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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Amazingly I appear not to have yet used that headline.
The BBC reports,
Brexit: Trade talks with the EU are over, says No 10
Talks between the UK and EU over a post-Brexit trade agreement are “over”, Downing Street has said.
No 10 argued there was “no point” in discussions continuing next week unless the EU was prepared to discuss the detailed legal text of a partnership.
UK chief negotiator Lord Frost said he had told EU counterpart Michel Barnier there was now no “basis” for planned talks on Monday.
Number 10 said the two sides had agreed to talk again next week – by phone.
So talks are not quite over after all.
“Two bad things have happened at once. The first is that the phrase itself has been captured. “Safe spaces” for students are used to justify the “no-platforming” of thinkers who warn against the oppressiveness of “woke” doctrines. The Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson is only the most famous of the victims: he was offered a visiting fellowship at Cambridge but then, in March last year, was denied it after protests that his views might upset students. The second is that British universities, craving cash and students from foreign countries, have become dangerously uncritical of the terms on which they accept them. This is particularly true in relation to some Arab countries and even more so in relation to China.”
– Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph (£)
The point of “public service obligations” were because costs were high and bandwidth was limited. Broadcasters, especially those chasing ad money might not make programmes for disabled people, or obscure arts shows.
When you solve costs and increase bandwidth, anyone can make a show and people do. You want stuff about Keynesian economics, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. There are lots of blind people making videos on YouTube, people of nearly all varieties of politics from communists to libertarians, the history of corsetry, how to repoint a wall. There are few colour, sex or whatever bars because this stuff is cheap to make.
– Some geezer on Tim Worstall’s site discussing the anachronistic dinosaur known as the BBC
As the Daily Telegraph points out in its sharp (behind paywall) takedown of the UK government’s lockdown enthusiasm, the argument that we need to crush what is left of the UK economy to “protect” the National Health Service is based on the idea that the NHS will be overwhelmed by Covid-19 (despite the UK having had the late spring and summer to prepare for now). As the newspaper points out, the NHS is always “overwhelmed” this time of year because of flu and other winter-related bugs and diseases:
“But this is a perennial crisis. The NHS struggles under normal conditions in the winter because the system is completely dysfunctional. The Prime Minister needs to be honest about all of this and admit that not everything has gone according to plan. He needs to explain exactly why he is shutting down so much of the economy again and why he believes that drastically reducing social and family contacts is a price worth paying. He obviously wants to buy more time, but he needs to tell us how much and what for – and to explain convincingly why isolating the vulnerable (a strategy which seems ever more attractive by the day) while allowing the rest of the country to move on isn’t a better way forward. He needs to sell and explain his vision, not simply expect the rest of us to accept it automatically. Above all, he needs to spell out his Covid exit strategy. Britain’s economy and society cannot face another six months of the current madness.”
I occasionally read that the current “Tory” (yup, the scare quotes are there for a reason, folks) is moving away from all that ideological Thatcherite stuff about freedom, markets, scepticism of Big Government, to a more “pragmatic”, paternalistic approach. And yet the past few months have surely rammed home the message that the State does a lot of things very badly, while private enterprise, given the opportunity and freedom, does things rather better. The contrast between the ingenuity of supermarkets and their inventory management, on the one hand, and the NHS and its clunky, Soviet-style resource allocation, on the other, is harder and harder to ignore (example: cancer patients). And yet a vast swathe of UK public opinion, reinforced by all those cute rainbow symbols about “our NHS”, buys into the idea that this creation of late 1940s socialism and central planning is one of the high points of Western civilisation. We want to erase the very “problematic” Lord Horatio Nelson from Greenwich, apparently, but woe betide anyone who so much as suggests the NHS isn’t one of the Good Things of UK history. Remember the 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony where, just before Daniel Craig as 007 did his skit with the Queen, we had a whole choreographed display honouring the NHS?
Sentimentality, Charles Dickens’ besetting vice as a novelist, is, I fear, shared by much of the UK public. It is an illness every bit as bad as that of COVID-19.
(As a corrective, I can recommend The Welfare State We’re In, by James Bartholomew. The book challenges many of the founding myths around the NHS, such as the idea that only the very rich got medical care before the late 1940s).
