June 2023 - The Mallard

The Wire and Singapore

By Nathan Wilson — 10 months ago

The small island nation of Singapore is like the American TV program, The Wire. I understand that is probably one of the weirdest opening sentences to an article about philosophy and global politics, but hear me out.

Co-creator of The Wire, David Simon, once stated the reason for the show’s success was its ability to mirror every conceivable political bias of the viewership. This was enabled by the many different themes and issues exhibited throughout the show. If you are against the War on Drugs, you will see evidence of its failings. If you support it, you will see evidence it should continue. If you believe that police failings are because of cultural or economic reasons, you will see those perspectives reflected too.

In short, within the entire series, you will see nearly every modern political issue at play as understood by every ‘side’ of said issue. What remains interesting is that, as noted by Simon, the show maintains an ability to “validate” and consequently reinforce the beliefs of the viewers.

As such, the city of Baltimore continues to hold a light to America-at-large and its ongoing issues, even if it aired 21 years ago, finishing just before the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Whether it’s urban decay, corruption, or the failure of the American Dream, what we see in the show are things that existed in the 1960’s and still exist today in this post-industrial broken city.

You can follow this train of thought into the world of global politics, which is not as far away from modern media as I would like to admit. Specifically, we have seen a similar situation emerge out of the success story that is Singapore.

Singapore is like a mirror to any political persuasion that one might have, from which also can “validate” one’s own personal politics. The only real difference is that The Wire (and by extension the city of Baltimore, I say this because the city itself is largely the main character for the entire show) are used negatively, while Singapore is used positively.

If you want to see a thriving multi-ethnic, multicultural, post-colonial state, then you can look to Singapore. If you want to see somewhere that champions free-market capitalism, then you can see it there. If you want to see somewhere with a right-wing government that places a strong emphasis on law and order, not to mention the death penalty, it’s right there between Johor and the Riau Islands.

It remains fascinating to me that a tiny island, one which most people could never find on a map, has sparked such a massive debate on what they ‘see’ when they think of Singapore.

A nation with a population comparable to Lebanon or Palestine, yet more than a hundred leagues above such countries. A right-wing free-market paradise with the best public housing in the world. Those who see its publicly-funded universal healthcare system, one of the most efficient in the world, argue to the contrary. A super politically conservative nation that’s current president is an ethnic minority Muslim woman, racial success story, model minority, etc, etc.

Is Singapore perfect? Of course not. Is Singapore used to reflect general political beliefs about the world? Well, yes. Are a lot of these views correct? Yes and no.

Politically, socially, economically, a lot of different political views and philosophies are validated by the existence of Singapore. Fundamentally, Singapore and Baltimore have a comparable effect on the politically-minded.

Do people get murdered and addicted to drugs in both places? Yes. Are both places being led by an ethnic minority leader? Yes. How we view subjects often depends on the viewer itself, as much as the subject matter in play.

Despite this, Singapore has become a symbol of success whilst Baltimore has become a symbol of failure. Singapore is a model whilst Baltimore is a failure, and nobody wants to see their political beliefs reflected or “invalidated” by the latter.

What is revealing is how two completely different places are so similar, while being so completely poles apart. Everyone can infer whatever they want from either place or still be generally, albeit not exactly, correct.

In conclusion, I think that David Simon is largely correct about this idea of how we as viewers of a thing can be so vastly different, yet so widely validated by its existence. Maybe, it’s more revealing for us, as viewers, to look at places or thematic issues within the greater context of The Discourse, whether political or pop culture, and realize we can all be somewhat right, while also being largely wrong.

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Britain needs a Flat Tax

By Macaulay Nichol — 11 months ago

The concept of progressive taxation, once lauded as a pillar of leftist ideology, aimed to embody progressiveness by imposing a heavier tax burden on the wealthy. It was envisioned as a means to uphold public services, with the wealthiest individuals leading the chariot, paying heinous tax rates of up to 45%.

However, this philosophy ignores a critical flaw. As the belief that only the affluent bear this burden is far from reality, as shockingly, a staggering 32.32% of the tax-paying population find themselves trapped in higher tax brackets, far beyond a mere trickle.

With a significant 53.1% of the UK’s tax revenue directly fuelled from just 32.32% of the tax-paying population – or in other words, a mere 18.1% of the UK’s total population -, it becomes clear that we have overlooked the potential to invigorate our financial system, through putting more money in the hands of the people. By doing so, we could meet the demands of the free market and stimulate economic growth, something which UK markets have so greatly been missing out on.

