(3)

Yes. This …

… has finally moved out of my home, and out of my life. Last week, Men collected it and took it … I don't know where. A dump, presumably.

I recently wrote here about the continuing life of physical books and about the limitations of the idea of the paperless office or paperless home. Office-working commenters piled in to describe the persistence of paper in their offices, often in the teeth of earlier diktats from on high to the contrary.

But as far as my own libertarian activities are concerned, I really have pretty much completely abandoned communicating on paper, with my own writing, and most definitely with anyone else's. Which means that this machine, with which I once processed all the paper that I once processed, really had to go, if only to help me to accommodate my ever increasing hoard of books. Only inertia had caused the photocopier to linger on, in my kitchen. That, and the affection I still feel for something which once made such a difference to my life.

A simple way of describing what this machine did for me, and for a small gang of mostly London-based libertarians, from the 1980s until the early 2000s, is that it enabled us to do something like blogging, before there was blogging.

One of the many pleasures of blogging is that we don't now have to worry that much about how many people will want to read what we bloggers feel inclined to write. We like it when lots of people tune in, but if they don't, it's no big catastrophe. If only a few fellow fanatics read a piece I have written about, say, cricket, no unread piles of cricket verbiage accumulate in an expensive Samizdata office, causing us to wonder if we should then "market" the damned stuff, or try to give it away, or just take the hit and bin it. If, on the other hand, Instapundit instalanches something one of us has written, no queues to read it form while we scrabble about to find money for another print run and agonise about how many copies to print. All that nonsense, given only a bit of geekery to stop crashes, now takes care of itself. Here's what we think. If you don't care about what we think, well, we are a tad disappointed but we can live with it.

In its more cumbersome way, my photocopier enabled the network of libertarians that had coalesced around the old Alternative Bookshop in the early 1980s to be similarly unconcerned with mere numerical popularity. It enabled the creation of a tiny little libertarian internet, based on physical proximity and a mailing list, before and until the real internet came along.

One of us would write something that seemed of interest to fellow libertarians. I would do the artwork, with the words "cut and paste" being for me a reality long before they turned into a mere e-metaphor. It also mattered a lot in the early days, before even computerised desktop publishing, that I could photo-reduce text with this photocopier and thereby fit more writing onto one or a few sheets of A4 or A3. That the photocopier was A3 capable was also extremely important (which is also why it was so big). That enabled longer publications, clutches of A3 sheets folded down the middle and stapled twice in line with the fold (rather than a mere clutch of A4 sheets stapled at the top left corner) to actually look like publications, instead of looking like mere photocopies. (My long armed stapler was also an important piece of kit during those times.)

I would then run off only as many copies of each piece of writing as we definitely knew we needed. If whatever it was turned into a surprise hit, then more copies would be done, as and when, about half a dozen at a time. If not, no worries. As I said, no storage problems, and no fretting about print runs or about how to pay for them. It was just straight on to creating the next publication, and the next, and the next. The photocopier did enable a large quantity of publications to be produced, but not in the form of an excessive number of copies of a few publications. Rather did it enable us to deploy a few copies of many titles, ever more as time went by. Spread out on a row of conference tables, they could have quite an impact, and people could pick out exactly the ones they wanted. Not all that many libertarians were switched on by these means, but a decent number were. Certainly a lot more than would otherwise have been.

Then when the internet did arrive, all these laboriously contrived publications found a perfect new home. Undistracted by any fantasies about making money (as opposed to merely not spending too much) we shoved them all up and gave them all away. During the first few years of blogging, I believe they had quite an impact, turning many an "I thought I was the only one" libertarian into the real thing.

At first there was a real problem in the form of the un-copy-and-paste-ability of .pdf files, but that problem has now gone away. Thank you Adobe.

My photocopier lingered on as a rather undignified aid to scanning text from books into my computer. Until quite recently, I could only make my succession of computer scanners work if there were no shadows or complications for them to contend with (such as seeing one and a half pages but only needing to attend to one page), which meant me scanning a photocopy of what I wanted to scan, and then chopping off what I didn't want, with scissors. I know, crazy. And I'm sure I could have sorted out all such problems years ago if I had really needed to. But this ridiculous method did work, and it wasn't as if I had bought a photocopier only to do only this. And then, suddenly, my most recent scanner finally proved to be truly intelligent, even in the absence of any intelligence from me. Scanning stuff from books suddenly worked a treat, and the photocopier stopped being any use to me at all. At which point its bulk no longer seemed endearing, only annoying, and it had to go.

But when my photocopier really made a difference, it really made a difference. I am very glad to have been able to record my gratitude to it with this obituary.

(13)

One of the more dispiriting processes I regularly notice in confrontations between Good and Evil is when Evil concedes that it has done something evil, and Good promptly turns round, in the spirit of fair play, and concedes something else evil. It's like Good is a football team, and when it goes one-nil up, it feels that the fair thing to do is to give the other fellows a goal. To make a game of it. Or something.

So, for instance, if Evil concedes that, I don't know, "socialism hasn't turned out very well in practice", Good, in a burst of bonhomie and generosity and brotherhood-of-manliness, concedes that socialism was a nice idea "in theory".

No it wasn't. An idea that turns out badly in practice is a bad idea. Especially if the badness was a predictable and predicted consequence of that bad idea.

Often, in circumstances like these, Evil even asks for an equalising goal.

Evil offers a pairing of ideas - good twinned with evil, like socks emerging from the laundrette - as a package: "I'll concede that socialism has turned out badly in practice if you concede that socialism is a nice theory."

The proper way to behave, if you are Good, and go one-nil up in an argument, is to press for a two-nil lead.

The proper response to going one-nil up in the above argument about the practice and theory of socialism is to say: "Socialism has indeed turned out badly in practice. Now, about this evil notion of yours that socialism is a nice theory. Let's talk about that. And let's you admit that you are wrong about that also. We told you you were wrong from the start, and we were right that you were wrong. We predicted that socialism would turn out badly in practice, on account of it being a bad theory. You pressed on. You were wrong. In theory as well as in practice."

Like I say, press for two-nil.

So, all hail to Mark Meckler. (And further hail to Instapundit for linking to the story, today, and earlier.)

Meckler, arriving in New York and learning that he must not carry a gun, handed his gun over to the New York goons. (That much, he was willing to concede.) The goons promptly arrested him, for carrying the gun up to the point where he stopped carrying it, or something.

Faced with a determined Meckler, and a huge outcry of rage and contempt from the forces of Good, the New York goons have dropped their evil charges. One-nil to Meckler. But Meckler is now being subjected to another evil injustice. The goons still have his gun, and are refusing to return it.

Instead of thanking the goons for being so nice about not arresting him any more, Meckler now wants his gun back. Quite right. New York goons, give the man his gun back! (This is now an international campaign. I am international and I now say this.)

Saying "now give me back my gun" is not only the good thing for Good Mr Meckler to do; it is also excellent tactics. He is now one-nil up. He faces the chance to score another goal, and go two-nil up against the forces of Evil. He is now pressing to do just that.

Quite right. When you have argumentative momentum, against a team that is saying (or in this case also doing) not just one bad thing but many bad things, use it. Thereby keep it, and build it.

When the New York goons do hand back Meckler's gun, if they ever do (and actually, even if they don't), the proper next response, from all of us who have now rallied around Meckler, is: "Now, about all these other gun-carrying people, against whom you have not dropped the charges, and whose guns you have not returned …" Three-nil. Four-nil. Five-nil …

If the New York goons don't hand back Meckler's gun, perhaps because they sense that if they do, Meckler's team will then get more momentum, then the New York goons will be digging their heels in in an argument that they will hate but which the Meckler team will relish.

Also good. Shame about the stolen gun, but also good.

(4)

Indeed. Press release from these guys:

Good luck with that.

Seriously, good luck with that.

I will try to be there.

(44)

It is time for the simple debate to end and all out war to begin. The Edison bulb bannings by the global class of intellectual Aristocrats is the step too far. To assist all in declaring their allegiance I have generated this handy war logo which could double as a war pennant:

Down with the Greens!
Graphic: copyright Dale Amon, Released under Creative Commons license.

(4)

It is hard to believe that great and articulate thorn in the side of the left, William Buckley, has been gone for four years. What would he think of what has transpired since? A friend of his discusses that question and gives us a clarion call of resistance from the great man's own words:

“I will not,” Bill wrote,

cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.

To which I will only add, Amen.

Resistance is not futile. It only takes 15% of a population opting out to bring any overbearing state to its knees. We only need a 15% Galt factor to completely spike the socialist enterprise.

(10)

Earlier this evening I attended a libertarian get-together in the upstairs room of a pub (the Rose and Crown in Colombo Street, London SE1), organised by Libertarian Home, and in particular by leading LH-er Simon Gibbs.

If what you would like would be a convivial evening in a London pub where, if you are not a libertarian you are going to have to explain yourself, whereas if you are you aren't (unless you feel like it), then why not get in touch with Simon Gibbs and invite yourself along to the next one of these things. If my experience this evening was anything to go by, you will be made very welcome.

Here is a photo I took of the other end of the table from where I was:

And here's another snap from the same spot, moments later, after I'd asked if I could interrupt everything, and "take some photos":

I am surprised what good photos these are, technically, given the light. If you are surprised what bad photos they are, technically, then clearly you don't know my photos.

These photos do not include anything like everyone who was present. They are accurate in suggesting that the gathering was youngish (certainly compared to me), and bright, but inaccurate in suggesting that this was an all male affair. It's just that the ladies present were seated nearer to me, and my lens is not wide-angle enough to have included them.

In particular, missing from that snap are two of the people who, it so happened, I spent a bit of time conversing with. For the first time ever, I got to meet Trooper Thompson in the flesh, whose blog I have long had a liking for. And, I also got to meet "Misanthrope Girl", whose blog I have not properly noticed until now. Trooper Thompson got chased out of the Samizdata commentariat for saying something rude about a gun (I think that was it), approximately a decade ago, which, having finally met the guy, I now think is a shame. Misanthrope Girl would also fit in here very well.

I had to leave earlier than I would have liked, but I am still very glad I went. I heard about this gathering by attending the Liberty League Conference, where Andy Janes (mentioned here recently already because of that Zimbabwean bank note), who also helps organise these evenings, suggested I might like to attend the next one. Perhaps, I thought to myself, and perhaps not. But then Andy gave me a physical copy of the leaflet that he had been handing out at the Occupy London occupations. These guys, I thought, maybe have something about them. (See also this open letter to the London occupiers.) Maybe they do. We shall see.

(19)

Do you think that the people occupying Wall Street are all idiots, parasitical permanent students, studying nothing of value, and demanding everything in exchange for that nothing? See also the previous posting, and its reference to "the zombie youth of the Big Sloth movement".

Maybe most of the occupiers are like that, but this guy seems to have grabbed the chance to say something much more sensible. Fractional reserve banking (evils of). Gold standard (superiority of). Bale-outs (wickedness of). Watch and enjoy.

What a laugh (in addition to being profoundly good) it would be if the biggest winners from these stupid demos were Ron Paul, and the Austrian Theory of Money and Banking.

(42)

Do institutions have a will that transcends, and can run contrary to, those who create and staff them?

In the early seventies my high school participated in a program that allowed students to access the Illinois Institute of Technology computers for instructional purposes. In a room off of the school library sat two Teletype 33 terminals, one of them equipped with foam telephone ear cups and a modem. We would code our programs onto paper tape and then, during our school's allocated time, feed them into the IIT mainframe for compiling and executing. The second thing I learned after how to get the mainframe to understand that I was sending it a program, was that computer programs have a will of their own that is totally apart from my will. My will is to get the answers to the formulas I am trying to solve. The program's will is to follow the next instruction. Occasionally, to the programmer's embarrassment and the rest of the computer club's amusement, an errant program would set off in a Quixotic attempt to consume all of our allocation of CPU clock time, empty the box of paper and wear out the printer ribbon, in an infinite pursuit of pointless activity. An example of this might be if I told the program to stop when a particular value reached "25", but then inadvertently instructed it to count up in units of two. Since the counter stepped from "24" straight to "26", it never did reach "25" and the program tripped merrily along, consuming all of the resources it could acquire. Later I was employed working on a Burroughs computer. It had a lovely missile-launch style red button labeled "CLEAR MEMORY" shielded underneath a spring-loaded, hinged, clear plastic cover. When programs ran amok, we could lift the cover and administer an instant memory wipe to the CPU, returning control to the system operator.

How does computer programming pertain to Institutional Will? Institutions, whether they are small temporary government programs, or über institutions like a constitution, are nothing but computer programs executing procedural instructions on a societal mainframe. Just like electronic programs, institutions can evade their constraints and wildly consume resources, until a counter-procedural force stops them.

Years ago I promised to Veryretired, a long time denizen of the Samizdata commentariat, an essay on why civil disobedience is wrong. He has yet to receive that essay from me - and he never will, because I encountered the problem of Institutional Will. When institutions, like errant electronic programs, slip their intended constraints, it is only through disobedience to procedural instructions on the part of human individuals that they can be stopped.

