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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More than 35 years ago, I recall when an old friend of mine (who died all too young in 2006), Chris R Tame, had been appointed the director of an outfit called FOREST. That acronym stood for Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco. The group was backed by sundry folk, including as far as I know, tobacco firms. It made no secret of it. Chris, much to the annoyance of various pressure groups such as ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), was a keep-fit guy, who went jogging (I joined him in runs around Regent’s Park), lifted weights, did not smoke, and drank in moderation.
Chris’s argument was that your life was yours, not the nation’s or the State’s. With so-called “passive smoking” and the “pollution” side of it, he argued that the risk was slight, but where possible, the issue was for owners of private property to decide. A person was not, on this reasoning, forced to work in a pub or restaurant, etc, and people were not forced to go to such places. In a vigorous economy, with lots of consumer choice, there would be non-smoking premises and those who disliked or feared tobacco smoke could patronise places they preferred. It was the sort of messy solution that a market would provide, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. (See a commentary here from the CATO think tank in the US.)
Over the past 30 years, Chris’s argument has lost ground. On a personal level, as someone who doesn’t smoke or like the smell of it, that’s fine by me. But I realise that this is short-sighted to value a loss of others’ liberties. It is nevertheless striking that, when considering how things were 30 or 40 years ago, we have gone from tolerance of smoking (look at old movies and TV shows) to almost total suppression. I still see a few people smoking a ciggie outside an office here in London, but that’s rare. In fact, I am more likely to smell weed than tobacco these days in London, or for that matter, New York.
Today, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, at the annual Conservative Party conference, outlined a few policies and measures. I was struck by how he wants to adopt a New Zealand-style measure to progressively raise the age at which people can buy cigarettes, up to the point where it is illegal in all but name.
I recall many years ago how ASH and others denied to Chris Tame’s face that they wanted to ban cigarettes. Oh no, they said, that’s just propaganda. Well, it turns out that the end-point for all their campaigns was indeed to ban cigarettes completely. They wanted it all along but lacked the cojones to say so honestly.
Thanks to the cult ideology of Net Zero some governments, including our own, have started trying to destroy the entire basis of human brilliance and ingenuity in a way that has no parallel other than in totalitarian states.
If electric cars represented an overall improvement on internal combustion engine (ICE) cars by being collectively better to drive, cheaper to buy and run, at least as easy to ‘refuel’, had longer (or even equivalent) ranges, used less energy, lasted longer, had better resale value, were less environmentally damaging through being easier to make, using less metals and were easier to recycle, they’d sell themselves. Those are all minimum standards the Government could have set, but hasn’t.
– Guy de la Bédoyère
All revolutionaries become conservative in the very act of effecting their revolution. From the moment a change has been brought about their concern is to prevent it from being reversed. They seek means to guard the power they have taken into their hands against all possibility of a counter-revolution.
– Enoch Powell, Freedom & Reality, Paperfront, Surrey 1969. It appears to come from a speech made in Bognor Regis in November 1966.
No matter how many times I explained all this, the same question kept coming, over and over. ‘Why do you care so much?’ All I could say was: ‘Why do you not?’
The intercession of the most famous children’s writer in the world in the trans debate was a moment when I thought the argument would shift decisively in my direction. So beloved were the Harry Potter books, so impeccable were J. K. Rowling’s socialist credentials, so compelling her backstory, she would be listened to.
But no, not a bit of it. HMS Rowling – which had piped on board generations of children, and taught them to read for their pleasure and then for their children’s pleasure – was deserted faster than a plague ship, so taboo were the author’s perfectly commonplace views on women’s rights.
The young actors from the Harry Potter series of films instantly betrayed her. If I were a star who had never shown any ability to act past the pre-pubescent level that got me into the business, I’d be keeping my head down, not signing statements insinuating that my old mentor was a bigot.
Those actors – Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint – deserve to be remembered as symbols of the most remarkable arrogance, cowardice and ingratitude. But asking what Rowling actually said that was so terrible produces nothing. You’ve never seen a transphobic statement from J. K. Rowling because none exists.
– Graham Linehan
I am not a great admirer of Linehan but he is broadly right and his article is well worth reading.
There’s a foul, racialised undertone to this. The shock and horror some commentators reserve for ethnic-minority politicians who happen to hold more conservative views on immigration, asylum or multiculturalism has a whiff of ‘how dare you?!’ about it. They never accuse Braverman or Priti Patel of being ‘ungrateful’, but if we’re honest the vibe is not a million miles off. The unwitting implication is that it is somehow illegitimate for even second- and third-generation immigrants to be sceptical of mass migration or state multiculturalism. Those with an immigrant background must think the same, goes the unspoken logic, otherwise they are weird and inauthentic, perhaps trying to ingratiate themselves with golf-club racists.
