Some people know from an early age what they want to do in life. I was never one of these. I never in fact found a job I was really suited for. I didn’t have the social skills to be a journalist, nor the confidence in forecasting to stay in investment banking, and I didn’t have the academic’s capacity to devote myself to a narrow field of learning or to

cope with reviewer 2.

In my 60s, however, I have finally discovered what I was cut out for - to be a dilettante. I go to a class on Shakespeare each week, learn Italian, study music theory and composition, play guitar, read novels and history, and cultivate a garden as well as writing this Substack. I know a little bit about a lot of things: you want me on your quiz team.

Which poses a question: which is better - to be a dilettante or a fanatic?

I use the word “dilettante” rather than polymath not from modesty but from reality. Knowledge has advanced so much that it’s no longer possible to be a true polymath. Maybe John von Neumann or Jacob Bronowski came close, but they were rare geniuses even three generations ago. What Adam Smith said of the production of goods applies also to the production of knowledge: it requires a division of labour, people who devote much of their life to a single narrow subject.

We need fanatics who do just this. And not just in academia; musicians, novelists and artists must be fanatical enough to practice enough to master their disciplines.

Fanaticism doesn’t always foster knowledge, though. Liz Truss is a fanatic, but not overly freighted with knowledge or wisdom. She’s an extreme example, but you know many less extreme others, and if you don’t just look at any Question Time audience.

And even where fanatics do learn, Smith’s analogy goes further. Just as there are diminishing returns to the production of goods so too are there to the production of knowledge: research productivity is falling. And fanaticism coupled with pressure to publish leads some academics to falsify data, use AI slop or simply to make claims that aren’t true - hence the replication crisis.

Also, of course, Smith wasn’t entirely admiring of the division of labour. It causes people, he said, to become “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”

That’s perhaps an exaggeration for most professional people. But it contains a germ of truth. The Christmas editions of University Challenge are a little dumbed down because people who’ve had distinguished careers (a malefaction I avoided) haven’t had the time to cultivate wider knowledge.

The fanaticism that leads one to identify closely with one’s work can also lead to professional deformation, a failure to see that one’s professional standards cannot always be applied to the wider world. Academics, for example, are prone to seeing bad policy as intellectual error rather than what it often is - the product of power struggles or bad incentives.

Another fault of the fanatic was exemplified recently by Marc Andreessen saying that people 400 years ago didn’t do introspection - oblivious to the fact that the title character in Shakespeare’s most famous play does exactly that.

Dilettantism is a correction to this error. What I’m learning is that there are different ways of learning. For most of my life, I’ve been able to flip through papers and books on economics thinking “I’ve got the gist of this”, and this has been good enough. In other subjects it’s not. In learning a language or playing guitar what matters is that you just immerse yourself. James Buchanan’s advice to young researchers is correct: “keep your ass in the chair.” When reading Shakespeare and other literature you must look not merely for clarity as you do perhaps in scientific disciplines but for ambiguity. The meaning of “to be or not to be”, for example, varies depending on which word is emphasized. And whilst the search for absolute precision and for general laws is good in physics, it is often silly in the social sciences.

Fanatics who have stuck to one discipline neglect these differences - especially if, like too many techbros, they overvalue high IQs. That leads to a mistaken belief that because they are masters of one discipline (or fancy themselves as such) they can apply their expertise to anything else. Andreeson’s silly remark continues a long tradition of people who excel in one field making fools of themselves in others: Bobby Fischer, William Shockley, James Watson, Richard Dawkins, pretty much any businessman in politics, and so on. A good dilettante, on the other hand, at least knows enough about other disciplines to know his limits.

A related mark of the fanatic is the habit of seeing things from only one point of view. We see this sometimes in economics, when conventional economists try to squeeze every “shock” into a DSGE model without considering whether such models have their limits - not least being that they have so many “shocks” that are exogenous to their system. Better economists follow Dani Rodrik’s advice and use different models in different contexts, knowing the strengths and weaknesses of all. They’re dilettantes.

