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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“The EU, by contrast, is in danger of becoming the left-behind continent, with its economy stuck in the mud, its corporate sector sluggish and its polity adrift. In the two decades since 2004, US productivity growth as measured by output per hour worked has been more than double that of the Eurozone. Whereas Eurozone productivity has, at best, flatlined since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, US productivity has risen by more than 6%. The EU bureaucracy is preoccupied with being a regulatory superpower, treating access to its consumers as one of its main competitive advantages. But this obsession with regulation is killing the animal spirits that drive capitalist growth. Europe is terrified that a Trump victory in the November presidential election will produce instability. It should also worry that it will produce a mixture of deregulation and tax-cutting in the US, similar to Trump’s first two years, which will suck even more capital and talent from the EU to the US.”
– Adrian Wooldridge, Bloomberg ($). Wooldridge’s book on the history of American capitalism, co-authored with Alan Greenspan (who is probably about 1,000 years’ old by now), is well worth a read. The chapters on agricultural innovation struck me as particularly good, and often neglected by journalists who find farming boring. The book generally debunks myths about Big Business and anti-trust, as well.
Reading this Samizdata quote of the day got me thinking about why devolution in the UK has been a general disappointment and source of endless annoyance.
I remember when arguments were originally made for devolution, commentators would claim that devolution would work in the same way that the federal structure of the US works, or, for that matter, how the cantonal system works in Switzerland. By which they meant that if a state such as Zug in Switzerland or Wisconsin in the US tried a specific policy (encouraging cryptos, or enacting Workfare, to take two actual examples), that the perceived success or failure of these policies would be studied by other cantons and states. Hence the idea that devolution allows a sort of “laboratory experiment” of policy to take place. It creates a virtuous kind of competition. That’s the theory.
What seems to have happened is that since devolution in the UK, Scotland, Wales and to some extent, Northern Ireland, have competed with England in who can be the most statist, authoritarian and in general, be the biggest set of fools. Whether it is 20 mph speed limits spreading to many places and harsh lockdowns (Wales) or minimum pricing on booze and “snitching” on your own family for views about gender (Scotland), the Celtic fringe appears to be more interested in being more oppressive, rather than less. I cannot think of a single issue in which the devolved governments of the UK have been more liberal, and more respectful, of liberty under the rule of law. (Feel free to suggest where I am mistaken.)
One possible problem is that because the UK’s overall government holds considerable budgetary power, the devolved bits of the UK don’t face the consequences of feckless policy to the extent necessary to improve behaviour.
Even so, I don’t entirely know why the Scots and Welsh have taken this turn and I resist the temptation to engage in armchair culture guessing about why they tend to be more collectivist at present. It was not always thus. Wales has been a bastion of a kind of liberalism, fused to a certain degree with non-conformity in religion, and Scotland had both the non-conformist thing, and the whole “enlightment” (Smith, Hume, Ferguson, etc) element. At some point, however, that appears to have stopped. Wales became a hotbed of socialism in the 20th century, in part due to the rise of organised labour in heavy industry, and then the whole folklore – much of it sentimental bullshit – about the great achievements in healthcare of Nye Bevan. Scotland had its version of this, plus the resentments about Mrs Thatcher and the decline of Scotland as a manufacturing power.
I like visiting Wales – I went to Anglesey last weekend and loved it – and the same goes for Scotland. I can only go on personal observations in saying that I enjoy my trips there, and I have some family links to Scotland on my mother’s side. (My wife has some links to Wales.). But for whatever reason, the political culture of both places is, to varying degrees, absolutely horrible.
Maybe the “test lab” force of devolution will play a part in demonstrating that, as and when we get a Labour government for the whole of the UK, it will be a shitshow on a scale to put what has happened in the Celtic parts of the UK in the shade.
“Regulation is arguably the least scrutinised part of government. But it may well be the most important. At the moment, Government too often sees imposing costs on business as a pain-free solution. Unless that changes, we can kiss goodbye to any hope of growth.”
– Robert Colville. CapX. He writes about a new policy paper about the UK problem. Needless to say, the lessons extend far beyond the shores of the UK.
