Coldblood has been moved to undertake a protest that could presumably land him and his friends in a whole heap of trouble in the name of no ideology in particular.

Well, I’d guess that most people who claim to be inspired by ideology are, in fact, acting on behalf of their egos, enthusiasms and outrage at whatever injustices fate has tossed across their path of life. What’s interesting is that, unlike other movements, they don’t have a core leadership that offers an idea as a banner to collect beneath. That’s because they are vaguely anarchic.

Well what they are doing is essentially vandalism.

You think it’s OK because you dislike their target.

I dislike their target too,
But I’m not sure I think it’s OK.

Perhaps. On the other hand, what they’re doing is essentially censorship of behalf on an authoritarian power. Two wrongs don’t make an etc., I know, but still…

Well there’s a whole heap of trouble in that “but still”

I retract “but still” and add “it’s clearly a moral dilemma but not one that I feel all that energised to explore because I think it’s a practical good if companies are taught that caving in to authoritarian states will make them rather unpopular; for now, just call me Bentham”.

cjcj,

It was to me legitimate protest – companies should not bow to government pressure without any legal obligations to do so. Those that do make themselves legitimate target for non-violent action.

And there is an increasingly broad coalition, mainly of the young, opposed to totalitarian state behaviour. I remain interested to see how this will sit with those such as the NUS who honestly seem to believe the state should be given the means to control universities (control of funding) for example. Although I note that there are two very different dynamics of protest involved here – it may be that we have a new movement and an old movement active at once.

(On the other hand, while 4Chan denizens can be amusing when they’re not exploring the possibilities of the word “fag”, I wouldn’t trust them any more than I’d email my passwords, credit details and identity of one true love.)

Actually, yes, I merely endorse what Watchman’s said.

“Well what they are doing is essentially vandalism.”

Always rely on the tory butlers to come to the defence of their corporate masters.

I have just informed Amazon that I will do my shopping elsewhere. Small fry no doubt, but corporations are getting too big for their greedy boots. If they want to side with a buch of brownshirts then they can go fuck themselves.

I’m not sure I’d advocate it any more than I would smashing windows. But you’re certainly onto something with the non-ideology. There are geek sub-sets of the internet which deliberately eschew -ologies (yes, I know, this is in itself, etc) but are still willing to act collectively in specific and limited causes. Then they probably go back to deadly serious flame wars with each other. I imagine if you translated what they do into political compass terms you would find a general anarchist/libertarian flavour.

(Are you really fifty-something? I’m always surprised when people-on-the-internet turn out to have tangible human characteristics. You mean you’re not all just figments of my imagination?)

“From what I can tell, it’s a similar story in the student movement right now. While the Trot groups obviously have a presence, I gather that it is one that is not always appreciated.”

Understatement much!

I remain convinced that if you were to organise a protest againt the Socialist Workers Party, they would still turn up to the meetings, try take over your demo and badge it as theirs and actively march against themselves.

A non-violent protest against Visa and MasterCard seems a more more productive use of time and effort than a ‘no doesn’t always mean no’ campaign on behalf of Assange.

I do find it ironic that this group are calling themselves ‘Anonymous’ though. Presumably they’d defend the rights of credit card companies to retaliate by publishing their names?

The Anonymous movement is basically anti-authoritarian, with a broad construal of the word ‘authority’. They’re anti-censorship, and this extends to an opposition to anyone who wishes to prevent offensive speech. They’re basically of the belief that one’s tact filter should be on the incoming direction rather than the outgoing, and any attempt to prevent any form of communication, no matter how offensive, is essentially wrong. This sometimes puts them in a position of defending (or at least tolerating) racism, sexism and other things that the left generally finds less agreeable. They’re often “ironically” offensive, partly as an intentional attempt to defend the frontiers of what it’s possible to say, and partly because they find it funny.

I think there is an ideology here somewhere, but it’s bordering on the nihilistic. A left-wing critique of Anonymous usually begins by pointing out that their defence of free speech ends up empowering the privileged in their continued abuse of the under-privileged, and there’s no real answer to that – one either accepts it or does not; Anonymous doesn’t really seem to care about the moral implications. The best model for understanding Anonymous, and other similar free-speech quasi-nihilists is probably Charlie Stross’ “festival”; their only real goal is the freedom to consume stimulating/amusing/shocking information.