I am not saying that institutions have any moral presence: as an individualist I believe moral presence and agency must be assigned exclusively to individuals. Institutions do, however, have a will that transcends the wills of the individuals acting within them. How can this happen?

Legislation is horrifically complicated in these later times of our republic. But even worse, much of it is "enabling legislation" that puts in place institutions that set their own parameters in pursuit of an ambiguously defined goal. Whether through complexity or non-specification, there exists the possibility that institutional "programmers" will create a runaway institution, freed from all constraints.

Usually institutional errantry is the result of a complex interplay of processes, where no single individual understands them all, but it is possible to demonstrate it with a simple hypothetical case. Imagine that an institution's governance puts in place a policy called "Policy F". "Policy F" specifies that anybody who challenges "Sub-chapter XII(b)" is to be terminated from any further participation in that institution. Perhaps because a different sub-committee moved "Policy F" to page 231.76.0.1(A(c)) of "Sub-chapter XII(b)", the rule has been put firmly in place without open and thoughtful review. Eventually somebody reads down to page 231.76.0.1(A(c)) and says "Hey! Wait a minute! This is a really bad idea!" At this point, in order to comply with the rules, he is immediately expelled from the institution. After all, "rules are rules", "of laws and not of men", etc. This happens a few more times, and that institution is soon disproportionately staffed with people who by nature are disinclined to challenge the system. An institutional mindset is forming that diverges from that of the institution's creators.

In any living organism, some mutations are beneficial and some are not. In an institution, procedural mutations that serve to perpetuate the institution's existence will be selected for, whereas the absence of self-perpetuating mutations will allow an institution to eventually fade, as the underlying need it serves fades. As time passes, institutions form and dissolve, but some of them will mutate to serve their own continuance. After enough time passes, we will be (in fact, are) overwhelmed by the accretion of institutions whose sole remaining function is to perpetuate their own existence. It is not that procedural mutations will lean in that direction, only that the long-term institutional survivors are the ones whose mutations prioritized institutional perpetuance over the original purpose their creators assigned to them.

To be clear, my point is that Institutional Will is, and can be, neither benign nor malevolent, merely that it exists. Institutional Will is to amorally follow the decision tree; to apply at every decision point the specified action and to proceed onward to the next decision point. Whether in a computer program or in a major governmental institution, this process will continue until it either terminates itself or is terminated in defiance of its internal processes. When an institution is no longer beneficial and yet refuses to be terminated, that defiance must sometimes take the form of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is the opposite of unquestioningly following orders. Civil disobedience is a sometimes necessary application of one's moral agency, required of anyone capable of knowing right from wrong.

So in case you were wondering, Veryretired, I have reversed myself on civil disobedience. Sometimes it is not merely acceptable, it is imperative to defy errant institutions that have rejected their Constitutional bindings and are trampling original intent. It is about the survival of individuals qua individuals in the face of an institutional leviathan.

(4)

For those of you with a fantastically detailed historical knowledge of Samizdata, you'll recall the Liberty Club, which Brian Micklethwait posted several pieces about a decade ago.

This is a student society which I ran with Marian Tupy while at St Andrews. It was created because we were fed up with all the socialism promoted by Leftist students. And we didn't want to attend Tory soirees with John Selwyn Gummer: we wanted to promote libertarian ideas.

Much to my amazement, the Liberty Club is going strong. And I was pleased recently to meet the new President, Daniel Pycock, who is fizzing with ideas for the club. He has a good list of speakers lined up for this term (I suspect he's going to get a lot of abuse for inviting the brilliant climate sceptic Viscount Monkton).

Anyway, hearing about what the Liberty Club is up to made me go back to Brian's write-ups. I noticed in the comments of one, a reader asked whether there were similar societies at other universities, and I wrote:

There's the LSE Hayek Society. I am also in contact with someone at Leeds University who is looking into a setting up a Liberty Club.

Today, thanks to the work of the Freedom Association and the Liberty League, there are at least 16 such societies on campuses across the country. This is fantastic - and bodes well for the future of libertarianism in this country.

Brian's articles:

St Andrews is at it again - March 8, 2002
Face to face with the St. Andrews libertarians - April 22, 2002
What life at university should be like - March 13, 2003
Liberty Club marches on - May 20, 2003

(4)

Yesterday I had a nice surprise. I was rootling around in the now resting blog of the Oxford (as in Oxford University) Libertarian Society, trying to find the video of a talk I did for them about how to spread libertarian ideas, nearly three years ago now, because I wanted to remind myself about something I had said. I found the video, but also something much better than the video, namely a selection of the more eloquent things I said, cleaned up and clarified by Oxford Libertarian Andrew Gimber. I had not realised until now that this was there, or if I had I had totally forgotten. My belated thanks to Gimber, what with a moderate amount of text being so much better and quicker to take in (to say nothing of more searchable) than a long video performance. It's the difference between having over an hour to spare, or just a handful of minutes.

And before anyone says, I don't think vanity linkage like this is quite as vain as it looks. If I don't link back to my past stuff, nobody will, and I know this.

I wonder what Andrew Gimber is doing now. Something good, for him and for the world, I hope. (This is not, I think, the same Andrew Gimber.) There is an Andrew Gimber on this list, and I think that's him. Looks good.

I also wonder what the Oxford Libertarians are now up to. Something, I hope.

General point: What you shove on the internet hangs around. Even before the internet, what someone said a long time ago can hang around in someone's memory and have big long-term consequences, even if whoever said it had no idea at the time that the person with the memory that it stuck in was even listening. That being one of the points that I made in my talk.

(17)

I had already pencilled in the Rally Against Debt as something I would try to be at, if only because it will be taking place a mere walk away from where I live. An incoming email forwarded to me via the Cobden Centre has made this more likely. The email had this attached:

For me, those speakers are an appealing combination of the known, the known of, and the unknown.

How many others will show up, I have absolutely no idea. But, if I can do my tiny little bit to make the turnout that tiny little bit less insignificant, I think that I should. I still promise nothing, but I really will do my best to be there, and then to report back here, hopefully with some photos.

(33)

Commenting on this Guardian article, someone called "weejonnie" says,

If you want to participate in the gross corporate profits why don't you buy shares in the companies. Decide which ones are making far too much and invest in them.

Or has that gone over the average left-thinking person's head?

(21)

Big demo against the cuts in London today! Takes me back, that does. Maggie, maggie, maggie, OUT OUT OUT!

Simon Jenkins says British demonstrations scarcely ever achieve their aims. I think they often do. Not always quickly, not always directly, and the aims achieved are not always good, but the clue to the effectiveness of demonstrations is in the name. The demonstration demonstrates that there are enough people who care enough about some issue to fill up in Trafalgar Square. They vote, thinks the politician. Not that he panics; he knows that there are other voters shouting or yawning at their televisions as they show pictures of the Trafalgar Square lot, but the highly visible existence of this big shouty bundle of single-issue votiness seeps into his mind and affects his decisions, irrespective of whether he likes them or loathes them.

On the other hand, sometimes the demonstration demonstrates that there are not enough people who care about your issue to fill up Trafalgar Square. (There will be today; I speak in general terms.) If the mainstream media like your cause they will do their very best to help by means of what I think of as the squat shot. That's when the cameraman squats on the ground and points the camera upwards so that the shot shows only bodies and not the tell-tale large areas of empty pavement between and around the marching feet. (Added later: however eventually, the use of this low-angle crowd-shot becomes a signal to alert observers that attendance was low, and the subject of ridicule. The BBC have wised up and reined back on its use in the last few years.)

And sometimes - in fact ofttimes - the demonstration demonstrates that quite a lot of your supporters are not very nice. The blogger Zombietime went to many anti-war demonstrations in the US while G W Bush was president and quietly snapped away. One of the results was this record of the signs calling for Bush to be assassinated. Here in Britain the student demonstrators against tuition fees did not endear themselves to the public by the fact that one or two of their number were photographed hurling fire extinguishers from the top of buildings or hanging from the flag commemorating the war dead at the Cenotaph. I sympathise with the demonstration organisers in these cases: they did not condone these actions - but like the scorpion in the fable who could not help but sting even at the cost of his own life, demonstrations cannot help but demonstrate something. You asked the public to watch and judge your cause by the people you assembled, and they will.

As will your own people. The demonstrations I went to in the 70s and 80s have merged in memory. Was it at the CND one, or the anti-NF one, or one against changes to the immigration laws where I saw the collection bucket being passed round for the IRA? The bucket filled up slowly, I'll say that much for my fellow demonstrators, but it was not empty. At all of them I picked up piles of mimeographed leaflets that I now wish I had kept. They were revealing. They were insane. I realised that Searchlight, for instance, who I had thought of as just an anti-fascist group were very left wing indeed. Most of all I remember the posters. Three quarters of the posters, and almost all of the printed ones, were produced by the Socialist Workers Party. Busy little bees, they were. They still are: it is an astonishing fact that this tiny and fissiparous Trotskyist sect has twice dominated massive popular protest movements in my lifetime; the Anti-Nazi League / Rock against Racism movement of the 80s and the Stop The War Coalition of 2001-2008. Sorry, 2001-present, only they stop wars much more quietly now that Mr Obama is president. They were also big in CND.

Most demonstrators back then avoided carrying SWP posters. But it was difficult to refuse if someone asked nicely, so ordinary non-SWP people did end up walking for miles with an embarrassing commie placard thinking, how the hell did I end up doing this and I'm not doing it again. I suspect this will happen today as it did in the 80s.

The problem with demonstrators being turned off by weird extremist literature and weird extremist fellow attendees is not confined to causes that I dislike - even if part of the reason I now dislike them is that I was turned off by the weird literature and people. I sympathised with, although I did not attend, the big demonstration in 2002 against the hunting ban. My husband picked up a BNP leaflet for me while he was there because he had heard earlier verbal versions of the reminiscences about extremists at demonstrations that form much of this post. It depressed me that the originators of the leaflet were probably right in seeing that demonstration as a good opportunity to shift their stuff. One good thing, the leaflet had a picture of a squirrel on it. The good here is not the squirrel per se, fond as I am of the tree-rats, but at least they felt the need to hide behind cuddly things.

Oh yeah, another thing to avoid is having the same demo at regular intervals. Lie all you like about numbers, the media will help you if you are left wing, but when like for like comparisons can be made, decline will out. A left wing writer said in 2003:

The SWP's main priority is recruitment. Why else did it continually call demonstrations week after week during the Iraq conflict? This was a big tactical error for the anti-war movement. When the bombing started, many people felt dispirited and tired, but were organising and carrying out further actions and protests. More importantly, the SWP had not realised that many people on the enormous demonstration in February were there because they felt they had been denied a democratic voice. These demonstrations were bound to result in diminishing numbers - and many were bound to judge that as the collapse of the anti-war movement.

(8)

Here:

Via here.

(3)

Patrick Crozier reports on another ripple spreading outwards from the Cobden Centre:

CNBC is much better than the BBC. But that is not saying much. For the most part it offers up a stream of Keynesians with a smattering of Monetarists.

So, imagine my surprise when I turned on today to hear someone talking sense. Real, proper, honest-to-Godness, complete, free-market, Austrian sense. I even spent the next half an hour glued to the show just so I could catch his name.

I succeeded. The guy's name is Sean Corrigan and he works for these people.

Oh, and he writes for the Cobden Centre. ...

Corrigan is indeed excellent, as I found out for myself when I heard him speak at a Cobden Centre organised meeting at the IEA. What marks him out from other people who have jobs as Somethings in the City is that whereas most such persons are only now asking themselves: "What the hell just happened?", Corrigan was asking himself: "What the hell is happening?" about a decade ago or more. And, as Patrick Crozier notes, he got the answers right too.

Unlike, says Patrick in his immediately following posting, George Osborne.

(18)

Godwin doesn't apply where people really are laughing along about exterminating their opponents.

- House of Dumb. I agree. It's okay to call people nazis if they did it first.

(101)

Over the weekend, Tim Evans, who has been a friend of mine for about a quarter of a century, and who is now part of the Cobden Centre ruling junta (listen to a recent and relevant interview with Tim Evans about that by going here), has been ringing me and emailing me about this, which is a so-called Ten Minute Bill (I think that's what they call it) which Douglas Carswell MP and Steve Baker MP will be presenting to the House of Commons this Wednesday, just after Prime Minister's Question Time.

Ten Minute Bills seldom pass. But they are a chance to fly a kite, put an idea on the map, run something up the flagpole, shoot a shot across the bows (see above) of some wicked and dangerous vessel or other, etc. etc., mix in further metaphors to taste. Were this particular kite actually to be nailed legally onto the map (which it will not be for the immediately foreseeable future) it would somewhat alter the legal relationship between banks and depositors. For more about this scheme, from Steve Baker MP (whom we have had cause to notice here before), see also this.

Basically, this proposed law says that depositors should get to decide whether they still actually own what they already now think of as their own money when they hand it over to a bank, or whether their money degenerates into a mere excuse to create much more degenerate money, out of thin air. Depositors get to decide, in other words, about whether their bank deposits will be the basis of fractional reserve banking, or not. Or something. Don't depend on me to describe this proposal accurately, or comment learnedly and in detail on its efficacy, were we to live in a parallel universe of a sort that would enable this law to pass right now.