What’s true of economics is also true of politics. There are those so wrapped up in their own mindset that they can’t escape it. The absurd extreme example of this is Trump’s war on Iran. As a narcissistic solipsist he has no theory of mind, no insight into his opponents, and hence no strategy, with the result that he was surprised when the Iranians fought back.

Sane people, however, are prone to a less idiotic form of what I mean, and the vice is far from confined to so-called extremists. When he blamed Today’s falling listenership on “news avoiders” Nick Robinson failed to appreciate that the journalist’s point of view is only one of many, and that intelligent people are increasingly cheesed off with it. And mainstream economists sometimes cannot think outside of their preferred theory, whereas we Marxists can use Marxism or conventional economics as the context requires, Marxism for me being an antidote to ideological fanaticism.

In these respects the dilettante is a close relation of Richard Rorty’s ironist - one who forever doubts their own beliefs and vocabularies, aware that there are other sometimes compelling ones and able to step into them when required.

Here, however, we run into a problem. Social structures sometimes select for fanatics.

Dilettantes can set up a successful businesses, but they sell out for a few million and retire to the country. What distinguishes them from billionaires isn’t ability so much as the fact that the billionaire is fanatical enough to keep going. This is true of work generally. Whereas fanatics try 9-9-6 working (at least for a while!) dilettantes jump off the partnership tracks, change career, downshift or retire early, allowing fanatics to rise to the top. No wonder, then, that so many CEOs are sniffy about home-life balance. Corporations are sometimes likened to psychopaths, because they often end up being run by those with a monomanic obsession with “success”.

The business people we hear most from - billionaires and CEOs - are fanatics.

The same’s true of politics. Being an MP means your evenings are taken up with meetings and your days with attending to constituents and lobbyists with bees in their bonnets. That means the political process selects for fanatics, and so even the best politicians are unrepresentative of intelligent thinking. For example they overvalue hard work, failing to see that for millions of people it is drudgery and unfreedom, and overestimate what policy can actually achieve.

Years ago, journalists spoke of MPs such as Jenkins or Heath having a “hinterland”. That’s gone out of fashion.

One might imagine there’s an upside to fanaticism in business and politics, expressed (pdf) by George Bernard Shaw:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

He wrote that in 1903. The following four decades showed the problem with it - that the enemies of progress are even worse fanatics. We now face the same problem we had in the 30s: how to defeat the forces of reaction, those who would reverse the progress made on racial and gender equality?

Not with dilettantism or ironism. Robert Frost warned against this when he said that “a liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” That’s great for civilized discussion in SCRs, but less so when fighting the far right. As Toby Buckle says, those who believe in liberal equality need to state their case more strongly - to be more fanatical.

Here, our national mythology disguises a nasty fact - that Stalin and communists did more to beat Nazism than liberal westerners. Dilettantes and ironists might be civilized people, but on their own, civilized people don’t defeat Nazis.

“MPs are all in it for themselves and are out of touch with the real world.” I don’t know how true these cliched sentiments are; like Elizabeth I, I have no window into people’s souls. But I know something else - that they are irrelevant.

Almost everybody in work is in it for themselves. Doctors, binmen, guys on the checkout at Lidl - none would be there if they weren’t being paid. And do you care what a dentist or mechanic knows about the real world? No.

Why, then, do we put our trust into these people who are all in it for themselves and are out of touch with the real world? And why, so often, is this trust justified?

Incentives, that’s why. The mechanic who couldn’t fix your car, or dentist who couldn’t mend your teeth, or the shop that sold you mouldy veg, would soon lose business. And, being in it for themselves, they don’t want that. As Adam Smith famously said:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.

And here’s the problem. Whilst the self-love of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker gets us our dinner, that of politicians doesn’t so often do so. As voters we are beggars, depending on the benevolence rather than self-interest of politicians.

This is because well-functioning markets (which are only a subset of all markets) give people who are in it for themselves incentives to act in our interests. In politics, however, these incentives are weaker and even perverse.

In theory, this shouldn’t happen. Politicians want to get re-elected, and this should incentivize them to pursue the public interest.