‘I have just informed Amazon that I will do my shopping elsewhere. Small fry no doubt, but corporations are getting too big for their greedy boots. If they want to side with a buch of brownshirts then they can go fuck themselves.’

You can get 3 colouring books for £10 from The Works.

I remain convinced that if you were to organise a protest againt the Socialist Workers Party, they would still turn up to the meetings, try take over your demo and badge it as theirs and actively march against themselves.

Can we do this, please?

‘When asked what his politics were, he said he didn’t know

Sounds a bit like the counter-culture in the ’60s and ’70s.

When I was a punk rocker and squatter activist in the ’70s if you’d asked me my politics really I’d have been hard pressed to come up with a coherent answer. It was a mumbo-jumbo of anarchism/socialism/libertariansm/anti-fascism/merry prankster.

But people were much more politically active then, I always thought “sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll” missed out “and politics”.

And of course ‘The Revoultion’ was round the corner maaaaannnn.

What we did have a distrust of was organised politics of any type, especially Trot groups who occasionally tried to infiltrate and “organise” us. I maintain that distrust to this day really.

Maybe this young fella is similar.

@4 this is vandalism in the same way that staging a sit in at a vodafone store is vandalism – assuming we’re only talking about the end result and the damage done.

‘Their only real goal is the freedom to consume stimulating/amusing/shocking information.’

Like Franky Boyle but with impressive beards.

“companies should not bow to government pressure without any legal obligations to do so.”

Why, I thought companies can do what they like as long as long as it is legal, same as the rest of us.

They are under no legal obligation to provide a service to anyone, whereas DOS attacks are illegal, in this country anyway.

From what I can gather, hordes of teenage nerds unhappy with the Visa and MasterCard’s action in blocking transaction involving WikiLeaks have arranged among themselves to disrupt web-based services operated by the big league credit card companies.

Maybe, maybe not…

Typically within an ‘underground’ community the ratio of bona fide hackers and crackers to skiddies (script-kiddies) is pretty low.

You’ll find a lot of people with prefabricated tools capable of launching or participating in a flood attack, which simply overloads the target with spoofed traffic, but relatively few who’ll have access to the kind of custom toolkits and bot-nets necessary to run the kind of serious takedown.that will really hurt a major corporation.

As far as I can tell, this is a straight-forward flood attack which uses LOIC to create a voluntary bot net – nothing sophisticated and no real damage beyond a bit of enbarrassment.

“have arranged among themselves to disrupt web-based services operated by the big league credit card companies. This will presumably cost those bloodsuckers plenty”

Not so much really, no.

For what they’re doing is going to the corporate websites and trying to make them fall over (essentially by saying, though their automated software, “Hey, website, talk to me!” millions upon millions of times a second).

At which point the corporate websites, which essentially say, “Gosh, Mastercard is such a lovely organisation!”, fall over.

To make the payment systems fall over you would have to attempt to actually spend money repeatedly, in such an automated attack. And the problem there is that they’d be able to process an awful lot of payments before they did fall over, making it a very expensive form of protest.

The actual payments systems, the Mastercard network, isn’t even aware that this protest is happening let alone being affected by it.

‘Sounds a bit like the counter-culture in the ’60s and ’70s.’

Or Brando in The Wild One:

‘What are you rebelling against?’
‘What have you got?’

‘When I was a punk rocker and squatter activist in the ’70s if you’d asked me my politics really I’d have been hard pressed to come up with a coherent answer. It was a mumbo-jumbo of anarchism/socialism/libertariansm/anti-fascism/merry prankster.’

Punk got me into Emma Goldman – though not literally. The desire to break social conventions generally before thinking aoput what you’d put in their place.

Tim: are you sure the payments weren’t affected? This suggests otherwise.

Otherwise I’d agree that the risk of serious loss to Mastercard and Visa is minimal, and the main damage has been to their brand, mostly in the form of the increased willingness of some of their customers to find alternative payment providers. If this episode has done little else, it has exposed how unreliable Amazon, Paypal, Mastercard and Visa can be, and that can only be a boost to their (future) competitors.