That’s why I hate “devolution” and wish that a Conservative government had had the balls to roll it back. But I might as well want a pet unicorn as hope for any vision from a Conservative politician. All we get is a smoking ban and compulsory maths till 18. That’s Rishi Sunak’s Big Plan.
– JohnK
This is not a quote about life under a Communist or Fascist regime. It is about life in Exeter University in 2018.
I heard about this story from an article by Sanchez Manning in the Mail on Sunday:
A philosophy student overheard through the wall of his room saying ‘veganism is wrong’ and ‘gender fluidity is stupid’ was threatened with expulsion by his university, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Robert Ivinson said he was disciplined after a student next door in halls of residence at Exeter University heard the comments then complained he had been offensive and ‘transphobic’.
Mr Ivinson, who expressed the views in a phone call to a friend, was hauled before university officials and put on a ‘behavioural contract’ for the rest of his studies.
This video made by the Committee for Academic Freedom shows Robert Ivinson giving his own account of what happened.
Mr Ivinson acknowledges that a legitimate part of the complaint against him was that he was speaking too loudly in the phone call in question so that noise was coming through the wall. However he says that the university hearing refused to separate the issues of him making too much noise and what he said in a private conversation being deemed offensive.
Though Mr Ivinson appears perfectly reasonable, indeed likeable, in his video, I would like to believe that there is something missing from his account – because I do not want to believe that a British university can have fallen so far from what a university is meant to be. The Mail on Sunday article says “Exeter University was approached for comment but did not respond.” I shall be most interested to see what the University’s response turns out to be.
Andy Wightman describes himself as a vegan who drives an electric car, does not fly, and lives much of the time off-grid using solar power and wood fuel. In this article in the Scottish current affairs magazine Holyrood, bearing the title “Why the ‘ban’ on wood-burning stoves ignores the needs of rural Scotland”, he writes,
Since 1 April, it is no longer permissible to install a direct-emission heating system (one which produces more than a negligible level of greenhouse-gas emissions) in a new-build house or conversion. This is a ban on oil, coal, gas and wood-based heating systems.
But in response to a fair degree of upset from across rural Scotland in recent weeks at this apparent ban – however partial – on wood-burning stoves, ministers were at pains to point out that this was not, in fact, a ban. Why?
Because, according to the Scottish Government, they can still be installed in new homes to provide emergency heating. The government claims that this concession “recognises the unique needs of Scotland’s rural communities”. The problem with this sophistry is that the Building (Scotland) Amendment Regulations 2023 define emergency heating as an installation to be used only in the event of the failure of the main heating system.
So people can install wood-burning stoves at a cost of anything between £5,000 and £10,000 to be used for a few days per year and, therefore, it’s not a ban.
He then discusses some of the reasons why even very environmentally conscious people who live in the remoter areas of Scotland might want to heat their houses using wood-burning stoves, and continues,
It is, in fact, how I want to heat a house I am in the process of building myself. After a lot of careful consideration, I decided to install a log-gasification boiler as the main heating system. Such boilers are more than 90 per cent efficient, they feed a very large accumulator tank of hot water, and only need to be fired up every two to four days.
The wood will come from thinning from a forest that I manage locally, cut with a solar-powered chainsaw. There is no market for this kind of low-quality timber from small woods. If I cannot use it for heat, it will lie and rot – and produce carbon emissions – on the forest floor. The fuel wood will emit two per cent of the carbon being absorbed annually by the forest from which it is sourced.
The house design is rated B for energy efficiency (falling short of A by only two points) and is rated A for carbon emissions. I have planning consent and I even have a grant and loan offer from the Scottish Government to install the boiler.
Due to technical issues, however, I have yet to submit the final application for a building warrant. This will now as a matter of law be refused and I will incur the expense of revising the planning permission, commissioning new engineering assessments, and preparing a revised building-warrant application. I will also need to reject the grant and loan offer.
If you live in Edinburgh or Glasgow, however, you can still install a wood-burning stove even where you don’t need one and even when it contributes to significant levels of particulate matter pollution. In rural Scotland, you can live in or near a forest, perhaps off grid, but you are not allowed to use what is still a renewable low-carbon fuel when appropriately sourced and combusted.
