdowns that we all now know — ripping up centuries-old traditions of freedom, interrupting a generation’s education, hastening the decline into decrepitude for millions of older people, destroying businesses and our health service, dividing families, saddling our economies with debt, fostering fear and alienation, attacking all the best things in life — needn’t have happened for anything like so long, if at all?
– Freddie Sayers
|
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.
|