What I do know is that Austrian Economics (or, as I prefer to think of it: good economics), which is the theoretical foundation of the Cobden Centre, ought to have massively more sway in the world than it does now. Recently I have been trying to get my head further around Austrian Economics than my head has hitherto been, and I have also been watching the Cobden Centre as it has gone methodically about its self-imposed task of transforming Britain's and the world's financial arrangements, thereby massively improving the economic prospects of all human beings.

I have always been impressed by Austrian Economics, ever since I first dipped into Human Action in the library of Essex University in the early 1970s. I knew rather little about Austrian Economics until lately and I still don't know that much, beyond the fact of its superiority over bad economics. And I am now also very impressed by the Cobden Centre. What this latest parliamentary foray shows is that now Douglas Carswell MP seems to have joined the Cobden Centre network. Or maybe, what with Carswell having been an MP for some while, the Cobden Centre network has got behind Douglas Carswell MP. Whatever, and whatever his rank or title within Cobden Centre pecking order, Carswell is now a senior member of that network. Good. I hope and believe that there are many others now joining too, of comparable weight and intelligence.

I could say more about all this, much more. And I very much hope that in the weeks, months and years to come, I will. In particular I hope to explain more about just why the Cobden Centre has so far impressed me so much. But the important thing now is to get something about this up here, now, so that the Cobden Centre crowd (Tim Evans in particular) will have one more little puff of opinion to point at, to help them suggest that the intellectual wind may at least be beginning to blow in their (and my) preferred general direction.

(6)

I just got the news: our friends in Massachusetts have received their Official Massachusetts Government Notification that their Initiative to Roll Back the Sales Tax from 6.25% to 3% is on the November 2, 2010 Ballot.

Carla Howell, I salute you!

(4)

The invasion by Austrian Economics of the Institute of Economic Affairs continues apace, and at lunchtime today I attended this IEA event on that very timely subject staged by the Cobden Centre. The weather today has been so hot that since this meeting I could hardly stay alive and then when I had staggered home, awake, so don't expect a long and detailed report of what was said. All I really want to say here, now, is that I was greatly impressed by the two speakers, both of whom I photographed in action:

  

These two gentleman are, on the left, Jörg Guido Hülsmann, and on the right, Sean Corrigan. Watch out for those names. I'm fairly sure that quite a bit more is going to be heard of and from both.

The good news is that Cobden Centre Chairman Toby Baxendale asked both these two gentlemen if their performances could later be made available in written form to the Cobden Centre with a view to online publication, and both promised that they would cooperate fully with such plans.

I took other photos, including a couple of Tim Evans, the Cobden Centre's Chief Executive. In one of these snaps, Tim poses next to the IEA's evil monetarist Tim Congdon, who was present only as a picture on the wall.

Tim said that he also thought the speeches by the two gents above to be "superb". He says that about any performances he has had any part in organising no matter how average, but this time I think he meant it. And as I say, I enthusiastically concur. Judging by the response at the end from a gratifyingly crowded room, everyone else present did too.

(23)

Instapundit today links to a bizarre article at something called The American Interest Online, by someone called Walter Russell Mead, which summarises itself thus:

Short summary: the current iteration of the movement - with its particular political project and goals - is dead.

Incidentally true things are said by Mead about the "movement to stop climate change", to the effect that it has indeed taken a severe beating in recent weeks, and that its denizens will, once they get this, become extremely distressed, and will blame everyone except themselves, rather as Mead himself blames Al Gore. He calls his fellow Warmists "immature, unrealistic and naïve".

But the most obvious and most important truths of the matter that Mead does not mention are that this "movement to stop climate change" was trying to do something hideously destructive on the basis of a huge pack of lies. This movement was and is both intellectually and morally wrong, and all the more morally wrong as its intellectual failure becomes ever clearer. Mead merely says that warmism has, this time around, been a political failure. It tried to reshape (i.e. utterly screw) the world economy, but (alas?) it failed.

Mead even has the nerve to compare these would-be climate tyrants with the people who, in the 1920s, tried to put a stop to world wars. Bit of a difference there, Mead. There actually was a horribly destructive world war, not long before those efforts. Another equally real world war soon followed, which would also have been well worth stopping. Whereas your planet catastrophe now stands proved as having been imaginary.

I'm with Mead's appropriately scornful commenters, like this one, "RKV":

"The climate change movement now needs to regroup." Excuse me for asking the obvious, "Why?"

What they really need to do is shut the hell up.

And this one, "Lazarus Long":

Sounds like a defense of the Soviet Empire, after its defeat.

"Darn it, if only the right people were in charge communism WOULD work!"

Sorry, the AGW myth collapsed under the weight of it’s own lies and corruption.

Sorry, as in: you're a twat, rather than as in: I actually do apologise for anything.

These two worthy commenters, and this posting, all illustrate an important technique of propaganda. Which is: when you have your opponents on the run, keep them there. Do not, because they have started to acknowledge parts of the truth, let them get away with continuing to tell unchallenged lies about other parts of the truth, and especially not if the parts of the truth that they continue to contest are the most important parts.

Do not, so to speak, let them get away with a draw, and with it the continuing prospect of long-term victory, out of a misplaced sense of fair play. I have long known this, but was still extremely glad to find the commenters on this earlier Climategate posting here also getting this particular point so well.

(5)

Talking of conviction parties, as I was the other day, how about this shamelessly populist rant, from the leader of the LPUK. Its basic message is very simple:

Join us.

Alas, whenever I hear that phrase I tend to be reminded of a big ugly guy in a hat, beckoning, with a machine gun, to Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon to come over and become bit part players (i.e. corpses) in a gangland massacre that the two soon-to-be cross-dressers have just made the mistake of witnessing. Luckily, the machine gun guys get distracted by the arrival of some cops, or Some Like It Hot would not have been much of a movie.

Mr Devil's Kitchen didn't mean it that way. I wish him and his party the best of luck. They will need it. Times have changed since I wrote this, and as I said in my posting yesterday the internet has changed the rules for small political parties hugely. I now think that however difficult and dangerous a British Libertarian political party may prove to be, it simply has to happen. Certainly lots of others think it has to, to the point of joining it in quite promising numbers, and who am I to try to stop them? But many of the warnings in that Libertarian Alliance piece from over a decade ago do still apply.

I wonder how many candidates the LPUK will manage to field in the next general election? The willingness to be (electorally speaking) massacred is unfortunately a job requirement, but as I said in my earlier bit about UKIP, the silly parties might actually soon start doing a bit better, what with the big three parties being so widely despised, and now that the silly parties no longer depend on mainstream media coverage to be noticed at all.

I consider it interesting that UKIP and LPUK have both recently followed the Conservatives in choosing a couple of Old Etonians to be their leaders. Coincidence? Probably, but Etonians have always been good at smelling power. Two further straws in the wind to suggest that the age of the silly parties may now be with us?

(34)

As far as I know, it was my very good friend Sean Gabb who first posited a theory about who may be responsible for the hacking of the CRU e-mails that have now formed the basis of 'Climategate':

In short, I believe the Russians are behind this. It may be that all those megabytes of data were stolen by a computer hacker. There may be any number of people who are up to such hacking in the technical sense. But this seems to have been an integrated operation. Having the technical skills to get access to a computer archive is not the same as knowing where to look in that archive and what to look for. Nor is it the same as knowing what to do with it.

But the Russians had means and opportunity to do the job. Perhaps their security services are no longer as efficient and as well-funded as in Soviet times. But they are still there. Their mission is no longer to win the Cold War. But making life easier for Mr Putin and his friends is a large mission in itself.

I have no idea whether or not there is any truth in this. Certainly the Russian state has plenty of motivation but then so do a host of others. Sean offers very little in the way of evidence because there is very little in the way of evidence.

But, interestingly, there are some tufts of corroboration emerging:

Suspicions were growing last night that Russian security services were behind the leaking of the notorious British ‘Climategate’ emails which threaten to undermine tomorrow’s Copenhagen global warming summit.

An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the explosive hacked emails from the University of East Anglia were leaked via a small web server in the formerly closed city of Tomsk in Siberia.

Have they merely read and then embellished Sean's article I wonder? Or is there some flickering fire to accompany this smoke? The evidence is, at best, circumstantial.

But what if it does turn out to have been the former KGB? Would it not be an irony of historic proportions that an organisation formerly devoted to establishing a global tyrrany has thrown a big hammer-and-sickle into the works of their would-be successors? And, not just ironic, but also just.

Because if the warm-mongers get their way, then it is not the powerful and the well-connected that need fear their zealotry. The Al Gores and Zac Goldsmiths of the world can afford to bask in the green glow of personal glory, safe in the knowledge that their opulent lifestyles will not be compromised by so much a sterling silver napkin ring. They will soar (both literally and metaphorically) above it all. No, it is the Average Joe/Jane who will be forced to endure the austerity that their new overlords will demand. It is those who struggle to make ends meet who will be told that the planet can no longer afford their humble family saloon or their two weeks a year in the Algarve. It is the little people who will be stepped upon because they can be stepped upon.

Maybe, one day, we will know the true identity of the e-mail hackers. Or maybe we will never know. But I do sort of hope that it does turn out to be some guy called Yvgeny, acting on orders from the Kremlin, tapping away in a windowless room in a drab building on a military base in Krasnoyarsk because then, we will be able to say: congratulations, tovarisch! You have, at long last, established yourself as a Hero of the Proletariat.

(20)

I've just watched the Channel 4 Sky news video clip to be seen here, in which Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, berates Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, thus:

"... it's remarkable how the so-called sceptics have been using this as a propaganda tool to promote a political end ... People with a clear vested interest in creating public confusion because they want to undermine action on climate change, they should shut up and wait until the investigation is done rather than carry on a witch hunt."

Fraser Nelson took exception to this, in particular because Fraser Nelson thinks that AGW is quite a bit truer than I now think it is. In other words, said Fraser Nelson, he is a true sceptic, rather than a "so-called sceptic".

However, if Bob Ward had been shouting at someone like me, instead of at Fraser Nelson, as in his own mind he surely was, then he would have had a point. I definitely want the whole AGW thing to collapse in ruins, and suspect that it quite soon may collapse. In the meantime, I definitely do dislike all the regulations and taxes that Bob Ward and co want to see introduced, and I am most definitely using Climategate as a propaganda tool to promote that political end. I certainly prefer the current state of public confusion about climate science to the public unanimity that this confusion has now replaced. Insofar as I had any tiny part in helping to create and spread such confusion, and I did, I am a proud man.

But, as the true object of Bob Ward's ire, I do have some incidental disagreements with him.

Bob Ward says that it is "remarkable" how people like me are using Climategate to score political points. No it isn't. And the reason Bob Ward is so alert to the true nature of his politically biased and point-scoring enemies such as me is that he is quite clearly just such a creature himself. He is almost certainly telling lies, while I am sincerely trying to tell the truth. But when it comes to point-scoring and having a political agenda and being keen on propaganda, we are two of a kind.

Rather unpleasantly, Bob Ward says that we anti-AGW-ers should "shut up". Well, yes, I'm sure he would like that. He and his team are now losing an argument that could end up wrecking all their careers, and he wants that argument to cease. But that is not a proof that it should cease, and of course there is no chance of that happening, now that the internet makes it so hard to shut people up.

Talking of shutting people up, and of the internet, the notion that we anti-AGW-ers should wait, in silence, for a "public inquiry" is also very bizarre. What on earth does Bob Ward think has been in progress on the internet for the last fortnight, if not a gigantic inquiry of the most public kind?

Telling people to "shut up" these days is rather ridiculous, so maybe I am making a bit too much of what is really just silly bluster. On the other hand, shutting people up was what some of the nastiest of those GRU emails were all about, so on second thoughts I think I am not making too much of this phrase. I wonder what kind of teacher Ward is, when teaching students who don't share his worldview. I wonder what kind of scientist he is when faced with scientific disgreement. Not a nice one, and not a nice one, are my guesses. My guess is that Bob Ward is someone who says "Shut up!" rather a lot. Especially just lately.

I don't have any "vested interest" in the sense of being paid by anyone to say the things I now say. My vested interest is intellectual rather than economic. Bob Ward's vested interests, on the other hand, are both intellectual and economic. He stands to lose both an argument and a job if this argument carries on going against him.

Nor am I part of a witch hunt, exactly. A Bob Ward hunt yes, a witch hunt no. As has been said many times, and as is now going to have to be said many times more, the bad thing about the original medieval witch hunts is that those accused of witchcraft did not, on the whole, do the things they were accused of. They did not, for instance, fly across Europe on broomsticks at the dead of night and participate in Walpurgisnacht ceremonies. Lots were accused of this. None actually did this. This was an entirely imaginary crime. However, the victims of the anti-Communist "witchhunts" (sneer quotes there because the phrase was and is deliberately misleading) were, on the whole, guilty as charged. They were accused of being Communists and of being supporters of the vile tyranny that was the USSR, and they mostly were. Certainly many people were, at that time and since, guilty of being Communists and USSR supporters - real Communists, who did exactly the evil things that Communists were accused of. "Witchcraft", on the other hand, was not actually practiced by anyone.