Courtesy of the Telegraph, here is the video of a policeman warning a man that being “openly Jewish” in the vicinity of pro-Palestinians was “antagonising”. The Daily Mail has a pretty good account of the affair here.
I can feel a smidgen of sympathy for the cop. It was, as the Metropolitan Police say in their apology for the wording of their previous apology, a “hugely regrettable” choice of words, and typical of the abandonment of policing without fear or favour when it comes to Muslims, whom they fear and favour, but people talking under stress often do use words they later regret.
I feel no such sympathy for Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist, the person wrote the first apology. He was not on the street trying to think on his feet while being shouted at. He was sitting in an office with time to choose his words. The words he chose were these.
The video posted by the Campaign Against Antisemitism will further dent the confidence of many Jewish Londoners which is the opposite of what any of us want.
Bad Campaign Against Antisemitism for posting the video that dented the confidence of many Jewish Londoners by making them aware of something that actually happened!
Assistant Commissioner Twist continues,
The use of the term “openly Jewish” by one of our officers is hugely regrettable. It is absolutely not the basis on which we make decisions, it was a poor choice of words and while not intended, we know it will have caused offence to many. We apologise.
The issues at the heart of these protests are complex, contentious and polarising. When the challenges of public order policing are layered on top it becomes a very difficult environment for frontline officers to work in.
In recent weeks we’ve seen a new trend emerge, with those opposed to the main protests appearing along the route to express their views. The fact that those who do this often film themselves while doing so suggests they must know that their presence is provocative, that they’re inviting a response and that they’re increasing the likelihood of an altercation.
Consider those words “their presence is provocative, that they’re inviting a response”. What do they teach at Hendon Police College nowadays? Because three decades of universal condemnation of the phrase “she was asking for it” and the mindset behind it have clearly had no effect.
They are also making it much more likely officers will intervene. They don’t do so to stifle free speech or to limit the right to protest, but to keep opposing groups apart, to prevent disorder and keep the public – including all those taking part in or opposing the protest – safe. That is, after all, our primary role.
It is up to us to review these interventions and to determine whether we are getting the balance right, adapting our approach as we do so and making sure officers are supported to make the right decisions using all the powers available to the. We will continue to do so following this most recent protest and ahead of future events.
Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist.
As readers may remember, I am a big fan of Denys Davydov, the Ukrainian podcaster. Almost every day since US aid to Ukraine was turned off by Congress, Denys has been slagging off President Trump. Some of the language! His claim is that Trump is behind this block and that he wills a Russian victory. A couple of months ago, I checked on a Trump speech and although he wasn’t clearcut in what he intended to do it was clear that the Trump-is-a-Putin-pawn narrative was just nonsense.
Today he posted this (helpfully re-posted by Ukraine detractors.)
Look at what he is actually bloody-well saying! “…a Country in desperate need.” “…Ukrainian Survival and Strength…” Does that sound like someone who is indifferent to Ukraine’s fate?
“Why can’t Europe equalize or match the money put in by the United States of America…”
Assuming that European aid is indeed less than America’s, well, why can’t Europe match America’s expenditure? If Europeans don’t think Ukraine is worth defending why should the US pick up the slack?
Assuming Trump gets elected this is what I think he’ll do. He will make some offer to Putin. Something along the lines of, keep Crimea, lose the Donbass. Putin will reject it and then Trump will kick the living covfefe out of the bastard.
Rousseau: Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.
Marx: Man is born free but everywhere jobs.
Feminists: Woman is born free but everywhere men.
CRT: POC are born free (like Rousseau said) but everywhere wipipo.
Queer: Queers are born free but everywhere normality.
Kant: Man is born free but everywhere Reason.
Nietzsche: Man is born free but everywhere morals.
Nazis: German Volk are born free but everywhere Jews and queers and blacks and retards.
Hamas: Arab Muslims are born free but somewhere Jews.
– James Lindsey
Douglas Young gives us an even-handed review of Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me.