There is a horrible disease prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa called onchocerciasis or “river blindness”. The black flies that live near rivers carry a parasite, a tiny worm called onchocerca volvulus. When the fly bites a human the parasite worm is injected into the human’s body. Then…
Within the human body the adult female worm (macrofilaria) produces thousands of baby or larval worms (microfilariae) which migrate in the skin and the eye.
Sometimes sufferers can see “tangled threads or worms in their vision, which were microfilariae moving freely in the aqueous humor of the anterior chamber of the eye”. This will be one of the last things they ever see before they lose their vision altogether.
I have been haunted for years by one account of how people come to be infected with this disease. It goes like this: a fly lands on a child. They swat it away, like they’ve been taught. Another fly lands. They swat it away again. And so on, thousands of times. Until one day the child is too tired or too excited or too distracted and they fail to swat away the fly. Then they get the disease, right? Actually, no: it usually takes several bites before they are infected. So there is a period when they think, well, a fly bit me but nothing has happened to me so far – the grown ups must be exaggerating. You can no doubt predict how the story ends. Once infection does occur it is irreversible.
Today’s Sunday Times reports,
Prosecutor criticises ‘sinister’ Met for investigating Darren Grimes over interview
Scotland Yard’s criminal investigation of a conservative activist over his interview with the historian David Starkey is “sinister and foolish”, according to a former director of public prosecutions.
Lord Macdonald of River Glaven said the Metropolitan Police’s pursuit of Darren Grimes, a pro-Brexit campaigner, was “deeply threatening of free speech”. Mr Grimes, 27, has said that police want to interview him under caution over a controversial interview uploaded to YouTube in the summer, in which Dr Starkey said that slavery could not have been genocide as there are “so many damn blacks” still around.
Mr Grimes is facing investigation for an offence of stirring up racial hatred, which falls under the Public Order Act. The offence carries a maximum penalty of seven years in prison.
The decision to pursue the publisher of an interview has resulted in widespread criticism and concerns about the threat posed to freedom of speech. The force has confirmed that it began an investigation on September 25 after seeking advice from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
Lord Macdonald, head of the CPS between 2003 and 2008, told The Times yesterday: “Dr Starkey was roundly condemned for his remarks and has since lost all his academic positions.
“But offensiveness is not a crime and for the police now, weeks later, to target the journalist who interviewed him is both sinister and foolish. It looks like they are letting themselves be used as part of a political stunt — and, what’s worse, a stunt that is deeply threatening to free speech.”
For most of his career Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, better known as Ken Macdonald, was the very model of a left wing liberal activist lawyer. It is good to see that the flies can still be swatted by the left hand of the British body politic. In fact the police investigation is being swatted from several sides, and may soon be quietly shelved. Even so, as Brendan O’Neill writes in an article on the case for Spiked,
And yet, even the existence of this investigation is worrying, even if it does soon fall apart. We should keep the champagne on ice if the Met comes to its senses and drops its pursuit of Grimes, because we will still need to ask ourselves how this could happen. It strikes me that it is the natural result of the slow-motion decay of freedom of speech in this country, of the past few years of Leveson inquiries into the free press, police arrests of trolls for making offensive comments, the arrest of comics and feminists for saying ‘incorrect’ things, the use of public-order legislation to punish controversial opinion and the extraordinary growth of informal clampdowns on free speech too, from the cult of safe spaces on campus to Twitterstorms against anyone who questions the illiberal ideology of wokeness. Too many people have been cavalier about the demise of freedom of speech and the result is this: the police investigating someone for having a discussion.
The darkness in my vision might just be approaching old age, but sometimes I think I see tiny threadlike forms twist and writhe.
Two years ago the worldwide media furore over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the US Supreme Court was at its height. Every second story in the British press seemed to be about Dr Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of sexual assault against Kavanaugh. Some may find it difficult to cast their minds back to the fevered atmosphere of that time. In these enlightened days of 2020 we rest secure in the knowledge that American politicians of all sides respect the principle of the presumption of innocence, which is why a TV report about Tara Reade’s accusation of sexual assault against Joe Biden is only being shown in Australia.
The Times of London is the Times. It has been the voice of the British establishment for over two centuries. It is seen by many, including itself, as the standard bearer for serious journalism on serious issues for serious people. I have been a Times subscriber for many years, as my parents were before me. At several points over that time my faith in the paper wavered, but never enough to make me switch to another paper. Which one would be better? The Guardian? The Telegraph? The Daily Mail? So ingrained is my own habit of regarding the Times as at bottom a responsible newspaper that I had to spend some time checking that its coverage of the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh really was as bad as I remembered.