While decreasing the top rates of tax may seem delusional given the economic situation and current governmental regime, there remains a possibility worth exploring—a flat tax system. In a society where absolute fairness is demanded, regardless of common sense, one must question why society would reject such a concept. A flat tax is undeniably the fairest and most equal method of taxation, aligning with the very meaning of the word ‘fair’:

“fair, just, equitable, impartial, unbiased, dispassionate, objective mean free from favor toward either or any side. fair implies a proper balance of conflicting interests. a fair decision. just implies an exact following of a standard of what is right and proper.” [Definition of the word ‘fair’ [Merriam-Webster, 2023]

Therefore I ask, why not give a flat tax a chance? It treats everyone equally, regardless of socioeconomic background, offering an undeniable sense of absolute fairness. However, doubts arise when considering its feasibility, more particularly its success within the UK. While some countries, such as Russia and Ukraine, have implemented a flat tax providing positive outcomes, it is essential to acknowledge that the UK’s financial sector could potentially be destabilized by such a system. The financial sector not only sustains thousands of jobs but also serves as the lifeblood of the nation’s capital. Nonetheless, this does not mean that a flat tax is impossible for the UK.

Russia’s flat tax rate of 13%, introduced in 2001, led to an increase in tax revenue, alongside improvements in overall tax compliance and efficiency, supported by OECD. This simplification of the tax system was hailed as a significant success, considering the many complex loopholes which existed before its introduction.

Regrettably so, implementing a 13% tax rate across the UK would not be so easy, especially with the UK public’s insistence on retaining the NHS; therefore, I would propose a higher rate, potentially around 20%, tooling HM Treasury to strike a balance between taxation and state spending.

Through adopting this alternative approach, we would aim to solidify the medium in-between sustaining key public services and ensuring maximum disposable income, which after all, would be better reinvested throughout the UK’s markets, taking away a degree of power from the state. Through this, the basic tax rate would also remain the same (at 20%), effectively eliminating the higher tax bands of 40% and 45%.

The math behind this proposal makes sense, as a flat tax rate of 20% would lead to a decrease of approximately £49 billion in tax revenue compared to our current progressive system, representing a decrease of only 6.26%.

While losing out on £49 billion may seem significant, it would position the UK as one of the most attractive nations for wealthy investors, providing a clear economic incentive as compared to other competing nations. Fostering and enabling a true post-Brexit economic plan, which would provide the investment the UK so desperately needs.

To put this into perspective, HS2 is set to cost between £72-£98 billion, whilst yearly funding for the NHS costs £160 billion; this further solidifies the point that £49 billion is a figure which the government could work with, an amount which would allow the UK economy to grow out of stagnation and thus establish an empire of investment, indeed signalling to the world that we are ‘actually’ open for business.

As Friedman argued and I alike, we should focus first on economic restoration, above all else, and what better way to do so than restimulate our markets with more disposable income to spend across the nation.

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‘The Bad Ethics of the Machine’ (Magazine Excerpt)

By Dinah Kolka — 11 months ago

With the recent debates surrounding AI improvement and the somewhat imminent AI takeover, I thought it would be interesting to return to the 20^th century to analyse the debates on the rise of the machine and what we can learn from it today.

The early 20^th century marked a time when the technological revolution was in full swing. With radio, mechanised factory work, and the First World War marked the new era of mechanised warfare, the intellectuals of the day were trying to make sense of this new modernised society. With the speed at which the changes occurred, people’s conception of reality was lagging.

The machine has narrowed spaces between people – the car allowed people to traverse space faster, and radio and telephone brought closer and practically instantaneous access to one’s family, friends, and acquaintances. The jobs were mechanised and people, as idealised by Marx, had the potential of being the ‘mere minders of the machine’. We are now entering another era. A time when Artificial Intelligence has the potential to replace most jobs. This is what Fisher in Post-Capitalist Desire has considered an opportunity for a post-scarcity society. But is this possible? Or rather should we heed Nick Land’s warning in Machinic Desire where he advised:

“Zaibatsus flip into sentience as the market melts to automatism, politics is cryogenized and dumped into the liquid-helium meatstore, drugs migrate onto neurosoft viruses, and immunity is grated-open against jagged reefs of feral AI explosion, Kali culture, digital dance-dependency, black shamanism epidemic, and schizolupic break-outs from the bin.” (Land, Fanged Noumena, 2011)

But let’s thrust away the shatters of this neo-automation and return to 1912, the time when this has only just begun.