And now, a quite large number of climate scientists are, I believe, about to be proved guilty of manipulating the science of climate to create both unnecessary climate panic and consequent new global political arrangements that could do huge political and economic harm to the human species. Unlike all those poor medieval witches, most of them are probably once again: guilty as charged. They are green Communists, people who want the exact same global political and economic catastrophe that the earlier Communists worked so hard to achieve, but by using different arguments, different academic and scientific frauds and manipulations, different lies.

The basic problem with what Bob Ward said in his little contretemps with Fraser Nelson is not that Bob Ward is wrong about my motives, and he may even have been right also about Fraser Nelson's motives. No, Bob Ward's problem is that what we partisan politicos are saying about him and his fellow climate scientists is probably true. Wishing something to be true does not make it true, but neither does it make it false. What you want to be true sometimes is true. I and my political comrades do indeed want to believe that Bob Ward and his political comrades have been foisting a fraud upon the world, and we want this to be proved, asap. Boy, do we want it! We will rejoice at such an outcome, and absolutely will not be shutting up about the possibility of this, and reasons for hoping for this, in the meantime. But that does not mean that this outcome, if it materialises, will be unjust or untrue.

(4)

I recently recorded a conversation with Toby Baxendale, who owns and runs a fish distribution empire, and who is the founder of the Cobden Centre. Listen to it by clicking here.

Our chat lasted about fifty minutes and a lot of interesting biographical and intellectual ground is covered. For the benefit of those for whom that is rather a long time to spend listening to talk, I have written at greater length about listening to and learning about this interesting and formidable man here.

(7)

The BigBrotherWatch campaign has a rather neat idea for a networked protest against the bully state, designed to encourage people to notice how much of it has insinuated itself into everyday life.

You put a standard sticker on some physical evidence of intrusion, threat, surveillance, overregulation, nannying... by or authorised by, an official body. You photograph it. You send in the photograph to them and/or publish it by other means... and that's it. There's a running competition for the best pics.

It is a smart use of the networked world to do something that is not quite the direct action loved by old-fashioned activists, but more directive action, to get the public's attention on the world around us and how needlessly oppressive it has become. And it is a game, too.

Alex Deane of BBW tells me he has already had hundreds of requests for stickers, and some very serious and respectable think-tankies appeared to be taking them at a meeting I attended last night.

I wonder whether anyone will manage to tag an FIT unit?

(21)

My favourite banner [registration required] from the Washington DC protest last Saturday which did not happen, judging by many media outlets, was a few "tens of thousands" of right-wing protesters, according to the Washington Post, but drew rather a bigger crowd, according to the Daily Mail, than the new Messiah's botched swearing in ceremony.

What I would like to know is when "we want less" became an extremist position?

(2)

There is a certain kind of libertarian-stroke-free-marketeer intellectual whom I hold in particular esteem. I'm talking about the specialist consensus breaker. I gave a talk to the Oxford Libertarian Society last year in which I mentioned two of my favourite intellectuals of this sort. I talked about James Tooley, who says: education for the poor doesn't have to state funded and it's better if it's not. And I talked about Peter Bauer, who said: government to government foreign aid does more harm than good. I could also have mentioned another such consensus breaker: Terence Kealey.

Happily, my failure to inform the Oxford Libertarian Society of Terence Kealey's existence and stature did not do any lasting damage, because by some means or another they still managed to hear about him. Better yet, they invited him to talk to them about the consensus he has been busy breaking, the consensus that says that science is a public good which has to be government funded. Kealey says: not so. As with education for the poor, it's better for science if the government doesn't fund it. And even better yet, the Oxford Libertarians filmed Kealey's talk.

The talk was given on May 22nd, and the video of it was posted on the Oxford Libertarian Society blog on the 23rd, so sorry for only just noticing it and mentioning it here. But this is not one of those arguments where a couple of weeks will make any difference. I've only watched about a third of it so far, but am confident about recommending all of it. The talk I gave to the OLS is here.

See also this recent Kealey book and this earlier one, both of which I have read all of and much enjoyed.

(36)

As here, for instance. Via Liberty Alone, I learn of a remarkable new recruit to the ranks of those who are panicking about the pandemic. Yes, it is none other than the US Libertarian Party. They have just issued a press release reprimanding the US state for not being statist enough about this medically trivial event, which is in any case only being plugged up in order to divert attention away from other governmental blunders and to excuse further governmental usurpations, despite all the blunders. Why can't they see that? Or don't they care about such things any more? One can imagine a true "pandemic" that really did need measures like draconian border controls to defend against it (sickness is the health of the state), but if this trivial flu variant is it, then, to put it mildly, an explanation to that effect should have been added.

The UK Libertarian Party should treat this pandemic pandering as an awful warning of what happens to small parties - parties "of principle" - who become gripped by the desire to pile up lots of mere votes, and who forget what they were started to accomplish. First they pick a regular politician to lead them, and he then picks more regular politicians to help him, and before you know it, they are behaving like regular politicians.

But it is more fundamental than that, I fear. Start a political party, and before you know it, it is behaving like a political party. LPUK beware.

(15)

Good on the Libertarian Alliance for publishing this. As it says, Guido Fawkes, aka Paul Staines, is more than able to take care of himself, but given some pathetic attempts by the Daily Telegraph and a few others to sneer at him (what the heck has gone wrong at the Telegraph?), it is nice to have friendly comments.

Paul has probably raised the profile of the LA indirectly, quite a bit. He should get an award at this year's annual LA conference. Even if it is not the whole truth, I think it is very, very good to be able to have it said that a "libertarian blogger has brought down minister X or civil servant Y". The very fact that folk are going around saying this, or hinting at it, is gold-dust to libertarian activitsts such as the LA and its counterparts. In his way, Paul is doing for the free market movement what the Tea Party folks are doing, maybe, in the US. In fact, I'd be willing to state that relatively speaking, Paul's site is now the most influential political blog in the world. I mean, is there a French, German or, heaven help us, an Italian equivalent?

Just askin'.

(7)

This coming Friday, April 10th, I will be giving a talk at the home of the parents of Tim Evans, about the late Chris R. Tame. I was his junior libertarian partner, so to speak, during the 1980s into the mid-1990s, when I helped him to run the Alternative Bookshop, and did pamphlets for the Libertarian Alliance, so he obviously had a profound effect on my life. If you knew him, or if you have read any of the writings at the other end of the above link to the Libertarian Alliance website, you will know that I was only one among a great many.

The purpose of this posting is twofold. First, I want to remind people about my talk. Emails have already gone out to most of those likely to be interested, and fliers were distributed at that very well attended Kevin Dowd lecture. But, what with this coming Friday being Good Friday, I have no idea who will show up or in what numbers. If you want to attend and have not yet emailed Tim Evans (tim at libertarian dot co dot uk) to that effect, then do so and he'll send you attendance details. There has been talk of the event being video-ed. If that doesn't happen, I will at least sound-record it myself. So, no need to bust a gut to be there in person if you want to at least hear my performance (always assuming that it is not so terrible that I decide to delete the only record of it).

My other purpose with this posting is to solicit help. Chris Tame had a lot of his considerable impact on the world in the form of meetings and relationships, personal and intellectual. He did do quite a bit of published writing and performing, but not nearly as much as he would have liked. When he died just over three years ago, prematurely, he did so while feeling, as did many others, that he would have had lots more to give had he only been allowed the time.

But Chris Tame nevertheless did have a huge influence, as you can tell by reading the comments on this Samizdata posting that marked his death in 2006. It is the nature of this influence that I will be attempting to shed as much further light on as I can in my talk this Friday. The gist of what I'll be saying can be summed up in this comment by Dale Amon on that earlier posting:

I do not think the libertarian scene in the UK and Ireland would be anything like the same if he had not been there.

In addition to building the foundations and structure of the Libertarian Alliance and libertarian movement in the UK, Chris passed on masses of information, especially about the broad and ever growing range of libertarian books and articles out there, to a huge number of friends and acquaintances, to fellow libertarians of course, but also to many others from different parts of the political spectrum, and just to people he happened to come into contact with. The full range of such influences will never be fully known, but if you have recollections of Chris and of how he influenced or informed you, I would love to read a comment from you, or if you would prefer it, by you sending me an email (brian at brianmicklethwait dot com).

A good example of the kind of thing I mean is to be found in the opening paragaphs of Kevin Dowd's recent lecture, in which Dowd mentioned just how much of an impact Chris had upon him. I know these sentiments to have been very heartfelt, because when I met Dowd just before he gave that lecture, told me all of that and more about how Chris Tame had helped and influenced him.

Without the indirect influence of Chris Tame, the Samizdata story would probably have been a very different one. I am by no means the only Samizdatista to have made a start as a self-conscious libertarian because of him.

My thanks in advance to anyone who can comment in the way I have suggested. If you are reading this for the first time after I have done my talk but still have something pertinent to add, please do not feel on my account that you are too late. I'd still love to read such recollections, and many others surely would too.

A final thought occurs to me. If anyone thinks that Chris Tame's influence was bad, and did harm, I'd be interested to hear about that too. I will almost certainly not agree, but I will be interested. He has now been dead long enough for anyone who wants to to speak ill of the man without being pelted with the comment equivalent of vegetables. I do not want to encourage this, you understand, just to say that as far as I am concerned, that would be okay.

(26)

At 8:30 pm, I will turn on every single light in my house for one hour in protest against those who would bring our civilisation into a new dark ages.

(16)

It is my understanding there are now five hundred cities on the tea party list. I hope all good Samizdata readers (or at least that subset of which resides in the middle half of the North American continent) get out their signs and show their anger this coming April 15th!

The 'Main Stream Media', as Glenn Reynolds approximately put it, will be hiring extra people that day to do the hard graft journalistic work of ignoring the nationwide demonstrations by hundreds to thousands of people in what may well be one for the Guinness records. There may be the largest number of simultaneous demonstrations in American history on Tax Day 2009.

It actually does not matter that MSM will be absent as no one pays any attention to them any more any way. I can literally not remember the last time I read a 'dead tree' newspaper. I do not even own a working TV anymore. I doubt I am alone. They are irrelevant and obsolete.

I you want coverage, go to Pajamas TV. I would not be surprised if Reason TV covered some of it as well. For daily information, keep an eye on Glenn Reynolds.

I will not be on that side of the Atlantic in time for the fun, but I do have a few sign suggestions. (Some are mine and some are golden oldies):

"I'm Capitalist and I'm Proud!"

"Go Galt!"

"Screw the Welfare State!"

"Legalize Freedom!"

"Pelosi Go Home!"

"The Mafia would steal less!"

"Taxation is Theft"

"Smash the State!"

Feel free suggest other sign ideas for the tea partiers!

Later: I have recently been exchanging email with J Neil Schulman and that reminds me of how prophetic his 1979 Prometheus award winning novel Alongside Night is of current events, even if we are only in the prequel stages of his story.

(10)

I know how the Duke of Wellington (attrib.) felt. The problem for a rational civil liberties campaigner is often not that you do not know who your friends are, but that you do - and that you worry whether, given what they actually think, they will be let out for the day and not talking to buttercups when you need their help.

Here is a breathtaking non-sequitur in the comments of the Guardian Comment is Free:
I think ID cards would be fine ... but I think they should be introduced after the constitutional reform that guarantees safeguards, PR and no monarchy.

The comment is however appended to a piece of splendid news. The entirely sane Mark Thomas has managed to persuade the Metropolitan police to delete him from the National DNA Database.

(4)

If you are a Samizdata reader, you probably don't have a lot of use for your Member of Parliament. However, now is the time to use them - especially if you have a Labour MP.

Here is Phil Booth:

At the Convention on Modern Liberty, I launched NO2ID's request that everyone at the convention – and around the UK – tells their MP right now that they refuse their consent to having their information shared under any "information sharing order", a power currently being slipped onto the statute books in clause 152 of the coroners and justice bill .

Please tell yours too. It's important, and urgent – and something that only YOU can do. If you never have before, now's the time to write to your MP – in a letter, or via www.WriteToThem.com.

Jack Straw has been making noises that could signal a 'compromise', but the only acceptable action is to remove clause 152 entirely from the bill. It is not linked to any other clause, despite being sandwiched between other powers and so-called safeguards offered to the information commissioner. It cannot be improved, and Straw can't be allowed to merely "dilute" it. Clause 152 just has to go.

It's imperative that in coming days every MP hears from his or her constituents. Please tell them you refuse consent to having your information, taken for one purpose, arbitrarily used for any other purpose. And ask them to vote clause 152 off the bill.

If you are skeptical about whether anything is important enough to write a polite letter to your Labour MP, then please read my detailed briefing for parliamentarians, here (pdf).

--
Note: If you followed the link to Jack Straw and now feel sick, I am sorry. Here is the retired Law Lord, Lord Bingham, to make you a bit better.