One problem with this is that voters don’t know what the public interest is because they are systematically misinformed about social affairs. They have no idea about the size and composition of public spending; misunderstood the impact of EU regulations; overestimate the numbers of asylum seekers; overestimate (pdf) spending and fraud on welfare benefits (pdf); and don’t understand how economics works.

Politicians feel incentivised to pander to such ignorance. Cameron and Osborne spoke of the “nation’s credit card”; Labour promised in 2024 not to raise income tax rates; and the Greens and LibDems want the government to respond to high energy prices by cutting fuel duty. In any rational polity, all these statements would be greeted by voters with contempt and plummeting support. But they weren’t.

Politicians who are incentivized to pander to public opinion thus give us bad government, because voters’ preferences aren’t a good guide to their interests. The fact that voters sometimes wise up to their mistakes - for example by regretting Brexit or being cheesed off with declining public services - does not overturn this point.

There’s another bad incentive: there are no penalties for failure. There have certainly been many such, from privatized water through fiscal austerity to Brexit and privatized probation services and children’s homes. But the authors of these have not suffered. Quite the opposite. Cameron and Osborne went onto big money jobs. Even Chris Grayling, one of the most egregiously abject of ministers, got paid £100,000 a year for seven hours work a week on leaving office. And advocates of Brexit such as Daniel Hannan or Nigel Farage are still raking in cash despite having been proven wrong.

In fact, failure can sometimes be good for politicians even in electoral terms because, as Gilles Saint-Paul points out, it can maintain a government’s client base. He gives the example of pro-poor parties that would lose their supporters if they actually abolished poverty. But there are others. The fact that Brexit hasn’t worked gives its advocates the chance to whine that it hasn’t been properly tried. And grievances about immigration have to be maintained by parties trying to appeal to anti-immigrant voters.

The converse is also true: success doesn’t get you elected. Rising incomes for workers under the Labour governments of the 60s and 70s meant that many felt themselves sufficiently well-off to vote Tory. And the 1997-2010 Labour government did a good job of reducing pensioner poverty - with the result that pensioners stopped voting for it.

Politicians don’t, then, have strong incentives to avoid bad policies. But they do have incentives to chase corporate donations and cushy jobs after leaving office. This encourages them to not regulate industries harshly; to not demand value for money in procurement (pdf); and to extend profitable subcontracting. Wes Streeting’s keenness on introducing more private companies into the NHS might be founded less upon fine considerations about NHS productivity and transactions cost economics and more upon the career prospects of an MP with a majority of only 528.

The claim that politicians are “in it for themselves” therefore misses the point. Incentive structures in politics encourage those who are “in it for themselves” to make bad policy. Whereas well-functioning markets can make bad people do good things, political systems can make even good people do bad things.

Incentives matter. In failing to see this, people are substituting moralistic cliche for analysis of systems.

What to do about this? You can perhaps all think of ways of changing incentives - though almost all those ideas run into the problem of how to actually achieve such change.

You might, therefore, that this is a case for having more public-spirited people in politics, for somehow strengthening the notion of “public service”.

But “find a saint” is not a reliable political strategy. And even if one could do so, the fact remains that politics is not merely a matter of good will. The politician’s job, like that of the dentist or car mechanic, requires technical skills: the ability to recognise trade-offs and explain them to voters; an understanding of decision theory and cognitive biases; an awareness of the key mechanisms in the social sciences; an ability to drive through the implementation of policy; an ability to get elected; and so on.

Herein lies yet another problem. Our degraded public sphere is dominated by noisy fanatical partisans who demand only that politicians echo their prejudices - hence the Tory party electing Truss or Badenoch. Nobody is much interested in encouraging (or even defining) the technical skills of politics. And so these wither away.

It’s a tired cliche that we get the politicians we deserve. But it’s true.

He woke up and accepted the adulation of his subjects. He walked between golden rooms and received his coterie of sycophants. He sat and preened and celebrated himself.