→ Continue reading: I thought they were better than this: recollections of how the London Times covered Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination
Before you weigh in, please read both the Guardian articles.
“UK court hears children cannot consent to puberty blockers”, reports the Guardian today.
In a statement in the submission, Bell said she had been left with “no breasts, a deep voice, body hair, a beard, affected sexual function and who knows what else that has not been discovered”. She had to live with the fact that if she had children in the future, she would not be able to breastfeed. “I made a brash decision as a teenager (as a lot of teenagers do) trying to find confidence and happiness, except now the rest of my life will be negatively affected,” she said.
On the other hand, the abstract of this medical study published in the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics records that the study found that
There is a significant inverse association between treatment with pubertal suppression during adolescence and lifetime suicidal ideation among transgender adults who ever wanted this treatment. These results align with past literature, suggesting that pubertal suppression for transgender adolescents who want this treatment is associated with favorable mental health outcomes.
Another Guardian article published on 28 September raised similar issues of principle regarding a treatment that must be given to children if it is to work at all:
‘There is a fear that this will eradicate dwarfism’: the controversy over a new growth drug.
Two extracts:
Samuel Gray is very brave about his daily injections. At six-and-a-half, confident and happy, he was a boy who knew his own mind and made a big decision about his future. His parents had asked him if he wanted to take part in a clinical trial for a drug that could improve some of the conditions associated with achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism, with which Samuel was born.
[…]
In 2015, BioMarin Pharmaceutical, the company that developed vosoritide, released the results of phase two of its study. At the time, Leah Smith, a spokeswoman for Little People of America (LPA), the largest organisation in the US for people with dwarfism, said: “People like me are endangered and now they want to make me extinct.” Recently, the actor Mark Povinelli, who is president of the LPA, told the New York Times that the drug “is one of the most divisive things that we’ve come across in our 63-year existence”.
The Times reports,
FTSE 100 businesses ‘must bring minorities on board’
One of Britain’s biggest institutional investors has told the 30 or more FTSE 100 companies with all-white boards that it will vote against them unless they hire an ethnic-minority director in the next 15 months.
Legal & General, which manages more than £1.2 trillion of assets on behalf of pension funds and other clients, issued the ultimatum in the past few days in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer.
L&G has written to all 100 companies in the FTSE 100 as well as the US companies in the S&P 500 telling them it expects them all to have at least one director of black, Asian or other minority ethnic (Bame) origin in place by January 1, 2022.
It told them it will vote against the re-election of the company’s nomination committee chairmen if they fail to meet this target. Nomination committees are the main board panels responsible for board appointments.
L&G, which typically owns 2 or 3 per cent of almost every British blue chip, is thought to be the first big UK institution to warn explicitly it will vote against any company failing to comply.
Does Legal and General as a company have the moral right to invest as it sees fit? Absolutely. But as a commenter called David C says,
I have a pension invested with L&G. I’m taking this as an early indicator the company has fallen into woke hands, which means performance is going to suffer.
David C then spoils a good point by saying that that social diversity matters should be left to government. The L&G plan to “force” racial quotas on those companies in whom it invests by threatening to put its money elsewhere unless they comply with its wishes is preferable to the actual force-with-threat-of-jail as used by governments.
Even so, members of the board of Legal and General should remember three points:
1) They are investees as well as investors. What they do to others can be done to them, with equal legitimacy.
2) L&G say that research by McKinsey & Co shows that “more racially diverse boards make better decisions and produce better financial returns to shareholders.” In itself I can well believe that heterogeneous boards help a company avoid groupthink and hence improve profits. But when a person is hired for their skin colour it is probable – not certain, but probable – that they will not be as competent as a person hired for their competence. I admire L&G for being willing to put this oft-made claim that affirmative action helps the bottom line to very a public test.
3) Isn’t racial discrimination illegal?
I lied when I said three points. Point four is affirmative action never delivers equality. Decades of caste quotas in India and racial quotas in Malaysia have been dandy for a small sub-class of hereditary quota-fillers while entrenching the assumption that the “helped” class could not make it on their own. Point five is that, legal or not, racial discrimination is wrong.