(40)

I recommend this, a speech given by Sean Gabb on Monday night to the Young Conservatives. Said he: close down the BBC, the Foreign Office, much of the Home Office, the Commission for Racial Equality, anything to do with health and safety, etc. etc. Quote:

Let me emphasise that the purpose of these cuts would not be to save money for the taxpayers or lift an immense weight of bureaucracy from their backs - though they would do this. The purpose is to destroy the Establishment before it can destroy you. You must tear up the web of power and personal connections that make these people effective as an opposition to radical change. If you do this, you will face no more clamour than if you moved slowly and half-heartedly. Again, I remember the campaign against the Thatcher "cuts". There were no cuts, except in the rate of growth of state spending. You would never have thought this from the the torrent of protests that rolled in from the Establishment and its clients. And so my advice is to go ahead and make real cuts - and be prepared to set the police on anyone who dares riot against you.

As a libertarian myself, I have long resisted the idea of class warfare. I hate the collectivism of such notions. I mean, I have friends, including libertarian friends, who work for the BBC. (I also have a relative in a rather interesting position in the BBC, I have recently learned. You meet all sorts at family funerals. He thought of the BBC iPlayer, or so I've been told.) But, on the other hand, if a Gabbite government ever did materialise in Britain quickly enough for me to witness it, I would not object very strenuously.

But whatever I may feel about this extraordinary event, it certainly was an event. Why, even Instapundit noticed it, or rather he noticed the Volokh Conspiracy noticing it, which is how I noticed it this morning.

What would be really good would be if the lefties picked up on it and said: "This is what those evil Conservatives really want to do!", and if Sean then repeated it all to something more like a truly national audience, adding "if only". Or, if truly national pundits start linking to the thing, which amounts to the same thing. Even better would be if the opinion pollsters start asking the actual voters, the actual people, how they feel about Gabbism, and if quite a lot of them say: sounds good to us.

Because, equally interesting, and from a libertarian point of view just as controversial, is what Sean says about state schools and state hospitals and state welfare:

Following from this, however, I advise you to leave large areas of the welfare state alone. It is regrettable, but most people in this country do like the idea of healthcare free at the point of use, and of free education, and of pensions and unemployment benefit. These must go in the long term. But they must be retained in the short term to maintain electoral support.

None of this is new to me. I am sure I could dig out earlier Free Life Commentaries in which all this is said. In fact, come to think of it, Sean wrote a book about all this, didn't he? Yes he did. But this time, he said it to a politically quite interesting audience.

I am not going to stop opposing government spending on schools and hospitals and welfare merely to suit Sean Gabb's suggested strategy for the Conservatives. But, I do love how Sean (I assume it's Sean) describes this speech (here) as having been greeted with "a combination of silence and faint applause". Springtime for Gabb has come early this year. Or, to switch to another showbiz comparison, it must have been a bit like this, that Michael Jennings linked to from here earlier today.

Is there perhaps some kind of Law of Speeches to the effect that all truly significant speeches are greeted thus, and that only speeches saying absolutely nothing of interest get standing ovations? It would make sense.

(14)

Following on from Perry's post below, I am pleased to note that there is something we can do to help Geert Wilders.

For those among you who want to actively help, go to his website and donate what you can to help defray what will likely be a ruinous legal bill. The link is here.

Geert Wilders is one of the pitifully few public figures in Europe who is willing to confront the Islamist menace. As a result, his enemies have sentenced him to death (because all they want is peace, don't you know) and his own government has decided to prosecute him.

Even if you cannot contribute financially then I urge you at least to get a message to him to let him know that he is not alone and that he has many, many friends. He needs them.

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Their lack of imagination will also protect them from the apprehension that they have anything to hide.

It is only people who behave suspiciously who should – and quite rightly deserve to – fear. That is the purpose of having ID cards!”

“Like my friends and acquaintances, I cannot understand how a law abiding citizen can object to the proposal or how they will limit or infringe my “civil liberties”.

- Unnamed members of the public quoted as endorsing the Home Office view in its consultation summary (2003) (pdf).

The national identity cards scheme will give people confidence, convenience and security in an increasingly vital aspect of modern life – proving and protecting their identity.

- David Blunkett, launching the Identity Cards Bill in 2004

Such views are surprisingly persistent. To tackle them, we (NO2ID) have produced what I suppose is the first NO2ID commercial:

(9)

This is even better.

(2)

Congress notes that the Government proposes to require workers in aviation to enrol in the National Identity Scheme in 2009. Congress has deep concerns about the implications of the National Identity Scheme in general and the coercion of aviation workers into the scheme in particular. Congress sees absolutely no value in the scheme or in improvements to security that might flow from this exercise and feels that aviation workers are being used as pawns in a politically led process which might lead to individuals being denied the right to work because they are not registered or chose not to register in the scheme.

Congress pledges to resist this scheme with all means at its disposal, including consideration of legal action to uphold civil liberties.

Overwhelmingly carried by the TUC. Coming not very long after the British Air Transport Association (the association of airlines and airports) expressed its "joint and determined opposition to the proposal" [pdf], this suggests the current scheduling of the UK National Identity Scheme may have some problems.

Expect yet another repositioning shortly. (My guess: it'll be about "immigration control".)

(13)

It may be disgustingly authoritarian, but it is risibly incompetent too. It appears the Home Office has just spent a very large amount of UK readers' money making a vast online advertisement for NO2ID. We'd despaired of reaching 'the youth' ourselves, too expensive. I'm very glad they decided to do it for us.

With audience participation. Which embarrassingly for the Home Office shows 'kids' not to be quite the suckers they'd hoped. Enjoy.

(67)

What it [the UK Libertarian Party] will do, like the Libertarian Party has done in the United States, is to tarnish the libertarian brand, allowing the crazier aspects of libertarian thinking to come to the fore, and achieving nothing of any merit.

- Alex Singleton, 'How Libertarians undermine liberty'

(45)

I brought prejudices acquired during the Cold War to the struggle between civilisation and Islam, but tried – and try still - to be careful to see the differences as well as the similarities between the two struggles.

In this spirit, I at first thought that whereas Soviet communism was ideologically breakable, Islam is not breakable. More than a billion souls believe in it, and however true it might be that it is evil and repulsive nonsense, saying this would accomplish very little. It would merely poke the hornet's nest with a stick. But slowly, I have been coming round to thinking almost the complete opposite. Not only does denouncing Islam as evil nonsense establish the mere right, of us civilisationers, to denounce Islam - along with our right to say anything else we might want to say - true or false, nice or nasty, sensible or daft. Such talk also, I am starting to believe, strikes a dagger into the heart of the enemy camp, by spreading doubt in it about basic beliefs and hence sewing discord and confusion. I used to think that Islamists were indifferent to such ideological attacks. Now, I am starting to believe that they fear them very much. Hence all the murder threats. They sense that this is one of their weakest and potentially biggest fronts in the struggle. The biggest front of all, in fact.

And even if only a few "apostates" materialise, they are of huge significance, for they bring with them deep knowledge of the enemy we face and how we can see the enemy off.

Another advantage of ideological attacks on Islam is that arguments about - and in favour of - "apostasy" unite civilisation, and divide its enemies. We civilisationers argue fiercely with one another about how to oppose Islam, but almost all of us believe that if you want to criticise a religion non-violently you should be allowed to, and that if you want to abandon a religion you should be able to do that without getting extremely violent grief, or even the threat of it, from those who still do believe in it. Talking like this or doing this may be rather daft, and very unwise, and get you shunned by polite society (i.e. scared society), but ... yes, it should be allowed. I am content to regard all who say that they disagree with the claims in this paragraph as the enemies of civilisation that they are, not just from the point of view of the mere truth, but on tactical grounds. Put such cretinous pro-Islamist fellow-travellers on the defensive also, I say.

And now I read this article (linked to about a week ago by Instapundit) in which it is claimed that the trickle of converts from Islam that was all I had so far noticed is actually whole lot more than that. It tells of a spectacular growth in the number of converts from Islam. Conversions have been happening in a steady flow for decades, but recently they have become a torrent, world-wide. Mostly these people are converting to Christianity, but sometimes just to not-Islam. Bossiness and terrorism and constant fighting is, it seems, not just repulsive. It actually repels. People are leaving the religion of war and joining the religion of, approximately speaking, peace - or joining no religion at all. Islam is only still growing numerically because it is growing so quickly by purely biological means. As far as the flow of converts is concerned it is now in headlong retreat.

So, is this true? Is this allegedly huge exflux really happening? I have heard nothing about it before, but that could merely mean that I am ignorant. Or is the exflux just wishful thinking on the part of Christians, talking nonsense to keep their spirits up?

(16)

This is one of those before-I-entirely-forget-about-it and better-late-than-never postings, for which deepest apologies to all who might mind that I didn't put it up a week ago, when I should have.

So anyway, some while ago Antoine Clarke and I did one of our occasional recorded conversations about politics, here and in the USA. After we'd talked about the mess the US Democrats have got themselves into (I suggested a coin toss to settle it), we then mentioned the Libertarian Party, and the fact that they will soon be choosing their Presidential candidate. And after that, we switched to libertarian politics on this side of the pond, the point being that, in a very small way, there is some UK libertarian politics to report, in the form of the recently founded UK Libertarian Party. Antoine mentioned that the UKLP was having some kind of public event in the near future, and I mentioned this possibility in the blog posting I did in connection with all this. And "Devil's Kitchen", one of the bosses of the UKLP and also a noted blogger, left a comment:

We have a general meeting and piss-up from 3pm this Saturday (29th March 08), upstairs at St Stephen's Tavern, Westminster.

Do feel free to drop in if you so desire …

So, I did. This was just over a week ago, as I say. As I made my way there, I feared the worst, namely a little clutch of social dyslexics as old as me and as badly dressed as me, but even fatter and even uglier, some of them clutching grubby plastic bags full of newspaper cuttings. I got there nearer to 6pm than 3pm, and immediately thought: oh dear, I am too late and they have all gone. The first floor of the St Stephen's Tavern was, you see, full of normal people. But just as I was about to leave and go home again, the guy who turned out to be Mr Devil's Kitchen himself hailed me. He even recognised me. So, I went over, and asked him which of this enormous throng of people were the UKLP. "They all are", he said.

I did not stay long, because I was trying to recover from a nasty cough and cold. Also, what with these people looking so normal, and hence of potential political significance, I did not want to infect them. But I stayed long enough to discover that they all seemed to have lives and jobs and brains, and social antennae, and the looks to match. Mostly they were twenty somethings or thirty somethings, mostly male but with a few young women. I was allowed to take photos, but the ones without flash were too blurry and the ones with flash (which I seldom use) made all concerned look like horror movie extras, because my red-eye thingy was either not switched on or else is useless.

Which was a pity, because appearances matter, or they do if you are trying to start a political party. If your only concern is publishing things, the way it always has been with me, fine, look any way you like. But trying to be politicians and looking old and ugly means that you are not just old and ugly, but stupid and pathetic as well.

But I did stay for a bit, and I can report that the effort put in by my generation of libertarians and libertarian fellow-travellers, such as those who run and write for Samizdata, have most definitely not been wasted, if all these nice intelligent young total strangers were anything to go by, which they surely are. I have always been deeply pessimistic about whether libertarian parties can ever get anywhere, but have reluctantly come to the conclusion that although it is a dirty job, someone has probably got to do it, and whether they should or not, they will anyway, so why fight it? I wish these people all the luck that I fear they will need.

I also learned something else. Mr Devil's Kitchen is, like David Cameron, an Old Etonian. That's another thing that maybe should not count, but does.

(4)

London and the Database State

A mayoral hustings organised by NO2ID

Londoners are among the most watched people on earth. As well as housing Whitehall, Parliament and the other self-protecting security apparatus, London has many information and identity management systems of its own. How do candidates feel about the civil liberties and privacy implications of, among other things, the Oyster Card, congestion charging, telephone parking? Would they support or oppose national ID schemes as mayor? What is their attitude to the database state?

Invitations have been issued to every party with London representation at Westminster, in Strasbourg or in the GLA. Gerrard Batten (UKIP), Sian Berry (Green), Lindsay German (Respect/Left List), Boris Johnson (Conservative), and Brian Paddick (LibDem) are currently expected to participate, and written responses from other invitees will be read from the chair.

Chaired by Christina Zaba, journalist and NO2ID's Union Liason Officer.

Time: 7pm Tuesday 8th April 2008
Place: Friends House, 173 Euston Road NW1 2BJ
Free and open to all.

[I'd like to take this opportunity to remind EU and commonwealth citizens resident in London, they have a vote in this too.]

(9)

There is a great little article in Slashdot about a well known German hacker group, Chaos Computer Club, publishing the fingerprints of German Secretary of the Interior as part of their protest against state use of biometric ID.

The club published 4,000 copies of their magazine Die Datenschleuder including a plastic foil reproducing the minister's fingerprint - ready to glue to someone else's finger to provide a false biometric reading. The CCC has a page on their site detailing how to make such a fake fingerprint

Sweet. I suppose that is a 'hardware hack' of sorts!