Occasionally, small half-formed intruders stumbled into his mind. These were thoughts, but he was unable to assess what they meant or could lead to. He was burdened with a sense of encroaching humiliation, a feeling of being trapped in a prison of his own making, from actions which he himself initiated. But he lacked the self-awareness to understand how he ended up in this position or the coherence with which to break out of it.

America has no president. It has an emperor. And the emperor is insane.

This is how he spends his days. Last Friday, the US Commission of Fine Arts approved a commemorative gold coin featuring Donald Trump, to celebrate America’s 250th year of independence. Federal law does not allow a living president to appear on US currency, but the law is a thing of the past which no longer troubles the American establishment. The members of the commission are acolytes, hired to worship the emperor. Last year, Trump fired all sitting members and replaced them with his loyalists. Now they think as he instructs them or as they believe he wishes them to think.

The Commission’s vice-chairman James McCrery said: “I motion to approve this as presented, and with the strong encouragement that you make it as large as possible, all the way to three inches in diameter.” The only quality which competes with their obsequiousness is their stupidity.

On Thursday, he held a Cabinet meeting. These have now devolved into sanctification ceremonies, a form of emperor-worship ritual. The most senior figures in the US government compete to lower themselves as close as possible to his feet as they eradicate what is left of their dignity. Doug Burgum, the US interior secretary, invented an alternate version of Venezuela where they worship the American emperor. “I literally think they’re going to put up a statue to President Trump,” he said. “It’s like they view President Trump like Simón Bolívar. He’s the liberator of a country”.

Later that day, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, created a new award so that he could “honour” the emperor. “He is the suitable and fitting recipient of the first ever America First award,” he said. “That’s this beautiful golden statue here, appropriate for the new golden era in America.”

Afterwards, the Treasury Department announced that all American currency will be changed to feature Trump’s signature. It is the first time this has ever taken place for a sitting president. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent said: “There is no more powerful way to recognise the historic achievements of our great country and President Donald J. Trump than US dollar bills bearing his name”.

It is bitterly ironic that a country which is famed for a constitution of checks-and-balances should have ended up so vulnerable to a leadership personality cult. The US constitution is designed in a series of elaborate countervailing tensions between legislature and judiciary and executive, the product of men who were concerned with limiting power, with strapping it in restraints and holding it down.

But a constitutional system is only as effective as the people who believe in it. You can write the constitution down in one place, as the Americans do, or have it hidden away all over the place, as we do. None of that matters. All that really matters is that people behave according to the social and moral norms it establishes. People must believe it to be true, or it is only paper. In the US, they ceased to believe it is true long ago. That is why the legislature, which lacks all self-confidence, refuses to stand up to him. It is why the judiciary, whose supreme body he partly appointed, does not restrain him. It is why the press, which is subject to its own institutional pathologies, is unable to meaningfully hold him to account.

The mad emperor is therefore allowed to do whatever he likes. He has total discretion.

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One day the mad emperor woke up and decided that he wanted to bomb Iran. From that point on, a series of events took place which would impact people all over the world. It would impact people who live in high-rise apartments and rain-lashed slums, in corporate offices and rice fields, in wealthy post-industrial countries and poverty-stricken agrarian states.

It began from the first moment of the operation. The Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Southern Iran decided to close as soon as US bombing had been confirmed, at around 10am on February 28th. They called parents and asked them to pick up their children. They did not know it yet, but it was too late. The roads were congested and most parents would not make it there in time to save them.

Sometime between 10:23am and 11:47am, the school was hit in a missile strike. The roof collapsed, trapping children and teachers under rubble. The school principal seemingly managed to move a group of children to a prayer room and called parents again to have them rescue them. The school was then hit by a second strike, killing most of the children who had taken shelter. At least 175 people were killed, including over 100 children.

The US was almost certainly responsible for this strike, as officials close to the military investigation have made clear. When he was asked about it, Trump replied that “that was done by Iran”. When he was asked why he was the only one suggesting this, he replied: “Because I just don’t know enough about it.”