@Tim Worstall — will it cost Mastercard? The ddos attacks will not. But most of the older members of my family have called their banks to cancel their credit cards because they fear (erroneously) that the hackers will go after THEM. I have tried to explain this to my dear 74-year old mother, but she insists there is a danger.

The part of me that supports free speech and freedom of the press would really like to encourage my mother and her sisters and all her church friends to distance themselves from MC because of this “threat” posed by the hackers. It’s morally wrong to lie to one’s mother, although nodding and saying “you do what makes you feel safe” isn’t exactly a sin, is it?

Also, let’s not assume that ALL of Anonymous are 15 year old nerds, thank you.

“The actual payments systems, the Mastercard network, isn’t even aware that this protest is happening let alone being affected by it.”

Let me amend that slightly: online retailers might find that parts of the Mastercard system ain’t working so great.

The major networks, between the shops and the banks, won’t be affected.

Is there anything to really critique these guys about who are acting on issue and not ideology?
The political persuation would be a hindrence in attacking a single issue on a single issue basis.
The responsibility of the political movements would be to support the individual’s actions rather than the other way around?

I don’t know any, but these people who are referred to as ‘nerds’ and ‘geeks’ are seemingly much more effective at getting attention than the the banner-waving ‘hippies’ (pardon me) of traditional civil unrest and disobedience and they aren’t going to be accused of putting people directly in physical harm by their actions either.

Also, part of the Paypal network is down (though it might be back up by the time you click on the link).

Generally speaking, most web presences have a soft underbelly somewhere. Taking the main Paypal site down might be tricky, but maybe the API site (the one currently affected) has poor performance/scalability characteristics and can be disrupted by a fairly moderate effort. These things get expensive pretty quickly (people on Twitter have quoted $120k per minute and given that api.paypal.com has been down for around 2 hours, that’s $7.2m, which I imagine handily beats whatever the Vodafone/Topshop protests cost the companies in question) and the likes of Paypal can only take so many outages before their customers (the retail companies) simply move to a different payment processor that hasn’t angered the mob in such a way.

Whoops, that’s $14.4m, not $7.2m.

@captainswing

“Sounds a bit like the counter-culture in the ’60s and ’70s…Maybe this young fella is similar.”

Just hunching, but I doubt he’d be similar in any way you’d recognise. The nature of counter culture is surely that it moves on. Counter-culture now isn’t about sex or rock and roll, or the vaguely concocted socialist-anarchist-WTF revolution, for the very good reason that those things are now mainstream. In fact in some ways I’d say geek culture defines itself in opposition to a lot of that stuff.

The drugs theme seems to be pretty consistent, mind.

Sort of drugs & laptops & drum & bass?

Or just drugs & drugs & drugs & drugs?

Dave,

Why, I thought companies can do what they like as long as long as it is legal, same as the rest of us.

They are under no legal obligation to provide a service to anyone, whereas DOS attacks are illegal, in this country anyway.

Indeed. Pity then they are chosing to do what someone else (the US State Deparment according to the Telegraph – see their unlinked account of Paypal’s statement in http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8190972/WikiLeaks-enemies-targeted-by-hackers.html ) would like them to do. To do something like this for a government is your choice, but it opens you up to accusations of taking sides, whereas if the credit card companies and all had told the US State Department to go and shove it, what would there problem be?

If you are stupid enough to be a business who does what government rather than the consumer wants, you should expect the trouble it brings.

Rob,

Christ, the costs of this stuff escalate – that doubled in a minute!

Well… Anonymous started as a reaction to Scientology so no wonder it’s anti-authoritarian. As for whether it’ll last, who knows? I’m betting that a at least some of the 4chan /b/tards & script-kiddies (urbandictionary it) will be head-hunted by MegaCorp Inc. and, y’know, sell their souls, man.

But for now it’s good to see some payback against the corporate world, if only because it puts to bed the myth of widespread apathy.

I agree with whoever said that Anonymous is essentially a nihilist “organisation” as well.

Hmm @ Dave the writer..