The last Labour government rigged almost every institution in this country with enormous craft and cunning. Even now, from the National Lottery Fund to the National Trust, we have institution after institution in this country run by people whose interests are opposed to those of the general public, and aspiring more than anything else to the hideous, divisive and now clearly failing ‘woke’ agenda. Dacre and Moore are good early warning shots. But if the Johnson government wants to do something meaningful, it should not just follow through on their appointments; it should follow them up with a fusillade every bit as relentless and long-lasting as the Labour one, the repercussions of which this country still suffers from.
– Douglas Murray
We British had the Twitter Joke Trial.
R v Paul Chambers (appealed to the High Court as Chambers v Director of Public Prosecutions), popularly known as the Twitter Joke Trial, was a United Kingdom legal case centred on the conviction of a man under the Communications Act 2003 for posting a joke about destroying an airport to Twitter, a message which police regarded as “menacing”. The conviction was widely condemned as a miscarriage of justice, and was appealed three times, the conviction being quashed as a result of the third appeal.
I posted several times on Samizdata about the absurdity of prosecuting Paul Chambers for what anyone could tell was a joke:
If this is security theatre, it gets one star.
Nuke the entire court from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Pretending to be scared
Twitter joke not menacing after all
A blackly funny coda to the whole miserable saga was posted by Michael Jennings here: Irony
It being easier for me to search out my own old posts, I may have missed some from other contributors. Apologies if so. The point is, it was plain from the very first day that the actual threat to life and limb from Mr Chambers was zero. Yet this had to go to the highest court in the land before someone put a stop to the farce.
By the way, according to a Guardian article in 2012 the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time did not merely allow this prosecution to go forward but insisted that it should.
The director of public prosecutions (DPP) stopped his staff dropping the case against Paul Chambers, author of the “Twitter joke” about blowing up Robin Hood airport in South Yorkshire, it has been claimed.
Crown Prosecution Service lawyers had been prepared to back away from one of the most controversial cases in years, telling Chambers that they no longer saw a public interest in opposing his appeal against conviction. Chambers had said he felt “immense relief” that the prosecution – which had seen him lose two jobs and gain a criminal record – appeared to be over and that the authorities seemed ready to restore his good name.
The CPS even sent Chambers and his solicitor, free-speech campaigner David Allen Green, papers stating that it now agreed that the case should end. However, at the last minute the DPP, former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer, overruled his subordinates, it is alleged.
After a blunder like that, I trust this Starmer fellow resigned from public life.
Perhaps Judge Jacqueline Davies and Sir Keir Starmer were kidnapped as larvae and raised to believe that this was what they had to do for the sake of the colony. Little else can explain their ant-like official determination not to think.
But wait! We have a challenger! Not to be outdone by the effete Brits, the United States of America now has its own long-running Twitter Joke Prosecution:
In dumb union case, a Twitter joke becomes a federal case.
That Washington Examiner story was from May 4th. As of yesterday, it is still a federal case:
Here’s The Latest On Federal Agencies’ Targeted Harassment Of The Federalist:
“No jokes allowed. Ever.” Apparently, this is the new Twitter rule, as The Federalist national news publication faces a joint administrative and judicial broadside at the National Labor Relations Board. What the publication is going through constitutes just one of the many costly, silly, and arguably unconstitutional quasi-judicial proceedings underway throughout the federal bureaucracy.
A recent case before the NLRB — in which the agency served as legislator, police, prosecutor, and judge — helps illustrate why not everything can, or should, be handled in-house at the executive branch. In June 2019, The Federalist publisher Ben Domenech tweeted, “FYI @FDRLST first one of you tries to unionize I swear I’ll send you back to the salt mine.”
His followers got the joke. His employees got the joke. But one Twitter user apparently did not get the joke, so he filed a complaint with the NLRB. The user does not even work for Domenech nor have any ties to The Federalist, but the NLRB didn’t mind. Political appointees for the NLRB investigated the claim and prosecuted Domenech for violating NLRB rules, all while presiding over the so-called hearing.
When The Federalist employees came to Domenech’s defense by testifying that they understood the tweet to be a joke and in no way felt threatened by Domenech, the administrative law judge rejected their testimony. He reasoned the testimony of the employees could not offer any value to the proceedings, and ultimately decided that Domenech violated NLRB rules.
(Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)
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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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