One of the defining elements of the second Trump administration is how glib and nonchalant his replies to questions are. He’s not even that angry with reporters anymore. He simply doesn’t care. He doesn’t think about these things. They do not matter to him. He is nonchalant not as a political exercise but because he is emotionally unaffected and intellectually disengaged. Core issues of war and peace are now reduced to this man uttering incoherent and internally contradictory sentences, like someone mumbling in their sleep.

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Once the war began, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. Or rather, insurance companies closed it. Iran just had to make threats and show that it could deliver on them, the realities of modern actuarial ecosystems did the rest.

Trump had probably not considered this eventuality at all. Insofar as his military strategists had done so, they evidently believed that Iran would avoid this approach because of the damage it would inflict on their own economy. But once Trump escalated his rhetoric away from ballistic missiles and towards regime change, the existential consequences made that calculation redundant. He has created his own worst outcome, but he will never understand this and is probably not even aware that it has taken place.

The immediate impact was to oil. It is a commodity whose function is to allow for movement, so once its price rises the price of everything else rises, by virtue of the additional expenditure required to get it where it needs to be. For Trump, this will be electorally toxic. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) forecasts that US inflation will surge to 4.2%, on what are pretty optimistic forecasts assuming a reduction in energy prices in June. If the conflict drags on and those reductions do not take place, the inflationary consequences will be longer and more severe.

There will be people in the US who go out of business because they cannot afford the increase in their transport budget. There will be workers who lose their jobs because the company folds or has to lay people off. In the UK and across Europe, families who are struggling to get by will go to the supermarket and see that, once again, the food they are buying is rocketing up in price. They will save, they will purchase cheaper food of a lower quality, they will give up on life’s little luxuries, like a visit to the fish and chip shop on Friday night, and in some cases they will go hungry. The emperor will not care about them. He will not recognise that they exist. He will not lose a moment’s sleep over it.

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The Strait of Hormuz is not just an oil chokepoint. It is much more than that. In addition to oil it is a key transit point for liquified natural gas, aluminium, helium, petrochemicals and fertiliser. What we are seeing is akin to no-deal Brexit, in military form and on a global scale. It is a system-wide event with primary, secondary and tertiary causal waves which touch nearly all areas of the economy.

The strait is the transit point for roughly 20% of global liquified natural gas. Qatar, the world’s second-largest exporter, shipped 93% of its exports through Hormuz. The UAE shipped 96%. There is no pipeline alternative to the global market, as there is for oil.

People in Europe will suffer. People in the Indian subcontinent will suffer more severely. Last year, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan imported almost two-thirds of their total liquified natural gas supplies via the strait. They are particularly exposed, with serious threats to electricity supply security in Bangladesh and Pakistan particularly. The very poor will be forced into darkness. The less poor will make savings elsewhere. The emperor will not think of them.

Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the world’s helium goes through the strait. This noble gas is crucial to the AI boom. It is used in the manufacture of microchips and semiconductors. It is also a key input in MRI machines, fiber optics, and aerospace applications. Sometime in the future, a promising tech start-up will never get the chance to establish itself. A medical machine will never be built. The emperor will not think about it.

Major aluminum smelters in the UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia depend on the strait for export. Once the strait closed, prices sky-rocketed. This will soon drive up the price of the products in sectors which use it as an input, including automotive, aerospace, and construction. The great industrial engines in Europe and the US will suffer once more. Workers will be left in a more precarious position than they would have been otherwise.The emperor will not think of them.

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One of the most severe consequences concerns fertiliser. It cannot be rerouted. There are no pipelines. There are no strategic reserves.

The Strait of Hormuz is required for over 30% of the world trade in ammonia, nearly 50% of urea and 20% of diammonium phosphate - all key inputs in fertiliser production. Since the war began, prices have soared. Urea prices at the New Orleans import hub jumped over 30%, from $475–$516 to roughly $680 per metric ton. In the Middle East, the price of Urea went up by 19% in the first week of March. In Egypt it went up by 28%.

There is a secondary impact from the restrictions on natural gas, which is a key feedstock for nitrogenous-based fertilisers. This makes the upward pressure on costs even more severe. Fertiliser firms in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan have shut down production without access to natural gas from Qatar.