As a life-long Sir Elton John fan, it was exciting to see that his lyricist, Bernie Taupin, had penned an autobiography, Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me. Whereas Beatles John Lennon and Sir Paul McCartney were the 1960s’ top composers, two of their disciples, Elton and Bernie, would be the 1970s’ reigning songwriters. This is all the more notable since the duo’s wordsmith was only in his early-to-mid-twenties when Captain Fantastic ruled FM radio with an incredible run of hit singles and albums from 1970 through 1976. Indeed, Taupin wrote the lyrics for “Your Song” as a nineteen-year-old virgin. The pair have continued to produce plenty of hits over the decades, and Taupin has occasionally written the words to songs for other performers, such as Alice Cooper, Starship (“We Built This City”), Heart (“These Dreams”), and Willie Nelson.
But as outrageously public as melody maker Sir Elton has been, his lyrical partner has generally stayed stubbornly backstage, making his memoir somewhat of a revelation. Though reared in rural England, Taupin was always in love with America’s music, movies, pop culture, and Wild West. These influences saturate his lyrics and, as soon as he could afford to, he headed for Hollywood: “I left because I wanted an alternate lifestyle and was driven by an Americanism that was always in my soul. I excommunicated myself from a culture that I didn’t feel I belonged to or was terribly interested in and embraced one that had inhabited my imagination since I straddled a broom and galloped across my old front lawn.”
By far Taupin’s longest love affair has been with America, and it is touching how grateful this immigrant remains. Of his SiriusXM program, “American Roots Radio,” he explains that “Preserving the heritage of consequential Americana had always been of the greatest importance to me,” crediting how “it served me well as an inspirational arsenal.” Taupin has no patience for fellow expats who ridicule American culture, bluntly telling them, “Don’t pillory the fabric of a nation that has invited you with open arms and p*$% on its pastimes.” Instead, having lived the last three-plus decades in a rural part of southern California, Taupin displays deep affection for his adopted homeland: “The Santa Ynez Valley is still quintessentially small-town America… They still wash your windows and pump your gas at the local Chevron, the coffee shop knows what I want without asking, and I know everyone on a first-name basis at the local market. I’m indebted to it and its inhabitants for giving me a stable and concurrently ordinary life. Everyone knows who I am, yet no one panders or fawns. I might garner a little extra attention, but in every other way I’m just another neighbour. They’re hardworking, good-natured people intrinsically patriotic in their respect for American tradition.”
Yet so much of the book is dominated by anecdotes about a huge variety of famous artists and entertainers Taupin has met, including John Lennon, Sir Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Katharine Hepburn, Stevie Wonder, the Rev. Al Green, Bob Marley, Billie Jean King, Freddie Mercury, and loads more. Many vignettes are quite revealing and fun. For example, surrealist painter Salvador Dali referred to himself as “The Dali,” doodled a delightful drawing on a restaurant napkin, and tossed it to a grateful Taupin, only for his hotel maid to mistakenly launder it.
→ Continue reading: A review of: Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me
Last night came this, “National Conservatism Conference: Police told to shut down right-wing Brussels event”
Brussels police were ordered to shut down a conference for right-wing politicians, including Brexiteer Nigel Farage and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, on Tuesday.
People were stopped from entering the National Conservatism Conference a few hours after it began, organisers said – although it continued for those inside.
The local mayor said he issued the order to ensure public security.
Organisers of the conference said they “overcame attempts to silence” them.
They said they plan to continue with the conference on Wednesday, writing: “See you again tomorrow!” on X, formerly Twitter.
The BBC article continued,
The move to shut down the conference was also criticised by Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, who called it “unacceptable”.
“Banning political meetings is unconstitutional. Full stop,” Mr De Croo wrote on X.
Referring to the fact that it was the local mayor, Emir Kir, who opposed the conference, Mr De Croo said that while municipal autonomy was a cornerstone of Belgium’s democracy, it could “never overrule the Belgian constitution guaranteeing the freedom of speech”.
Except it just did. In a discussion about this story on Reddit UK Politics, a commenter called “suiluhthrown78” offered some background:
The local mayor Emir Kir who did this has quite a history, Tower hamlets style politics is nothing compared to whats been brewing in Belgium, France etc.