This actually reminds us of one of the key problems with the ideology of multiculturalism – namely, the notion that ethnic minorities amount to homogenous blocs, with a specific culture and outlook, rather than individuals with minds of their own. Indeed, multiculturalism treats individuality as if it is something only white people do. This frankly racist idea has underpinned multicultural policy for many decades, justifying the state’s encouragement of cultural identities, and its funding of self-proclaimed ‘community organisations’, to be christened as the ‘authentic voice’ of this group or the other, all while ignoring the diversity that exists within those same groups.
– Tom Slater
So it is now official: a state-owned major television channel, required by its licence to ensure that its factual programmes “must not materially mislead the audience”, can broadcast blatant lies without reprimand, let alone sanction: provided, it would seem, that the lies are about British colonial policy. If that is how Ofcom interprets its regulatory duties, Netflix can relax.
– David Elstein
The very existence of Ofcom, not to mention state-owned channels, indicates UK has not been a ‘free country’ for a very long time.
Adam Boulton is a journalist and broadcaster who is a regular panelist on TalkTV, a competitor to GB News.
Some background: GB News presenters Laurence Fox and Dan Wootton both are currently suspended while the station investigates some crass remarks from Fox about a female journalist for Joe News, Ava-Santina Evans. You can hear what he said on the clip embedded in this report by Metro magazine: Dan Wootton suspended and investigated by GB News over Laurence Fox’s misogynistic Ava Evans remarks.
Fox’s sexual comments about Evans (“Who’d want to shag that?”) and Wootton’s sniggering at them were oafish, but I do not see what Evans has to complain about given that she has made almost identical remarks herself:
But, as ever, it’s OK when the Left does it. Last week the Guardian ran a piece by Alexandra Topping called “Russell Brand and why the allegations took so long to surface”. She said, rather defensively I thought, that “multiple experts” had told her it was from fear of Brand suing for libel. OK, the experts do have a point about Britain’s libel laws, and that is why I am making absolutely no comment about the criminal accusations against him and ask you to do likewise, but fear of libel does not explain why Brand remained a star for years despite making on-air sexual remarks about a woman in a manner far worse than anything Laurence Fox has done.
The truly disgusting behaviour of Brand and Jonathan Ross towards Andrew Sachs and Georgina Baillie in 2008 did not stop the Guardian’s George Monbiot calling Brand one of his “heroes” in 2014 and saying “He’s the best thing that has happened to the left in years”.
Brand did not cease being on the left. Until these allegations came out on September 16th, he was due to contribute to book called “Poetry for the Many” edited by Jeremy Corbyn and the trade unionist Len McCluskey. But Brand’s views had ceased to be an asset to the left, certainly to the sort of left that flourishes in the current broadcast ecology.
Say what you like about the Daily Telegraph, which generally tilts centre-right in its politics and economics (particularly with incisive writers such as Allister Heath and Matthew Lynn), it does not seem to enforce orthodoxy. While the leader column and Heath have both applauded the UK government’s decision to permit oil drilling in the large Rosebank field in the North Sea – and mocked the fulminations of the critics, there were fulminations in the DT’s business section. An example comes from Ben Marlow, a columnist whose portrait glares out, Medusa-like, at a foolish and fallen world.
Marlow describes the timing of the announcement as “comically bad” and immediately shows his climate alarmism colours by noting that the announcement came a day after the International Energy Agency had warned that any new oil and gas infrastructure was incompatible with the Paris Climate Agreements of limiting global warming to 1.5 C. The new oil field is expected to produce as much as 500 million barrels of oil over its lifetime. Marlow goes on to state that bringing this oil field into production will do “none of the things that ministers and its cheerleaders claim”, and went on to berate the Conservatives for their alleged failure to cover the UK in solar panels and windfarms. And he went on to attack the government for sowing “confusion” among carmakers by putting back the ban on new internal combustion cars by 5 years to 2035. Further, he mocked the idea that producing more oil has any real benefits to the UK, saying that the oil goes into the world market. He does, rightly, criticise UK governments past and present for being weak on nuclear energy, but overall, Marlow’s column is a noisy example of green tantrum-throwing in an otherwise relatively sane newspaper. I wonder what his employers make of him?
So let’s examine Marlow’s central point, that the opening of this oilfield is a blow to the environment and won’t fix anything for the UK. Well, he ignores that some oil/gas fields will and have come out of production as the oil and gas gets too expensive to extract, reducing the commercial case for it, so if this is replaced by newer fields, that doesn’t necessarily increase the total amount of oil and gas in production. And even if it does, he’s assuming a straight-line link between increased C02 emissions, and increases in the average temperature of the planet. From my reading, there is a law of diminishing returns in nature, as in economics. Every extra ton of C02 produces less of a warming impact than the preceding one. Further, there is global “greening” to consider – although there’s a law of diminishing returns on that when it comes to the link with carbon emissions, I suspect, too.