(4)

On March 18th, it will be two years since the untimely death from cancer of Chris Tame, founder of the Libertarian Alliance, bibiophile, and sceptic about many things, including the time spent (wasted?) on party politics. There is a plan to commemorate the academic approach which Chris always thought was a key to winning the battle of ideas against collectivism of all shades, with the Inaugural Chris R. Tame Memorial Lecture, at the National Liberal Club, in London on Tuesday at 6.30pm.

The speaker is Professor David Myddelton, from Cranfield University. The title of the lecture is: "How to Cure Government Obesity," which sounds like the sort of obesity we really ought to panic about.

Admission is free BUT ONLY if you contact Tim Evans, the LA's president, by email: tim [at] libertarian [dot] co [dot] uk. Numbers are limited and there are some drinks afterwards. I expect a recording will be made and linked to on either the LA blog or website. I shall certainly be there.

I especially miss the wicked sense of humour and the fact that my office is above an Amnesty International second-hand bookshop. It's the sort of place Chris would have spent five minutes scanning ALL the shelves - even sport, in case a Tae-Kwondo manual showed up! Then he would have chatted for an hour with the Socialist or Liberal volunteers in the shop, discussing what he termed "the rape of the libraries" and (sincerely) pushing against climate change on progressive humanist grounds.

(3)

The very worthy folks of the Free State Project are holding an event in June in New Hampshire to highlight their work and maybe attract some more supporters.

[PorcFest 2008] is the FSP annual event as an out reach to those that are interested in migrating to promote Liberty and Freedom. We are trying to get the message out to a larger population that there will be a gathering of Liberty Activist coming together from anarchists to those working within the system meet and make the migration.

If you are interested in supporting the FSP and becoming a 'porcupine', check it out!

(5)

The fine folks on The Line is Here (subtext: an anti-nanny state collective) have started something called the Picador Project which may be of interest to our USA based readers.

The Picador Project was started in order to combat what many of us see as a root problem underlying the pernicious rise of the nanny-state mentality in our society. Namely, that too many people believe they are entitled to gifts from the government, coupled with a government all too willing to hand those gifts over in return for a few basic human freedoms and a monopoly on “truth.” This sort of trouble being a perennial consequence of basic human nature, utopian schemes of running off and starting over are never the ultimate solution. Thus, if we want to preserve our way of life, we have to face these troubles here at home and conquer them.

Check it out.

(2)

I have always been fascinated about the techniques of promoting ideas. I remember reading the Libertarian Alliance's tactical notes as a student and finding them a thought-provoking read. Organisations, it seems to me, that really do well at promoting ideas have worked out a relatively simple technique, or series of them. They repeat the technique and receive political wins over and over again.

So I was very interested to read this BBC News feature. It explains a technique used repeatedly by the prolific TaxPayers' Alliance. According to the article (which quotes TPA supremo Matthew Elliott):

[The TaxPayers' Alliance] specialises in using the government's own data and Freedom of Information requests to winkle out examples of public sector waste; packaging it up into brief, media-friendly research papers, complete with an eye-catching headline figure to give reporters a ready-made "top line".

"Journalists' budgets have been cut back massively and yet they have to produce much more content. They haven't got time to do a lot of the investigative stuff they used to do in the past.

"So when we present them with some primary source material, it's guaranteed to be a good story."

Simple but effective.

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A most interesting document has come into our possession - and quite coincidentally, we understand, into the possession of several other well-known blogs. It is a scan of the internal document of the Identity and Passport Service outlining the new implementation strategy for the UK's identity card scheme, liberally annotated by the experts at NO2ID.

We think it tends to disprove the denials only just issued by HM Government in relation to the scheme, as well as some half-lies and full lies they have been telling all along. (It may also show up the feeble grip of Gordon Brown's paper Stalinism. "In government, but not in power," ministers will rubber-stamp anything - just as long as it doesn't look like a retreat.) But judge for yourself: (pdf 1.17Mb)

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The Stockholm Network people are trying as hard as they can to parlay their Golden Umbrella Awards into something truly significant. So they were pleased when Perry de Havilland did a piece here about the awards dinner last week, and even more pleased when Instapundit linked to that posting. And they were also delighted by this Wall Street Journal piece by John Fund. With awards ceremonies, what matters is not so much the dishing out of the awards as the matter of whether anyone else cares, or can be persuaded to care. This event was good. But it is the response to the event that will surely mean that the corresponding jamboree next year will be better.

Fund, who presented one of the awards, to a Bulgarian by the name of Dimitar Chobanov, begins his piece thus:

The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and other free-market Washington think tanks are known to many Americans. What isn't generally understood is that there has been an explosion of free-market think tanks around the world that are increasingly challenging the conventional view that government is the solution to society's problems.

Like Perry, I was part of the throng, and in a piece I did about these awards for another European think tank last week, I made the same point about free market think tank expansion. Whereas Fund sees these enterprises spreading beyond the USA, I see them spreading beyond Western Europe, but however you slice this story, free market think tanks are spreading.

In among being impressed by all this, I took photos. Usually, when I take photos at pro-free-market events, my only questions are: How many women are here and how nice do they look? But the photography I did at the Golden Umbrellas focussed more on what was being officially talked about. Those ladies I did snap were snapped because they were on the stage, like Mistress of Ceremonies Karen Horn, Janet Daley and Cécile Philippe. There were plenty of other fine looking women present that night, but I concentrated my picture-taking on the people who were giving and receiving awards. And as well as photographing them, I listened to what they were actually saying. Which you can also do by going here.

(9)

Many of the Samizdatistas attended the Stockholm Network's Golden Umbrella Awards last night, an event that was described to me as the 'Free Market Oscars'. The intention is to encourage the people working in the varied pro-market think-tanks and advocacy groups around the world by acknowledging their contributions to the cause of liberty.

In truth I attended with moderate expectations as I have struggled to say awake through all too many award ceremonies, but was surprised at how well the event was managed and produced and although it may damage my credentials as a cynic, I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Helen Disney, the Stockholm Network's CEO, is one of the most focused and appealing people on the free market scene and her team, such as Tim Evans (who as many of you know, also wears a Libertarian Alliance hat), should be congratulated on managing such a great event. The Master (Mistress, surely?) of Ceremonies was Dr. Karen Horn of the Cologne Institute for Economic Research and former economics editor for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She was an outstanding choice, attractive, witty and very engaging, thus setting a wonderful tone for the evening.

The after-dinner speech was delivered by C. Boyden Gray, the imposing US Ambassador to the EU. He is a terrific speaker and I found his less than flattering remarks about the US legal profession most endearing. There was very little to disagree with in his advocacy of reducing limits to free trade and he was frank about how this needs to happen on both sides of the Atlantic.

Another notably good speaker was Ján Čarnogurský, the former Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic. In fact the only speaker who hit the wrong note was Iain Duncan Smith MP, who launched into a defence of his own think-tank, the Centre for Social Justice, although by the time he had finished speaking I still had no idea who he was defending it from or what the hell it actually does.

For details of who won what, see here, but the big winner of the evening was the Bulgarian think tank, the Institute for Market Economics, who walked away with two well deserved prizes. I was also delighted to see the very worthy UK based Taxpayers Alliance come away with an award. The TPA are like a fact-checking 'urban guerilla' organisation of thorn-in-the-side activists who have achieved results out of all proportion to the resources at their disposal.

I was quite struck by how young most of the think-tank and activist people in attendance were and that is surely a good thing.

The US Ambassador is an excellent speaker...



...and he towered over everyone! Seen here with Tural Veliyev of the Free Minds Association of Azerbaijan



Karen Horn and Cécile Phillipe, presenting an award to Richard Durana of the Institute of Economic and Social Studies in Slovakia



The delightful Cécile Phillipe, Director of the Molinari Economic Institute



Ján Čarnogurský is also an excellent speaker



Janet Daly is not someone I often agree with but I found little to disagree with last night



No, I am not going to put up any pictures of Iain Duncan Smith speaking



Big Pharma! Eye Catching Dresses!

(15)

My sparser (even) than usual blogging lately is largely the result of the expanding demands of NO2ID. Thank you to everyone (including several Samizdata contributors) who has added to the avalanche of cheques into our legal fund. The bank clerks in Marylebone High Street are grateful for the work, too.

We (NO2ID) are about to make things even more fun by recruiting a new cohort of refuseniks to join those 10,000 immortals who committed themselves in 2005. In the aftermath of the HMRC data-sharing scandal, the British public is ready for the message that the only way to stop the state from debauching your personal information is not to give it a chance.

When Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne vowed to defy the ID scheme recently, it quickly became clear that not many people really understood what this meant. We have formulated a nice clear promise that anyone at all can make, and set it free, online and off. It will be an interesting exercise in network effects.

What follows is a piece I wrote for public distribution explaining the point of the whole thing:

You might be prepared to go to gaol rather than have an ID card. But you can't.

David Blunkett has been smugly pronouncing that there will be no ID card martyrs because the intent is to have a system of penalties – like monstrous parking fines – hard to contest in court. So further punishments would relate to failure to pay, not ID cards. That silly distinction is currently irrelevant, since powers of direct compulsion have been dropped, for now. It has not stopped Mr Blunkett repeating it, though.

Subtler minds have been at work. The Home Office plans to make you to "volunteer". It hopes almost all the population will "volunteer", before most people have even noticed what is happening. Well before it rounds-up and force-fingerprints a few pariahs. Official documents will one by one be "designated", so that you cannot get one without at the same time asking to be placed – for life – on the National Identity Register.

The civil servant, Sylvanus Vivian who originated this idea in 1934 – yes, that’s right, nineteen thirty-four – called it "parasitic vitality". In other words, the scheme is a vampire. It has no life of its own, and thrives only if it feeds.

There is its weakness. We, collectively, can choose to starve the Identity and Passport Service. It only works smoothly if few are prepared to face a little inconvenience to resist. It only works at all if a large majority of the population can be hypnotised into thinking that it is just routine, no big deal. If enough of us refuse to be bled willingly, the beast will either starve or show its fangs.

Already 'e-Passports' have been used as a pretext to build a chain of interrogation centres to service the ID scheme. But further growth of the parasite will be harder to hide. Which is where you come in.

Making martyrdom hard, made resistance easy too. Actually breaking the law at this stage is hard to do. There is scarcely any ID card law to break; it is designed to be brought in silently by regulations, alongside administrative changes.

So that’s why NO2ID is suggesting a new form of non-violent direct action: pre-emptive resistance. You can do something positive now. Something totally legal; that has its own life, not determined by us, but by you. Anyone can do it. Anyone can help others do it. The more who do, the easier it is.

You can resolve openly, and clearly, not to do those specific things that give the ID scheme its "parasitic vitality":

I solemnly and publicly promise that:

• I shall not register for a national identity card
• I shall not supply personal details or fingerprints to a National Identity Register
• I shall not apply for any document or service if joining the National Identity Register is a condition of obtaining it
• I shall not co-operate with any Identity and Passport Service interview concerning my identity.
• I also promise by my example to encourage others to do the same.

In just one month of 2005, over 10,000 people pledged online not to register. Many more will take this NO2ID Pledge, and pass it on to others. Maybe the Government thinks it could force tens of thousands to submit by denying them access to their own lives. It would be a very brave Government that tried.

(23)

Why is this scum called animal rights activists?

A notorious extremist group says it has tampered with more than 250 items containing the antiseptic, which is mainly used to treat children suffering from cuts and grazes, as part of a long-running campaign against an animal testing laboratory.

The group, calling itself the Animal Rights Militia, said it targeted Savlon in a "clear and uncompromising" manner because it believes its Swiss manufacturer, Novartis, to be a client of the research centre Huntingdon Life Sciences.

And it warned its campaign would continue unless the pharmaceutical firm ends its links with HLS.

The Telegraph article seems to serve as a platform for their statement and agenda instead of a report that these criminals have been arrested and appropriately dealt with.

(27)

He wrapped up his Friday broadcast with carefully bracketed video of young Republicans in Washington. His softly presented outrage leads to the inevitable conclusion that he is embracing the libertarian principle of individual, personal action. The only other possible interpretation being that he is a sanctimonious hypocrite.

Ending his July 27 broadcast of Bill Moyers Journal, he makes his opinion very clear that unless someone has committed to personally experience the greatest possible cost of what they are advocating, their opinion is without standing and worthy only of ridicule and moral reprobation. His quiet anger is directed at people who advocate actions for which others will bear the burden. I for one consider this to be a marked improvement in Moyer's politics. Prior to this he has always identified strongly with activists who want to force the rest of society to bear the burden for their projects. I look forward eagerly to seeing him apply his new standard to every guest that he invites onto his program. It will be refreshing to only hear opinions from people who have first made a total personal sacrifice to a cause, before they may express belief in the justice of that cause. Because, Bill's right. If you have not given yourself totally to some great endeavor first, 'volunteering' others is the very essence of hypocrisy.

transcript excerpt:

BILL MOYERS: ... Less than a month ago, July 6, Private First Class LeRon Wilson, and another member of his platoon were killed when their military vehicle hit a roadside bomb south of Baghdad.