I have to politely disagree and as much as I DO appreciate you all for doing what you did back in the day, you were running on ideology which to me is the key that creates war, civil unrest, destruction etc..

I believe this, I believe that…yadayadayada….WHY do you? Who are YOU amongst the billions living on this planet that WE have to follow on YOUR belief??

Eff that.

This guy is my knew hero. And I hope the future slowly starts to look more at what is WRONG then what is wrong because you don’t believe in what I believe.

Hence why I loved Obama telling off the Right and Left who are fighting like little babies…”we live in a diverse, v diverse country with people with diverse, ve diverse needs. In order to run a country effectively, we must take in ALL these people’s needs, not just our own”

Something along those lines anyhow!

@ 29

I agree it’s all mainstream now.

It’s just when we said sex and drugs and rock and roll we did not imagine the sex meant loads of teen pregnancies, the drugs heroin epidemics in deprived towns and the rock ‘n roll ‘The X-Factor’.

So in a way we both won and failed miserably.

“To do something like this for a government is your choice, but it opens you up to accusations of taking sides, whereas if the credit card companies and all had told the US State Department to go and shove it, what would there problem be?”

Well, they’d all be out of business pretty sharply actually. For to be a payment system like either Paypal or the credit cards, you need to have a licence from said governments to operate.

You know, this regulatory control of the financial system y’all are so keen on?

@35

I’m sure this generation’s counter-culture will end up with just as mixed a balance sheet. That’s how you know you actually were counter-cultural, I suppose.

@30

Or drugs and laptops and a nice cup of tea and a sit down. So I like to think, anyway.

@13 – “I think there is an ideology here somewhere, but it’s bordering on the nihilistic… The best model for understanding Anonymous, and other similar free-speech quasi-nihilists is probably Charlie Stross’ “festival”; their only real goal is the freedom to consume stimulating/amusing/shocking information.”

No-one’s picked up on this, which is a shame – ‘Singularity Sky’ is one of the best and certainly one of the most interesting books of the last decade.

@11 Plus ca change.

Also: Situationism 2.0

Tim,

If you’re going to quote me, please don’t then associate with me being keen on state regulation of anything. If nothing else, it will confuse sally’s simple view of the world.

So we have a situation whereby through financial regulation, governments can lean on financial companies to cut off funds to organisations that have not committed any crimes? Could anyone explain to me how that is a good idea?

I wasn’t saying it was a good idea. Just an explanation of why everyone caved. Because the people doing the asking have the ability to put those asked out of business.

Tim makes a good point. It is the people who argue most strongly for state regulation of industry who are complaining most loudly that states misuse this power. Milton Friedman is sniggering somewhere.

Sorry Tim – my turn to be addressing things to the wrong person (through bad use of language in this case…).

The question was aimed more at the left-wing people hereabouts, who now have a concrete example of state power through regulation being used to harrass someone who has legitimately taken on that state power.

@31

“If you are stupid enough to be a business who does what government rather than the consumer wants, you should expect the trouble it brings.”

I agree Watchman, thats free enterprise. For example if i had bad service from a shop I would boycott it and try and persuade others to do the same.

I don’ t however think it would be acceptable to shut down the power of that shop so the tills dont work or stand outside the doors wrestling people to the ground so that they cannot shop their either.

Just because I have boycotted something doesnt give me the right to make that decision for other people, which is essentially what these hacktivists have done

@Watchamn, Tim Worstall

I don’t think lefties are unaware of the risks of state regulation. That’s why we like checks and balances, a more nuanced approach. Surely the Freedom = Free Markets ideology is the simplistic one? Isn’t it ironic that the attacks on Wikileaks funding come from the heartland of Free Marketism, the US of A?

“heartland of Free Marketism, the US of A?”

If you really think that then I’ve a bridge to sell you.

Both Denmark and Sweden are more free market than the US in most ways (other than the level of taxation of course).

Dave,

To be fair though, the government does not have the right to close down the power and lock the doors either. That’s why we have laws.

By bending to the government’s will, corporations become a tool of big government, forced to do its bidding, neither that of the shareholders nor the consumers.