Gilbert Gannan, in an article for Rhythm, wrote:

“Life is far too good and far too precious a thing to be smudged with mechanical morality, and fenced about with mechanical lies, and wasted on mechanical acquaintanceships when there are splendid friendships and lovely loves in which the imagination can find warm comradeship and adventure, lose and find itself, and obtain life, which may or may not be everlasting.” (Gannan, 1912)

In a quasi-perennial argument, he claims that mechanical morality and mechanism, in general, will never replace the real deal – the real concrete friendships and those we love.

This is an excerpt from “Mayday! Mayday!”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.

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A Dirge for the Aristocracy (Magazine Excerpt)

By Philip Diaz-Lewis — 11 months ago

Culture is often a bearer of such practical wisdom. Indeed, the reason we listen to the experienced and wise, despite their lack of formal education, is that their experience has imparted practical wisdom. Theoretical wisdom is implicit in this down to earth practicality. Although the village elder might not be able to say why a certain behaviour is virtuous, her account, being correct, could be elaborated to reveal a true and natural principle. Extending this to an entire culture, we have one basis for social conservatism. The accumulated experience of ages has a sort of implicit wisdom to it, which can be potentially made into a theory, even though nobody may have yet done so. However, this isn’t enough, lest we be agnostic pragmatists like David Hume. For the one clinging to classical ideas, all practical wisdom has a theory behind it whose objective springs we can discover through reason.

One such cultural heirloom that is greatly misunderstood these days is aristocracy. Most cultures in human history have had aristocracies of some type. A noble class existed in ancient Mesopotamia, Persia, Mesoamerica, the Andes, Egypt, China, Japan, Greece, Rome, among the Celts, as well as mediaeval and early modern Europe. Indeed, aristocracy of some type has been one of the most common institutions of humanity across history. Yet in the last three hundred years, aristocracies have shrunk, from the predominant ruling elites of the world to disempowered and mocked cliques, clinging to privileges regarded as archaic.

Britain is one of the few countries that still has an institutional aristocracy. But its influence is ever diminishing, its numbers ever depleting, and its ideals waned to nothing. I doubt many would contradict me if I said its public image is far from positive. I believe the cause of this decline is that it is a remnant of a previous ethical outlook, one rooted in ancient Greek and Roman thought, and Christianised in the Middle Ages. This outlook collapsed in Britain during the eighteenth century (before it did in most of Europe). Whig liberal philosophers like John Locke chipped at its foundations. The aristocracy as a result became an institution without a purpose, embedded in a new society totally hostile to it.

So, what are these foundations? I think three: human goodness as function, a communitarian spirit, and a family-centred life. Really, it’s only the first, functional goodness, the latter two being elaborations of it.

Goodness as a function is simple. To be good is to function properly according to a species’ ideal. In the same way a good hammer is good at banging nails, and a good oven at baking bread, so a good human being is good at “human-ing” to coin a verb. The question ‘what is goodness?’ for ancient and mediaeval thinkers is almost invariably ‘what’s the function of humans?’ Yet because humans have reason, unlike animals who merely follow their instincts, our function involves more than survival and reproduction. We make art and science, and can appreciate the value of things through understanding. We are the animal that is happy with a garden and a library, as Cicero says.

This is an excerpt from “Mayday! Mayday!”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.

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British Conservatism is Ignorant of History and has Forgotten its Past (Magazine Excerpt)

By Henry George — 11 months ago

This dictatorship of the present has been enabled by around thirty years of material abundance and relative peace following the conclusion to the Cold War. As John Keegan, the military historian put it, Britain and American can afford our universalist idealism and our fantasies of a benevolent world united and ameliorated through commerce, given our good geographical fortune of being separated from continents by bodies of water. We can forget that the tides of history have pulled whole cultures under in violence and war, instead indulging in an imagined progressive history, moving ever upwards towards ever greater enlightenment and prosperity.

Our leaders, if they deserve the name, have forgotten the lessons of history, because they do not know history. They do not know the fate of nations and peoples. They are ignorant of the importance of the landscape of the world and the moral landscape of the heart, and how the interplay between the two shapes the destinies of civilisation. It is not to engage in nostalgia for a vanished age that never existed to reckon with the fact that those who governed us in the past were well aware of life’s tragic nature, of the reality of necessity and the ultimate goal of the avoidance of anarchy, its own form of tyranny. Our leaders in the 19^th and up to the mid-20^th centuries had been baptised in the fires of historical experience and therefore knew that the maintenance of right order, in accordance with the good, true, and beautiful, was the precondition for any liberty. Utopian, romantic ideas of universal rights, spreading democracy and natural freedom were dangerous in their unbounded idealism, leading nations and government astray in the quest for moral perfection.