There will then be a third inflationary impact from restrictions on ongoing exports. Brazil, for instance, imports 85% of its fertiliser. It is then uses it in soybean production, where it is a major exporter and global price-setter. Three quarters of China’s soybean imports are from Brazil, which it uses to feed livestock. The inflationary wave will travel overseas, hitting country after country, and bouncing off to hit another country, in a series of interlaced economic effects.

In the US, this comes during the spring planting window for corn and soybeans. Without fertiliser, there will be reduced planted acreage, lower yields and consequent increases in prices for customers. But the impact will be felt much more broadly than the US. It will be felt in Sri Lanka during the Maha rice harvest, in Bangladesh during the Boro rice season, in India ahead of the Kharif season and in Egypt, Sudan and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Poor countries will suffer the most and they will suffer worse than before, given that the US and the UK have effectively shuttered their government funded aid programmes. The emperor will not care. He will barely recognise the humanity of the people we are discussing. To him, they will be a great dark mass, off in the horizon of the world, an indistinguishable homogenous protrusion without moral purpose or moral consequence. The further impoverishment which is inflicted upon them will not overshadow his mind.

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Even if the war ends tomorrow, the pain is coming. The damage has already been inflicted: on extraction, capacity, distribution. It will not be restored in months, it will take years. And in that time we will all suffer, to some extent or other. All because the emperor woke up one morning and decided to start a war.

Liberal democracy rejects leadership personality cults for the same reason it believes in countervailing constitutional restraints. It is because power cannot be trusted. Because power cannot be allowed to persist without supreme vigilance. It cannot be tolerated except insofar as it is pinned down by multiple controls. We have developed this system specifically to prevent madmen becoming leaders and to moderate them if they do.

This is why we have the judiciary, the legislature, the press and the voting public: to hold power to account. This is why each part of the system is scrutinised and moderated by some other part, or multiple parts in tandem.

For a decade now, populists have told us that independent institutions are a threat to the people’s will. That the judges are biased, the legislature is elitist and the press a pack of liars. But if you look around the world today, you can see the full extent of this fiction. It is a lie that killed those children in that school, that will destroy an American start-up before it can get off the ground, that will price a British family out of their weekly shop and will drive people in some of the poorest countries on earth into greater suffering.

We do not serve the people by allowing power to be exercised without restraint. We serve them by taking it firmly under control.

These events are caused by the madness of the emperor. But they are ultimately the result of populism and the dark, blood-dimmed lie it has told the public. They can be brought to a halt, once we call that lie out and commit to the values that our society is based on.

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Odds and sods

Best be quick because that was a long one. This newsletter is available as a podcast at the top of the page, or on Spotify. My column this week was the European far-right having a terrible time due to their connection to Trump. Poor them. We put out a Origin Story release this week on Introvert/Extrovert - is it real, or just some fetishistic way for people to self-categorise? We reveal all, in a story of psychoanalysis, human profiling and super weird Austrian sex stuff. I haven’t watched or read or listened to a goddamn thing, sorry - utter cultural death at the moment - but I’ll be on new and improved form next week, I promise. See you then.

The other day, I had a casual conversation with colleagues about buying music. Nobody gave a rat’s ass; they all just either downloaded the .mp3 files or used Spotify. Most conversations on this topic end like this so I expected the response from more than a few individuals, but not from everyone. I was deemed the silly fool who buys stuff and supports artists.

Yet at the same time, we all bemoan the fact that creative individuals are losing their job due to the rise of generative AI. To that I say: maybe that’s our own fault for not properly compensating these people in the first place?

Please compensate the work you appreciate. Showing appreciation is not enough to bring food to the table. If you get paid for the work you are doing each month, don’t you think it’s only logical that these people also get paid? Where do you think that money should be coming from? It’s weird to still encounter that much reluctance to support makers in 2026. Most Brain Baking readers will (hopefully) find this obvious, and this article won’t have a big impact on the reasoning of my colleagues, but it doesn’t hurt to re-iterate this, so I’ll mention it again: please compensate the work you appreciate. Below are a few remarks I heard every time I bring up this topic (related to music & software in general).