I was thinking of LeRon Wilson a few days later as I came upon this internet video the independent journalist Max Blumenthal. He had gone to a gathering of young Republicans in Washington and interviewed some of them. Here are some excerpts:

JUSTIN YORK, UNIV. OF CENTRAL FLORIDA '10: We are all supportive of the war; we all believe that it is very important to win the war and to fight Al Queda in Iraq so we are not fighting them here in the United States.

DAVID CLARY, UNIV. OF ILLINOIS '09: I like the Republican standpoint, fight them over there not over here. That's what we're doing right now and we should keep doing it.

RACHAEL DAVIS, UNIV. OF ARKANSAS '09: Um, basically, what I don't think people understand is that, if it's not fought in Iraq, we don't win over there, it's going to happen here.

CLINT PETERSON, UNIV. OF NORTH TEXAS, '08: I think frankly we went there because Al Qaeda was already there, they may not have [had] the forces they have now but they were there and essentially if we leave there we give them a stronghold.

BLUMENTHAL: Why are you not fighting them over there?

DAVID CLARY, UNIV. OF ILLINOIS '09: Why am I not fighting them over there?

BLUMENTHAL: Yeah?

DAVID CLARY, UNIV. OF ILLINOIS '09: Because I'm in college right now.

BLUMENTHAL: Do you plan to enlist?

DAVID CLARY, UNIV. OF ILLINOIS '09: I haven't ruled it out.

BLUMENTHAL: Are you going to serve?

JUSTIN YORK, UNIV. OF CENTRAL FLORIDA '10: I've thought about it, thinking about it, haven't decided.

BLUMENTHAL: Undecided? Why aren't you serving currently?

JUSTIN YORK, UNIV. OF CENTRAL FLORIDA '10: Well I'm an undergraduate right now and I had a scholarship...I just didn't have any real urge...I just didn't have any strong urge...

RALPH KETTELL, COLBY '09: Why am I not serving? I don't know...I mean... I really support this country strongly and I...you know... I didn't enlist. There is not much else I can say. I don't think that you can't talk about this issue if you're not serving.

BILL MOYERS: Private First Class LaRon Wilson has been posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. He was the 30th 18-year-old American soldier to be killed in Iraq. That's it for the JOURNAL. I'm Bill Moyers.

(30)

Joseph Rowntree, like other Victorian Giants, campaigned against social evils in the footsteps of William Wilberforce, the abolitionist. The list of evils are clear, universal, puritanically nonconformist and relevant to the twenty-first century.

When Joseph Rowntree, the chocolate baron, established his charitable trust in 1904, he charged it with seeking out and curing the great scourges of humanity

It should pay particular attention to war, slavery, intemperance, the opium traffic, impurity, and gambling, he said.

Now, the Rowntree Trust has become dissatisfied with traditional social evils. They are probably too fuddy-duddy and fail to move the charitably inclined. But Julia Unwin, the Trust Director, who also deputises at the Food Standards Agency, has a list...

The ambitious 18-month project will be launched with a lecture at the Royal Society of Arts tonight by Julia Unwin, the trust director.

She said: From the very start our founder had amazing far-sightedness in predicting that both the causes and manifestations of social evils would change over time. We are asking people: 'What is it that really appals you?'

Miss Unwin, deputy chairman of the Food Standards Agency, was reluctant to sway public opinion but said many new social problems arose from our growing affluence, including over-consumption; an ageing population; obesity; integration; alienation and political apathy.

You can add your vote here.

So, disgust with politics and choosing not to vote is now a social evil. How we can see the voluntary charity worker is now transformed into the professional disciplinarian, the whip of the public sector professional class, with all three mainstream parties as their political wing.

(4)

Cartoons, where would we be without them...

via Nasty, Brutish & Short

(34)

This is a rather gloomy public service announcement.

I wrote about the Serious Crime Bill in January. Since, it has proceeded quietly through the House of Lords, almost unchanged. Yesterday, so suddenly that I did not know it had happened, and was talking today about how NO2ID should brief MPs for its appearance, it received its Second Reading in the House of Commons. It is amazing that there has been no large scale protest about this

If you live in the UK (or are a voting ex-pat), you have a few weeks to write to your MP before it becomes law.

Update:

In response to popular demand, some more information. Here are:

On Part I of the Bill, a briefing note on Serious Crime Prevention Orders from the Conservative Liberty Forum.

On Part II, a somewhat more technical briefing (pdf)on the mindboggling abolition and replacement of incitement at common law from Liberty.

On Part III, A briefing I wrote (pdf) on the data-sharing aspects for NO2ID.

Which may collectively clarify what I'm going on about. Or not. But take my word for it, this is very bad indeed. Worse than ID cards. If you have an MP, write to them.

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Patrick Crozier defends Al Gore against the hypocrisy charge, in a way which I think is slightly mistaken. He compares Al Gore's vast greenhouse gas emissions with his, Patrick Crozier's, use of state regulated trains, which Patrick disapproves of, but still uses, unhypocritically. But I think that Patrick does not quite nail it. Gore is being somewhat hypocritical. He surely could fairly easily do more to reduce his emissions. But, those who disagree with Gore are being very unwise if they make that their central complaint about him. What matters is not the degree to which Gore is or is not personally doing what he says should be done by people generally, but whether he is right about what should be done.

I am talking here about the "we are not doing enough" way of winning - and of losing - arguments.

You win arguments in politics by saying exactly what you want and not stopping until you get it. Sometimes that means setting an impossibly high standard of improvement, because what you want is very hard to get. Tough. You want it? Say so. Never say you are entirely satisfied until you really are entirely satisfied. You do not win arguments by surrendering three quarters of your case before the argument even begins.

Suppose that Mr X announces a tax cut. I applaud, but I also say that although this is a small step in the right direction Mr X could and should have gone far further.

Suppose that you, on the other hand, oppose tax cuts, and want taxes to be higher, and higher, and higher, until the state dominates absolutely everything. The right way for you to oppose Mr X's particular tax cut is ... to oppose it! You should say: "This is a step in the wrong direction." But, if it is actually a rather small tax cut, what extreme tax enthusiasts are often tempted to say is that although it may be a tax cut, it is not a very big tax cut. The implication, and sometimes even the explicit claim, is that Mr X could easily have done more, "more" in such a case being awfully liable to sound like "better". Which is exactly what I, an enthusiastic tax cutter, am also saying. So, if you oppose the general direction of the policy that Mr X is going through the motions of supporting, but yet you complain that "Mr X could have done more" or "Mr X didn't really do that much", you are actually endorsing the agenda of your opponents. You are helping me to win. You are scoring, to put it in football terms, an own goal.

I think that all this bitching about Gore's gas emissions is achieving a similar outcome. Personally I am not sure whether it is wise to suppress greenhouse gas emissions. Is this necessary, or pointless and therefore economically harmful? Not sure. Still tracking the argument. I am inclined to think that the gases do a small amount of harm, but that the suppression of them does more harm, not least in weakening our technologically developing ability to respond to climate changes and climatic disasters,and that there may soon be far cheaper technology-based ways of getting rid of the gases. But, I am truly not sure.

But suppose that you are convinced, as many in my part of the political landscape are, that all this talk of greenhouse gases is a load of hooey. If this is your belief, then the last thing you should be doing is complaining that Gore is not doing enough to reduce his own emissions. On the contrary, you should be praising him for at least showing some commonsense in his personal economic and ecological conduct, and for having a lovely big house and generally living the kind of life that all of us should be happily aspiring to. Saying that he should cut his emissions, on the other hand, is to concede that the central argument of his movie is quite right, and his only mistake is in not doing even more of what you and he both agree should be done.

Those who oppose state education make the same mistake when someone who is pro-state education is observed sending their child to a non-state, fee-paying school. In this argument I am a convinced anti-statist, just as I am a total enthusiast for tax cuts being huge to the point of total state abolition. All state education should be ended, just as soon as that can possibly be contrived. But, when some Labour politician is revealed to be sending her kid to a half-decent fee-paying school rather than to a scumbag state school, I absolutely do not join the chorus of complaint about her "hypocrisy". On the contrary, I praise her for being the good and loving parent that she is. I do also say that I disagree with her about state schools in general, and say that her wise and correct decision for her child illustrates my belief that state education generally is bad, and that in this particular case, in choosing the non-state option she is not responding to some mere one-off aberration but to a general tendency for state schools generally to be rubbish compared to fee-paying schools. But the absolute last thing I do is try to bully the poor woman into sending her kid to some lousy state school when she can afford a better one.

No, I save all my vitriol in this argument for those truly and totally disgusting politicians who impose bad state schools upon their defenceless children out of mere ideological adherence to the general idea of state schools being good, even though they can afford to do what they know would be far better in their own particular case. That really is horrible. Consistently horrible. Stupid and evil, as opposed merely to good but stupid.

Back to Gore. If you think Gore is right about his gases, then it makes perfect sense for you to object that he emits too much gas himself. But if you think he is wrong about the gases, then for heaven's sake concentrate your efforts on explaining why. Do not let yourself be diverted (that link being a fairly randomly chosen example of the kind of thing I mean) into spreading enemy propaganda by agreeing with something else that your enemies are also saying, which is that Gore should indeed cut his emissions, and that by implication so should all of us.

To use another sporting metaphor: keep your eye on the ball.

I think I just wrote a Libertarian Alliance Tactical Note.

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No no, not money. I need ideas.

I recently agreed to do another chat spot on 18 Doughty Street TV, and like a fool I picked Tuesday March 20th, i.e. this evening, all unaware that tomorrow is Budget Day, and we would all have to talk about the damn Budget. I hate, hate, hate Budget Days and Budgets, and conversations about Budget Day and conversations about Budgets, from the depths of my soul. I find the details of tax law deeply depressing and complicated, not least deeply depressing because so damn complicated. Plus everyone on regular TV drones on about it all for hour after hour, while saying (because knowing) extremely little, like cricket commentators when it is raining only not funny or interesting.

Anyway, I got an email this morning from His IainDaleness which included the following instruction:

We will talk about tomorrow's budget in the first half hour. Please come armed with three things you'd like the Chancellor to do and three things you think he actually will do.

Any suggestions? I particularly need help with the "he actually will do" bit. Generally, presumably, he will (a) kiss babies and (b) steal their lollypops. (A lollypop for whoever can pin down the movie reference there.) But more precisely, what specific horrors are in the pipeline? I assume a lot of anti-4x4 crap. But what else?

And, of course, suggestions about what he should do will also be trawled through with a view to me using the best of them tonight, probably without credit to the originator.

I think that the entire government down be shut down for ever and taxes lowered to zero. But I think they want something more precise than that. So far, I can only think of saying, again, that The Top Rate of Income Tax Should Be Cut to Zero, which I think is a brilliant idea, if only because it makes the current lot of leftier-than-thou Conservatives squirm.

I am now off to read what UKIP has to say, budget-wise. (So far I have not got beyond the heading. Which should surely say "fiddles" rather than "tinkers". The Emperor Nero was a violinist, was he not?)

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Tomorrow is national No Smoking Day. Whoopeeeeeeee!!!!

I shall mark the occasion by puffing my way through at least one pack of my favourite Belgian cigarettes (not contributing to the cavernous coffers of HM Treasury makes the experience so much more enjoyable) while blowing great, billowing clouds of grey, acrid, carcinogenic fumes into the air.

I shall consider quitting if and when we ever have a national No Nagging, Preaching, Hectoring, Finger-Wagging, Pecksniffing, Condescending, Nannying Or Sanctimonious Sermonising Just Bugger Off And Mind Your Own Fucking Business Day.

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I must say that I like the style of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Rather than playing the game with mealy mouthed statements so typical of a lot of think-tanks, they push their ideas with a catchy boot-to-the-goolies like "Smoking is healthier than fascism". Not surprisingly this is available on a tee-shirt from those most righteous pranksters, Bureaucrash.

I feel a purchase coming on...

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Green on the outside, red on the inside.

UPDATE: members of the commentariat have alerted me to the fact that I did not devise the "watermelon" double entrendre first. Fine - consider this post a propagation of an excellent and underused meme.

(5)

There are quite a few fans of Sean Gabb who read this blog, so they might like to be told, if they have not been already, that Sean will be on 18 Doughty Street TV this evening between 9 and 10pm, discussing libertarianism. Sean is a fluent and experienced media performer and should be well worth seeing and hearing.

Here is a picture of him that I took last weekend, hatching who knows what plots with fellow Libertarian Alliance supremo Dr Tim Evans, at the LA's Conference in the resplendent National Liberal Club.

Captions anyone? Mine goes: "One day all this will be ours! Ours I tell you!"

(0)

For information on the public meeting on Regulation of Investigative Powers Act consultations, check out Blogzilla.

(19)

I am now donating about $0.01 to the Mises Institute each time I do a search online. As my various writing committments require me to look things up at a rate of at least 20 a day, this means that I am raising a dollar a week (excluding weekends). Goodsearch, a Yahoo-based search engine, donates the money on the basis of the number of searches carried out. Details can be found here.