I think that the problem here is that you are seeing these businesses as independent entities, whereas I am seeing them as arms of government attempted suppression. I do not like the idea of the US deciding what people in Sweden, or the UK, can or cannot do simply through putting pressure on companies – if China did that how would we react?

44 – I don’t think that’s an unfair point. Socialists – right or wrong – would envisage the state in a rather different form but milder social democrats are trying to have their cake and claim its also a plate of jellied eels.

This is a good ol’ post…

Krugman also misses something: how is it that free market reforms like restoring vigorous tort liability are impracticable because they require incorruptible institutions, but the same critique doesn’t apply to reforms that require strenthening the regulatory state? Are “progressive” regulations made by legislators from a different species than those who refuse to make the oil companies accountable for the harm they cause? There’s a large body of literature suggesting they aren’t: that regulations usually reflect, in large part, the interests of the regulated industry.

@ Tim Worstall

As usual you attempt to obscure the point I was making with spurious facts. Sweden and Denmark haven’t exactly been aggressively promoting their version of Free Marketism to the rest of the world. Unlike Uncle Sam.

(Or, to re-use a joke I’ll never allow to rest in peace, trying to have their state and eat it.)

I hardly think the choice is absolutely no regulation or an abuse of state power. Most reasonable people are able to see the choices are in between the two extremes. Good governments do not abuse their power even when they have the ability to do so. There is something of an irony in the nation that has an illusion of limited government is always under every administration one of the biggest abusers of state power. The US is uniquely powerful because its economy is so large vis-a-vis the ROW. Therefore, the US has unique power to lean on companies who might not even be engaged in any business within the US. Just doing business with a company with a US connection is enough for them to use as economic leverage. Since the US economy is so large that catches almost anyone of note. The illusion of limited government never amounted to anything beyond the paper it was written on. They have always been economic bullies.

53

YUP

That is why America should be now viewed not as a country but as an Empire.

And since 9/11 and the huge power grab of the Bush govt, continued by Obama, and applied to all their national interests (which basically means the whole world) we are governed from Washington.

Funny, you never here the Euro sceptic right wing trolls ever complain about that. Sovereignty for trolls is a very elastic concept.

Interesting that Assange has hailed Bradley Manning as a Hero of the Struggle. Interesting, that is, when you consider that Wikileaks has not donated one red cent to his defense fund.

Wikileaks is doing more to confirm the image of Leftie (H)activists as unprincipled wreckers on the make than anything done since 1989.

Good post. The risk is that they are handing those in Government who would like to control the net a perfect excuse to do it.

“As usual you attempt to obscure the point I was making with spurious facts. ”

Ahahahahahahahaha.

“Spurious” and “facts” used in the same sentence.

Snigger, chortle chortle.

OK, having wiped those tears from my eyes: run it by me again how facts, you know theose reflections of the real world, can be spurious?

The first spotty little cyberterrorist herbert has been arrested for the DDoS attacks.

Interestingly, the DDoS tool that Wikileaks “avengers” are being encouraged to download so they can join in the attacks on Mastercard et al makes no effort to hide the IP address of the attack originator. So it’s trivial for ISPs to cut off “avengers” on their networks and inform the police of their activities. It seems that Bradley Manning and the two Swedish women aren’t the only people that Wikileaks supporters are willing to sacrifice in the cause of anarchy. Anyone intending to join this modern-day Childrens Crusade should be warned.

@4 this is vandalism in the same way that staging a sit in at a vodafone store is vandalism – assuming we’re only talking about the end result and the damage done.

I’d say the two actions are fairly similar – but I’d call neither vandalism.

and the likes of Paypal can only take so many outages before their customers (the retail companies) simply move to a different payment processor that hasn’t angered the mob in such a way.

Part of the problem is that these companies are also monopolies.

And furthermore, they’re exercising their muscles. For example, Visa’s attempt to stop Datacell still taking money for WikiLeaks stinks like dogshit.

I LOVE them all at the moment… students and cyber warriors and Wikipedia alike. Actually stirred me out of a rather apathetic slumber that I fell into somewhere when kids starting wearing big hats, taking ‘E’ and ‘raving’ in fields. I found myself blinking at the TV and news and think ‘whoo, now this IS interesting’.