I’m not buying music albums, I’m not as rich as you are.

Even though the person meant this as a joke, the underlying message was: “I don’t want to spend that much money on music/a creative product”. I buy one to two albums each month and on Bandcamp artists can decide for themselves how much to charge. You don’t have €20 to spare for this, but you are paying for three streaming services? Right. See also: You Shouldn’t Use Spotify.

I can share the Spotify subscription with my sister to make it even cheaper.

Did you know a thing called libraries exist where you can, you know, lend stuff, including CDs? Did you know that once you buy a digital album, you can do whatever the hell you want with it, including, you know, lending it to your sister?

But those artists already have millions, no way I’m giving them more.

This is a tougher nut to crack indeed. Michael Jackson is dead (remember, 2Pac isn’t), so where does that money end up? Even when he was still alive, supporting an artist who already has eight figure numbers on their account might be harder to justify. I’d say you should prioritise buying and supporting smaller (indie/local) groups. Maybe in this case you can also turn to the second hand market and at least support your local music shop that way.

I only like popular pop music and they already earn more than enough.

Consider the previous example; for instance Jackson’s album Bad. It wasn’t only Michael who was involved in the creation of that particular album you like. So all these people don’t deserve to have a meal. Consider this: if everybody thought like you, would that artist still be rich—or Dy Tryin (got it? 50 Cent? No?)?

Micro$oft is bad.

You’re right. Today, you should boycott Microsoft—but there used to be a time where they weren’t evil and helped propel software (and its development) into the modern age. If nobody bought MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, if no OEM deal was ever made to package Win95/98 with your new beige Compaq tower, maybe the contemporary software landscape looked a lot bleaker. What does this teach us? Compensate the work you appreciate only if it’s ethically sound¹.

You can’t find all these things on Bandcamp.

Right again, but the remaining can be found on plenty of other platforms such as Apple Music. This is not an excuse to neglect compensating the artist.

But thirty percent is pinched off by Apple!

Yes. That means seventy percent remains for the artist. And if you don’t buy anything but stream or download music, a hundred percent of zero remains for the artist. I’ll leave that calculation up to you as an exercise in critical thinking.

I used to buy CDs in stores but don’t anymore these stores are gone.

Unfortunately, most brick and mortar stores are struggling, indeed. Perhaps also because most people sopped buying music and just download and/or stream stuff instead?

The last thing I bought wasn’t good.

I’m sorry to hear. Did you also consider that buying the bad thing might put the creator in a financial situation where they can produce something else that potentially might be better—with your help, that is? Bigger creative projects that take months or years require funding beforehand. I presume you are aware of the disadvantages of being funded by venture capital.

I’m not paying anything for free software.

Open source does not equal free in the sense that the people that created these packages don’t deserve to eat. Supporting a project sends an important signal to its maintainers: the thing you are doing is relevant, please continue doing so. Sending an appreciative letter also helps but doesn’t pay bills, and since we’re living in an increasingly bill-paying society, many expert developers simply quit working on free software. What do you think all those “donate” buttons are for?

I only buy hardware, not software.

I’ll be sure to tell my software engineering friends and colleagues to retrain into hardware engineers as soon as possible.

I’m not using paid service x because free Google service y exists.

You’re still paying, buddy. Just not with money, but perhaps with something that is worth even more than the green currently in your wallet. It’s called your personal data.

Going to a music gig already costs an arm and a leg, no way I’m also buying the album.

What kind of an argument is this? So you like the band enough to drop €80 for a concert but you’re against paying for music just to make a statement? Next time simply stay home and instead buy the album, that’s 80% cheaper and you can listen to it again and again.

I don’t have room to collect CDs.