And considering that he’s a business correspondent and editor, Marlow seems curiously uninterested in how, for example, developing this big oil field will generate export earnings for the UK, and a lot of tax revenue for the government. (On the latter point, this isn’t an argument that I know classical liberals would want to make much of.) The UK has to import a lot of stuff, such as natural gas from the Middle East and so on. Exports are what we need for imports. If the UK’s balance of payments improves, it benefits us in the ability to import more of what we want. As for the government, more revenues give it more ability to encourage R&D and the like in areas such as modular nuclear power plants, etc. Even for those who aren’t carbon fuel catastrophists, we can acknowledge that if we want to shift towards nuclear fission and fusion, and potentially as yet undiscovered sources, that requires a ton of wealth.
Marlow’s mockery of the UK’s supposed tardiness over wind and solar is again a reminder that the battery storage issue just doesn’t register. Without storage, the intermittency problem with wind/sun energy is a killer. (The writer Alex Epstein and others have made this point.) Marlow, and others who share his views, really have no excuses to not directly address this point and explain how they’d handle it.
A final point: The huge budget overruns and delays on the HS2 rail project from London to the North are surely another reminder to journalists who talk a big game about “infrastructure” that the UK’s record of delivering things on time, and on budget, is appalling. Rishi Sunak, whatever else he is, is not an idiot. He knows that the 2030 mark for banning sales of new ICE vehicles was and is insane. All he needs to do to win that cigar from this blog is to reverse the policy completely. Then stand back and watch Mr Marlow’s head explode.
To Blair and his circle, then, the individual did not precede society – as Hobbes and Locke had it. People are born into an existing social compact and have obligations towards it that they do not necessarily choose. Other figures in New Labour’s stable of philosophers included Anthony Giddens, who offered the phrase “no rights without responsibilities” as the slogan of the Third Way, as well as the communitarian theorist Amitai Etzioni.
New Labour proceeded to govern in this spirit, with the political strategist Philip Gould crystallising these ideas into a policy agenda. The New Labour years saw the beginnings of Stakeholder governance, which envisages society as a compact of chartered interest groups – faiths, ethnicities, capital, labour – who have a right to be consulted on all matters of public policy. This is an anti-liberal idea: it formally dispenses with the individual citizen as the primary political unit, and denies the rights of voting majorities – a basic premise of liberal democracy. The establishment of protected characteristics is another example; it was premised on the idea that, in the eyes of the law, you were a member of a community first and an individual second.
– J Sorel
Net Zero policies are trashing private property rights, stealing vast resources from taxpayers, and creating a moribund economy based on Soviet-style government planning – the total opposite of conservatism.
– Richard Wellings in response to this gaseous emission (£) by Selwyn Gummer in which he argues delaying ruinous Net Zero policies is “unconservative”.
The ‘Conservative’ Party should be repudiating the entire climate scam, not just delaying bits of it to harmonise the UK’s economic ruin with the EU’s economic ruin.
Switzerland is a great country. In most respects Machiavelli’s description of the Swiss as “armatissimi e liberissimi”, “most armed and most free”, still applies. But…
It says,
Mandatory shooting
Mandatory program
Compulsory shooting training applies to all soldiers equipped with an assault rifle and must be completed every year until the end of military obligations.
It must be carried out by August 31 with a recognized shooting club. You can check the dates and times in official publications or on the internet.
Further information can be found at: http://www.be.ch/militaire
The Wikipedia article on Conscription in Switzerland says,
Switzerland has mandatory military service (German: Militärdienst; French: service militaire; Italian: servizio militare) in the Swiss Army for all able-bodied male citizens, who are conscripted when they reach the age of majority,[1] though women may volunteer for any position.[2] Conscripts make up the majority of the manpower in the Swiss Armed Forces.[3]
On September 22, 2013, a referendum that aimed to abolish conscription was held in Switzerland.[4] However, the referendum failed with over 73% of the electorate voting against it, showing strong support for conscription of men in Switzerland.
Much as I admire the Swiss, I cannot make myself believe that constitutes being liberissimi.
I’ve said previously we’re living in an age of tragedy. I’m not too sure about that anymore. I think we’ve advanced further than tragedy. We’re entering an age of absurdity. Consider German climate policy. Germany, as we keep hearing, is incomparably more adult, more advanced, more modern, and in every way superior to bungling Britain. But in Germany, the result of their closing down of nuclear and going for renewables has been an increased reliance on the dirtiest kind of coal. Well, this is tragic, but it’s even more than tragic. It is completely absurd.
And it’s difficult to put these arguments forward because people start shouting at you or they start crying or they say they can’t get up in the morning. I rather brutally suggest: “Well don’t. Stay in bed until you get a better reason for getting up. And if you don’t, well, there we are. Progress always has casualties.”
– John Gray
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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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