Here they are.. the technological generation, at ease with quick communication and new ways of networking and talking to one person while texting another and many of them, males in particular, brought up playing endless hours of on-line competitive, complex strategy games and others chatting to friends on every continent.

I wondered what they’d be like… and here they are! Lovely. They seem quite willing to refuse to ‘follow the pre-ordained route’ or turn up in the right place at the right time to be kettled if they can help it or have a political label thrust upon them (unless they want one)

Great.

Oh, and forgot to say.. they all seem remarkably articulate.

@57 Tim Worstall

“Snigger, chortle chortle.”

I get it. You’re not real, just some creation of DC Thompson.

FWIW – not much to most of you I guess – the actual victims, especially wrt Paypal, are the small businesses who use them. Still, who cares about them, eh?

And Sunny may not regard this as “vandalism” – well of course, when you dislike the targets then the ends always somehow seem to justify the means, don’t they?

(And whatever he “regards”, DOS attacks are illegal.)

He would be screaming if say Tea Party hacktivists took down someone he liked.

@49 – Similarly I do not like the idea of the hackers deciding what people in Sweden, or the UK, can or cannot do simply through putting pressure on companies.

The hackers have done exactly what the US government has done, yet this sort of suppression is acceptable, presumably because you agree with the wikileaks.

Incidentally I also like the fact all the cables got leaked, but think its ridiculous to moan about visa no longer giving a service to one of its customers, whilst at the same time celebrating hackers forcing visa’s customers to no longer receive their service.

I can’t speak for hacktivism, but the suggesion that “no ideology in particular” is the “story in the student movement right now” , or that the student movement is indifferent to or hostile to socialist or left wing ideas, seems very wide of the mark. t Yesterday’s demonstration simply would not have happened without Clare Solomon in particular, and the leadership of ULU and to a lesser extent the London Region of UCU – they called the demonstration , so overtly left wing figures from the student and trade union movement were pretty central to the events. Consequently while the bulk of the march were students and school students, there was a good representation of Trade Union banners – especially the unions with a presence in the universities – UCU, Unison – also NUT, RMT, TSSA, and these were met by chants promoting unity of workers and students – a pretty basic slogan of the left (I was carrying one half of one of the UCU banners, being a member of one of the London branches). I even saw – rare sight – a Labour Students banner.

Yeah, but not quite the same as the demand for a general strike being advanced by some of the sects, is it, Solomon?

Cherub,

@57 Tim Worstall

I get it. You’re not real, just some creation of DC Thompson.

Didn’t know they published comics about economics nowadays. Now that is diversification.

Sunny,

Part of the problem is that these companies are also monopolies.

Isn’t this the point of the (not much of an) argument about regulation – that because there is a requirement for government approval etc it makes it easier for government to limit companies involved in the financial sphere and effectively create monopolies.

I’d say the financial crisis was to a large extent another example of this – the failings of the old banks meant there were opportunities for others, but there was no-one able to enter the market to take them.

“Didn’t know they published comics about economics nowadays. Now that is diversification.”

Tsk, a comic version of the Road to Serfdom came out in the 1940s. A necessary diversification as the socialists couldn’t read the real one, not with all that lips moving as they did so stuff.

Off topic, but Tim have you considered that the reason Sweden and Denmark are able to have dynamic, freer economies is that they provide generous social welfare funded by taxation.

There was a really interesting piece linked to on Dani Rodrik’s blog about a year ago, which discussed how in Denmark, unions actually support free trade.

“Off topic, but Tim have you considered that the reason Sweden and Denmark are able to have dynamic, freer economies is that they provide generous social welfare funded by taxation. ”

It’s a point I often make myself (as does Scott Sumner, a real economist) but the other way around. The reason they’re able to have generous social welfare states funded by taxation is that they have dynamic freer economies underneath.

Sumner has written papers comparing how free the economies are and Denmark is the freest (advanced that is) economy in the world on 8 out of 10 measures (the other two being that tax burden).

In fact, this is a point I make repeatedly. That if you want to have that large redistribution, that social democratic state, then you really do need to be embracing classical liberalism as the underlying structure of the economy. For that’s the only way that you’re going to be able to get continued growth while still having that redistribution and social democracy.