Who said anything about collecting? Then buy them digitally. At this point, we’re just arguing for the sake of arguing…

I think it’s strange that many people still completely ignore all these arguments for compensating artists. These arguments alone are pretty useless: it’s not the awareness that’s the problem. Most illegal downloaders or lazy Spotify users are well-aware of the ethical concerns and financial consequences. Knowing is not enough to get people to act. Most people have heard of global warning and know we’re slowly but surely destroying the earth, yet we happily keep on driving cars, eating meat, flying planes.

If you know what does move people, please let me know.

By Wouter Groeneveld on 24 March 2026.  Reply via email.

European countries should not rush into social media bans for children, human rights adviser Michael O’Flaherty told POLITICO.

The comments come as many EU countries push to restrict minors’ access to social media, citing mental health concerns. In France, the parliament’s upper house is this week debating restrictions that President Emmanuel Macron has said will be in place as soon as September.

Such bans are neither “proportionate nor necessary,” said O’Flaherty, the commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, the continent’s top human rights body, adding that there “are other ways to address the curse of abusive material online.”

The debate on how to protect children from the harms of social media “goes straight to bans without looking at all the other options that could be in play,” he told POLITICO. Restricting access to social media presents “issues of human rights, because a child has a right to receive information just like anybody else.”

O’Flaherty’s concerns come amid live discussions on the merits and effectiveness of bans in Europe. Australia became the first country in the world to ban minors under 16 from creating accounts on social media platforms like Instagram in late 2025, and Brazil moved forward with its own measures last week.

Now France, Denmark, Spain and Greece are among the EU countries heading toward bans, albeit on different timelines.

Proponents argue that age-related restrictions setting a minimum age for the most addictive social media platforms are vital to protect children’s physical and mental health.

Critics say that bans are ineffective and are detrimental to privacy because they require users to verify themselves online.

O’Flaherty argued that — while children’s rights to access information could be curtailed if that overall limited their risks — any restrictions need to be proportionate and necessary.

That must follow a serious effort by the EU to tackle illegal and harmful content on social media, he said, which hasn’t happened yet. “We haven’t remotely tried hard enough yet to ensure effective oversight of the platforms.”

The human rights chief praised the EU’s digital laws as world-leading, including the Digital Services Act, which seeks to protect kids from systemic risks on online platforms — but said it wasn’t being policed strongly enough.

“We have a very piecemeal enforcement of the Digital Services Act and the other relevant rulebook right across Europe. It’s very much dependent on the goodwill and the capacity of the different governments to be serious about it,” he said. Governments have “an uneven record” in that regard, he said.

EU countries must make sure they have exhausted all other solutions before heading for the extreme measures of bans, he said. “I don’t see much sign of that effort.”

Still, Denmark, Spain and Greece are among the EU countries heading toward bans, although they are on vastly different timelines.

The European Commission, in charge of enforcing the DSA on large social media platforms, is considering its own measures. Countries like Greece have called on the Commission to go forth with an EU-wide ban to avoid fragmentation across the bloc.

President Ursula von der Leyen has convened a panel of experts to advise her on next steps, which is expected to give its results by the summer.

If the UK wants to regain serious respect in the world, it needs its European leg as well as its transatlantic one

“A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend. And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward, I will be prepared to be much stronger. And the president should be prepared for that.” Thus spoke Hugh Grant, playing the British prime minister confronting the US president in a famous scene in the romcom Love Actually. Real-life British prime minister Keir Starmer has attempted to stand up ever so slightly to the current bully in the White House over the latest US war in the Middle East. Despite the British government’s right-royal efforts to flatter Donald Trump ever since he was elected US president, his response to Starmer’s little attempt has been a torrent of contempt. So the reality is not Love Actually. It’s Contempt Actually.

Asked about the British government’s subtle distinction between defensive strikes in the Gulf, which it now supports, and offensive ones, which it doesn’t, Maga ideologue Steve Bannon tells the New Statesman’s Freddie Hayward: “That’s diplomatic bullshit. Fuck you. You’re either an ally or you’re not. Fuck you. The special relationship is over.” Ah, the “special relationship”! It must be 40 years since I first heard former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt say: “The special relationship is so special only one side knows it exists.”