“Emir Kir was considered a party vote machine. High scores which can be explained by threats and intimidation, the sending of targeted letters and the distribution of leaflets in Turkish with adapted content and oriented, sometimes going so far as to shake up the other candidates on its own list and electoral expenses that are not always transparent”
This morning comes this, as reported by the Guardian: “Ursula von der Leyen can run, but can she also hide?”
Ursula von der Leyen became president of the European Commission in a backroom deal in 2019 without facing Europe’s voters. Now she is running for re-election almost without campaigning. The former German defence minister, 65, was chosen unopposed last month as lead candidate of the centre-right European People’s party for the European parliament elections on 6-9 June, although she does not plan to take a seat in the EU legislature. Since then, she has shunned media questioning as far as possible, and is refusing to commit to debating the other candidates in public.
She has not confirmed that she will show up for the high-profile Maastricht debate on 29 April, according to the organisers, and political sources say a major European newspaper had to drop plans to stage its own debate among the Spitzenkandidaten, or lead candidates, because von der Leyen would not pledge to attend.
Frustrated opponents are starting to taunt her as the invisible candidate. “Ursula von der Leyen is claiming to defend European democracy, yet she has refused to run in the European parliament elections, and has failed to clarify whether she will participate in any of the election debates,” Dutch MEP Bas Eickhout, co-lead candidate of the Greens, said last week.
Her coyness is at least partly due to a political cronyism scandal that is dogging her path to a second coronation. Von der Leyen is avoiding questioning about her decision to appoint fellow German Christian Democrat MEP Markus Pieper as the EU commission’s first envoy for small and medium-sized enterprises, even though he was reportedly rated below two female contenders for the highly paid role by an independent selection committee.
In a non-binding amendment adopted by 382 votes to 144, the European parliament called last week for the controversial appointment, first revealed in February by two investigative journalists, to be rescinded and the contest run again.
The cronyism scandal has been bubbling away for some time, but I was pleased to see the Guardian reporting it in such uncompromising terms.
Those who claim they are anti-war, and for peace (inverted commas stand ready for use), have in the past often had a rather curious hostility towards anti-missile defence systems. I remember that when Donald Rumsfeld was Defense Sec. in the US in the early noughties, his support for anti-missile defence (I am using the British spelling of defence, okay?) was seen as somehow problematic, a sign of what a fool he was, etc, etc.
Well, how the world turns. From the Wall Street Journal on Monday this week:
It’s no small irony that President Biden is hailing the success of missile and drone defenses over Israel. In the 1980s there was no more dedicated foe of missile defense than Sen. Joe Biden. Democrats have resisted or under-financed missile defenses for decades on grounds that they’re too expensive and too easily defeated by new technology.
Progressives oppose defenses because they think vulnerability somehow makes war less likely. On nuclear arms, the Union of Concerned Scientists and others prefer the doctrine of mutual-assured destruction to being able to shoot down enemy ICBMs.
Israel’s defenses proved how wrong this view is, displaying their practical and strategic value. If the more than 300 drones and ballistic and cruise missiles had reached their targets, Mr. Biden wouldn’t be able to say, as he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday night, “take the win.” The mass casualties would have all but guaranteed a large-scale military escalation.
It seems to me that, if you are a small/minimal state sort of person, hostile to foreign interventionism (as much as of the domestic kind), and purely in favour of using force in response to the initiation of physical force, then having the ability to shoot down armed drones and ballistic missiles, fighter jets, etc, is in the same moral bracket as having locks on doors, or the freedom to carry concealed firearms, pepper spray, noise alarms, having a guard dog, a scary spouse, etc.
Here’s an item about the Iron Dome anti-missile system that Israel uses.
This article asserts that President Biden’s sceptical, even hostile approach, to missile defence goes back decades. In 2021, the Biden administration reportedly pullled a bunch of Patriot anti-missile systems from four Middle East nations.
The UK’s Royal Navy has a Sea Viper system to knock down drones. Here is an official release about such technology in the UK. The British Army has something called a Sky Sabre system.
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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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