History never ended, in the sense Francis Fukuyama meant it. Hegel, and his disciple Alexander Kojeve, were both wrong in discerning a direction to human History that would see the creation of the perfect liberal democratic regime and state of being in our world. History is the story of the deeds men and women do and accomplishments achieved together as clans, tribes, cities, empires, and nations. It is a story that will only end at the end of all things. Awareness of the living past reminds us that our lives are part of the weave of time, stretching back across the years, our own lives and the actions we take adding the threads that continue into the future.

This is an excerpt from “Mayday! Mayday!”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.

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An Opportunity from Nothing – View from the National Conservatism Conference

By The Mallard — 11 months ago

Strolling down Marsham street, past the Itsu and Pret a Manger, a funny looking man in a top hat flanked by grey haired beret wearing old women scream at the top of their lungs whilst recording a group of depressed looking individuals clad in ill-fitting suits who walk past them and into the Emmanuel Centre. Loud renditions of ‘Ode to Joy’ blare from the portable speakers powered from a generator in a white van plastered in EU flags.

You might think, for at least a moment, that I am describing a snapshot from 2017. That these individuals are making plans for Britain’s ‘strategy moving forward as we leave the EU’, and that Mister Bray would at least have a reason to be shouting ‘bollocks to Brexit’ at the passers-by. Instead, the year is 2023, Brexit is barely being mentioned at all inside the walls of the conference room, and no one is quite sure what he – or they – are there for.

That seems to be an outstanding theme of the conference: uncertainty. No one at all seemed to be able to pin down exactly what it was that they stood for. A plethora of rambling speeches about Edmund Burke, multiple references to ‘Le contrat sociale’, continuous struggle sessions against the rotting corpse of Margret Thatcher (who seemingly still operates behind the shadows in every corner of government), and yet nothing new or interesting was being said, just vague topics which they knew everyone would sort of agree with anyway.

Worse still, a lot of the high-profile attendees (especially the MP’s who bothered to turn up) didn’t really seem to know what the event was for. A favourite moment of mine was when, at the very opening of the event, Yoram Hazony and Jacob Rees-Mogg accidentally went ‘head-to-head’ in debating the finer points of the corn laws and the benefits of wheat tariffs in their separate speeches… absolutely thrilling stuff which really tackled… THE ISSUES.

Another devastating moment was when Suella Braverman took the stage to talk about her vision for Britain. In actuality, it was a 25-minute party political broadcast about why you should just ignore the last decade of Tory government and still trust her to ‘stop the boats’. It’s always so upsetting when you listen to actual real politicians – high ranking ministers, no less – who act like opinion piece columnists. The looks on the faces of the attendees during her talk said it all: “YOU ARE A MINISTER OF STATE, YOU HAVE CONTROL OVER THE HOME OFFICE, DO SOMETHING!”

No leadership, no courage, no unified vision. This is what the supposedly ‘Real Right Wing’ looks like for Britain at the moment. No figure appeared to give any sense of direction or policy; they would much rather ‘hash out the arguments’ and ‘make their case’ instead. This is not how you win elections or drive the mechanisms of state, this is how you gain followers on twitter or get a graduate columnist job at [MAGAZINE_NAME.COM].

Despite my negativity, I actually think that this presents a wonderful opportunity for those with more dissenting ideas on what the future of ‘national conservatism’ means in Great Britain. “NatCon” doesn’t really know what it seeks to be and has no defined leadership, so why not show it the way? Instead of feeling like a ‘captured institution’, it felt like a proto-organisation which can’t quite put its finger on what it is yet. Instead of allowing it to lean on the boring and decaying figures of the present, a fascinating vacuum is opening up to swallow anyone with the boldness to make clear cut statements on what they wish to see as the future of National Conservatism. Doing *that* would be a lot easier than any sort of ‘Tory Entryism’ which the generation before us sought to complete.

At the very least, the conference was an excellent opportunity for networking. It was nice to see a format more similar to CPAC than Tory Party Conference, with many MPs, intellectuals, and journalists more than happy to sit and chat with you outside of the main hall instead of listening to the lectures. This was genuinely enjoyable and made the experience a lot more worthwhile. I sincerely hope that more events like that can take place in future.

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Month: June 2023