I delight in pointing out that the national income tax rate in Denmark is 3.76%, the top national income tax rate is 15%. Yes, the total income tax burden is high, but the vast majority of it is paid at local rates to the local commune, something which can be as small as 10,000 people. I’m absolutely certain that people will be willing to pay higher tax rates when they know where the guy who spends it all has a beer on a friday night.

The majority of fire fighting and ambulance services in Denmark are provided by a private company (which was once part of G4S actually).

If the British left could only get over their fear/hatred of markets and near insane desire for centralisation then they might actually be able to build the social democracy they desire. As the Nordics have done.

“If the British left could only get over their fear/hatred of markets and near insane desire for centralisation then they might actually be able to build the social democracy they desire. As the Nordics have done.”

Alas they never will.

“And since 9/11 and the huge power grab of the Bush govt, continued by Obama, and applied to all their national interests (which basically means the whole world) we are governed from Washington.”

Ok, at the risk of de-railing the thread, I’ll bite. The above statement is just wrong, it implies that prior to 9-11 the US was a regional power and then had a power grap that has resulted in the entire world being governed by washington. I suspect most students of international relations would agree that the direction of travel was quite the reverse. Prior to the bush administration the US pretty much was the super-power, whilst it could not determine the outcome of every single thing on the planet, it undoubtedly was a superpower and shaped global institutions to reflect its need. Then Bush came along and attempted to have a power grab – the key word is attempted – and in doing so proved that republicans are too stupid to understand what power is and how it is won and maintained. The left office 8 years later with US power firmly in decline having pissed away the unipolar moment.

Far from being the place where the world is governed, washington isn’t even the prime location anymore. If an African country wants investment, arms etc, they go to bejing, not washington. Russia is now regaining its power in Central Asia and asserting itself on the world stage, and Georgia offers an example of what happens to Russia’s bordering countries that get uppity. India too can be seen as an emerging power.Even in its own backyard, the US is a declining power. The last decade has seen the likes of Chavez, Morales, Lula and several others take power, and Argentina default on its debt whilst telling the IMF to fuck off. (And with only one consolation goal of a miltary coup to show for it.) Indeed, even on its own border, the utterly stupid and dogmatic persuit of the war on drugs risks turning Mexico into a failed state. And domestically speaking it’s becoming ever more stupid and ungovernable. Even Israel is increasingly looking to Russia.

Geography and History are basically the only things that will prevent it falling behind the status of small regional power. And its this that makes the decline reversable, but I suspect things will get worse before they get better.

” near insane desire for centralisation ”

Remind me again which part of the political spectrum has opposed devolution, and a few decades ago abolished the GLC, centralised the school curricula and severely restricted the automony of local government.

Sorry for diverting the thread but as Tim alludes to it is not a matter of big government versus small government like some people popularly imagine. The real issue is between good government with the right incentives built into the tax structure and bad government which has the opposite.Scandinavia has lots of government and they are also the mostly highly prosperous nations on earth. There is a positive correlation between government and prosperity. High income economies have lots of government and low income economies have small government. The Soviet Union had lots of government but it was bad government. The anti-government nihilists who think they can abolish government to prosperity are wrong but so are the folks who think just increasing government is the solution to all problems. It is incentives that matter and that will lead to good government.

I suspect Tim W would argue that the Nordics do not have “lots of government”.

They have lots of tax and lots of transfer payments, but the key to their relative success is that public services are not managed by (central) government and are subject to market forces.

@77…..quite.

Well they do have the right structures in place of that there is no doubt but it would be rather silly to say they are small government societies. Decentralising power to local government is what is known as good government. As Prof. Sumner said:

” It is widely known that richer countries tend to have much bigger governments than poorer countries. ”

These were interesting posts on good government.

http://baselinescenario.com/2010/05/27/heritage-index-good-government-vs-less-government/

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=5298

In the physical world this kind of attack on sites isn’t so much like a sit in in a shop or breaking windows, and more like super-gluing a lock so none of the people working can get in, so the business can’t function. It’s mild vandalism and a short-term nuisance for the company involved. Whether it will change the policy of the company is another thing.