Most Samizadatistas will disagree with the Mises Insitute for being isolationist on foreign affairs, although this position is motivated more by a refusal to support collectivism (even the 'good collectivism' of a war of liberation) rather than the desire to see the USA lose, which is closer to the left's position.

On the other hand, the Mises Institute is consistently against bad economics, government regulation, taxes and socialist theory as much as practice.

If the Mises Institute is too radically libertarian for your tastes, you can select another charity, you can even switch from time to time. Come to think of it, I could switch beneficiaries as I search different topics, or on different days of the week.

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I know how many readers and Samizdatistas enjoyed the glorious "Sod off, Swampy!" story from last year. Like the incorrigible news truffle pig he is, Tim Blair found that particular happy tale. This time Tim has prime beef on the menu. Here's a taste:

Protester Angie Stephenson says it was terrifying.

"The workers, they were standing around cheering and whooping and yelling and making lewd comments so we had to call the police and tell them to get out here straight away,"

(16)

The abrupt end to the parliamentary wrangling over what we must now get used to calling the Identity Cards Act 2006 has taken many people by surprise. (Not least the parliamentary draftsmen, who find themselves with internal references to the Identity Cards Act 2005 in places.) I still can't quite figure out what happened, but am starting to think the timing is a matter of Tory electoral and media strategy.

For those benighted souls who are not yet subscribers to NO2ID's newsletter, here is our declaration of intent.

The Bill has passed - now the real fight begins.

One of our key tasks is to make the ID scheme politically unsupportable BY ANYONE. We have to make running on a platform that supports (in fact, that does not actively oppose) compulsory registration, a National Identity Register and ID cards political suicide for any party or politician going into any sort of election.

Starting NOW.

This is a long term goal, but one that is absolutely achievable in stages. We are already winning hearts and minds - a 30% shift in public opinion to date - and will continue to do so.

The Government knows that it has to win people over, too - it can't simply bully its way to its goal, like it did in parliament. But it'll be hampered by the scheme's costs spiralling out of control (with the attendant blast of bad publicity every 6 months), the technology failing (predictably or spectacularly), having to background-check and fingerprint perfectly law-abiding citizens, screwing up 1 in 10 (or more) people's details, issuing a card that is basically no use for anything much but scraping ice off your windscreen until 2013 (except maybe 'travel within Europe' - but then you're getting the thing alongside a proper passport...), etc., etc., etc. PLUS all the stuff we're going to do!

In May, there are local elections.

We ask that, before the elections, every NO2ID supporter and ID opponent in the country asks every single one of their potential representatives their position on ID cards, and makes it clear to them (especially those who defend the ID scheme) that they will NEVER vote for a supporter of compulsory registration or ID cards. This is not (yet) a 'decapitation' strategy, nor are we proposing tactical voting in May - but if enough people do this, the aspiring political class will begin to sit up and take notice.

How many letters, e-mails or meetings will this take? We cannot say. But if you get no response, send another letter - always keep copies - and start writing to your local paper, too: "This candidate refuses to engage with the genuine concerns of a potential constituent, how fit for office can (s)he be?". Turn up at hustings and wave copies of your unanswered letters. At some point you'll get a response - and the longer it takes, the worse the candidate looks. If you do get an interesting response, e.g. vehement opposition to the scheme by a Labour candidate, do let us know [send an e-mail to office@no2id.net].

None of this is hard to do. It just requires that enough of us get organised and DO it.

Please start this weekend - find out who your candidates will be. Get their addresses. Write the first letter, construct a questionnaire, see if any of them will respond to e-mail (but don't rely exclusively on it). And follow through.

In the next five weeks you could sow the seeds of defeat for the ID scheme in your area, but you'll never know unless you try.

Phil Booth
National Coordinator, NO2ID

What did you do in the war for freedom, Daddy?

(No excuses for those abroad. You can send us money by PayPal through a button on our site.)

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The rally in Trafalgar Square today was attended by about 1,000 (at most by my estimate) very disparate people and was a worthy effort for a poorly funded ad-hoc team of folks.

My main criticism would be that most of the speakers seemed to have little concept of speaking to a wide coalition of people united by a single issue: If an Iranian communist or anyone else, wants to talk about freedom of expression at a rally in London, then I am happy to listen, but the moment they start talking about Guantanamo Bay, US foreign policy or 'just' economic systems, which are NOTHING to do with the issue at hand, I will quite bluntly thank them to stick their views where the sun does not shine. They would do well to talk about what we have in common and not remind me that we are in fact profound ideological enemies.

Peter Tatchell and Evan Harris were well received and made compelling points. However in my opinion Sean Gabb was without doubt the best speaker as he was direct, clear and uncompromising, and most importantly confined his remarks entirely to the subject of freedom of expression. He also spoke for about half as long as most as the others, eschewing off-topic rambling and partisan digressions, which also endeared him to many in the crowd. If an unreconstructed free market capitalist like Gabb can resist advocating capitalism at a pro-freedom of expression rally, I will thank communists, socialists, greens and anyone else to kindly show the same focus on why we came to listen to what they have to say.

The stout fellows of the Infidel Bloggers Alliance were well
represented and took the piss most artfully





In the Trafalgar Square cafe, they were serving Danish Pastries, which seemed appropriate

 







Police photographers were very much in evidence and
seemed inordinately interested in the back of Sean Gabb's head

 

The police did not like this sign at all



According to a warden, there is allegedly a by-law against flying national flags in Trafalgar Square, which I find hard to believe as I always see Palestinian flags and (burning) US or Israeli flags when ever folks from the Middle East protest in Trafalgar Square... so the Danish Flags here became 'Danish Shawls'... I find such lack of compliance with regulations quite heartening.

On two occasions, The Plod tried to prevent certain signs being shown (one featured the Mohammed Cartoons on a placard from the Iranian Communist Party and another showed a mask of Tony Blair over a Nazi symbol). These incidents at a 'pro-freedom of expression' rally, and the presence of the police taking pictures of the crowd, were a useful reminder of the deadening hand of the state and just how precarious the state of civil liberties in Britain are.

(38)

Just a reminder that there will be a rally in Trafalgar Square tomorrow between 2:00pm and 4:00pm, Saturday March 25th. The Samizdatistas will be well represented there and I hope to get the chance to meet a few more of our commentariat at the event. Time to hold the line.

(36)

Actorist Susan Sarandon is in negotiations to play Cindy Sheehan in an upcoming telemovie portraying the latter's life.

(Via Drudge)

(5)

As expected, the electoral results from Belarus were a load of cobblers. Now the unexpected protests have started, with an estimated 5,000 brave protestors supporting the opposition candidate, Milinkevich, and declaring the elction null and void.

Thousands of protesters thronged the main square of the Belarusian capital on Sunday in defiance of a government ban, refusing to recognize a presidential vote that appeared all but certain to give the iron-fisted incumbent a third term.

The crowd hooted when a large video screen broadcast a live statement from the Central Election Commission chief, who announced results that showed President Alexander Lukashenko headed toward overwhelming victory in Sunday's vote.

The protesters chanted "Long Live Belarus!" and the name of the main opposition candidate, Alexander Milinkevich. Some waved a national flag that Lukashenko banned in favor of a Soviet-style replacement, while others waved European Union flags. Milinkevich arrived at Oktyabrskaya square later.

These are the results from the election thief:

The elections chief, Lidia Yermoshina, said Lukashenko had won 89 percent of the vote, according to returns from nearly one-fifth of polling districts. The results virtually guaranteed a third term for the authoritarian leader who has ruled the republic since 1994.

"Lukashenko cannot have won 80 percent!" he said, referring to exit polls conducted by two groups the opposition says are loyal to the government and released just hours after voting began that projected he would win more than 80 percent of the vote.

"Cannot! Cannot! Cannot!" the crowd chanted.

Let us remember that Lukashenko has no qualms about viewing all of these protestors as terrorists. Russia will stand idly by, with the satisfied smile of Reynaud, and the EU will wring its hands, a pity it isn't its own bloody neck!

However, I am quite pessimistic about the outcome. Lukashenko has the support of stagnation amongst the majority of the population. Only those whose future hopes have vanished under this regime will be in the square tonight.

Now we wait for Lukashenko's move...frostbite or tanks?

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There is a rally going to be held in Trafalgar Square between 2:00pm and 4:00pm on Saturday March 25th 2006, in support of freedom of expression. Be there and show your support! There is also going to be a similar rally in Berlin on the same day and hopefully others organised in various cities if a critical mass of interest can be attracted.

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... but the Dissident Frogman is still waiting for someone to give him the suitable translations for his banners in Arabic. Any takers?

(7)

If you are in Oxford on Saturday and want to join a protest against animal rights extremists, check this out. The Research Defence Society blog has more, as does the Social Affairs Unit and Laurie's own blog.

(9)

Those who have felt left out by the various cartoon demonstrations recently, and fancy getting out on the streets in support of something they care about have a chance on Monday lunchtime. In my capacity as General Secretary of NO2ID, may I extend an open invitation:

NO2ID and Liberty will be holding an emergency lobby of Parliament on 13th February 2006, when the Identity Cards Bill returns to the Commons for consideration of Lords' amendments. Mr Blair will be wielding the whip for MPs to assent to the nationalisation of the people with as little fuss as possible.

The lobby will take place from 12 noon until 1:00pm on the sundial in Old Palace Yard. This is opposite the St Stephen's Gate entrance to the Houses of Parliament. [Location marked 'H' on this map (pdf)]

This will be your last chance to make a visible protest against the Bill before it goes into the final stages of negotiation between the two houses. And for Samizdata people, it is a rare chance to make common cause with a true rainbow coalition - the fabulous collective of security professionals and technologists, business-people and anti-capitalists, spooks and mooks, great and good, lefties, ultra-lefties, Greens, red-greens, nationalists, internationalists, peaceniks, Old Labourites, New Tories, LibDems, Europhiles, Euroskeptics, Muslims, evangelical Christians, not-so-evangelical Christians, outright pagans, constitutional wonks, geeks, babes, and Trots that are backing the NO2ID campaign.

As always, we shall be laying on some props, but please do bring your own (death-threat-free) banners and placards - the bigger and clearer the better.

To get an idea of numbers, for our own comfort and the helpeful people from Charing Cross police station. we'd appreciate a note to events@no2id.net to let us know if you're intending to come, though it is not obligatory.

End of commercial. Here's the musical version.

(29)

This call [original link removed] for a rally in Trafalgar Square next Saturday is interesting. Does anyone know any more details of who is behind it? I would like to know more before leaping to any conclusions.

update: question answered - not worth supporting one group of (white) fascists protesting against another group of (Islamic) fascists

(19)

Recently, a Greenpeace boat was rammed by a Japanese whaling ship. Or vice versa, depending on which side of the fence you sit on. Somewhere in my blogospheric wanderings, I stumbled over a Greenpeace blog purportedly authored by the crew on that particular mission. Since sparring with members of the crew and those peopling their fawning commentariat, I am reminded yet again how soft-headed, shallow and emotionally driven the anti-whaling argument is.

It continues to amaze me how, over the years, Greenpeace has pulled off such a remarkable public relations campaign in regards to whaling. They have successfully ensured the utter ignorance of many hundreds of millions of otherwise intelligent individuals on the matter of whaling. For most opposed to whaling, there is one species, "the whale", and it is being fished into extinction by those nasty Japanese. Forget the fact that some species of whale are not even close to endangered. The minke, for example, has an international population ranging somewhere between 500 000 - 1.1 million individuals. The minke is the most commonly harvested whale. Icelandic and Norwegian whalers only hunt minkes and the vast majority of the Japanese catch consists of minkes. Forget the fact that, when the Japanese hunt other species, each year they have never taken more than 51 Bryde's whales, 10 sperm whales or 100 sei whales. If you want to check the population levels on each of those whale species, please take a look at the earlier IWC chart I linked to. To suggest this tiny rate of harvesting will have a negative impact on whale populations is preposterous. Even if the Japanese follow through on their threat to double their cull of minkes to about 1000, and - let's be generous - add another 1000 taken by the Icelandic, the Norwegians and indigenous groups, this cumulative figure of 2000 is clearly sustainable given a conservative population growth rate of 1% and a highly conservative total population of 500 000.

Another point that the anti-whaling wailers do not like to concede and invert in their rhetoric; whaling in international waters is not illegal. Membership of the International Whaling Commission is entirely voluntary, and no member is bound to accept its rulings. For example, IWC member Norway has been catching minke whales under an objection to the moratorium on whaling since it was put in place in 1986. Japan, whilst almost certainly running a misleading campaign that asserts its catch is predominantly for scientific purposes, could withdraw from the moratorium on commercial whaling and start openly whaling commercially any time it wanted to.

A further blow to the relevance of the anti-whalers' cause can be seen in the dwindling market for whale meat. Even arch enviro-moonbat David Suzuki concedes that the market for whale meat is falling in Japan. The same thing is happening in Norway, according to other environmental hysterics. Simply, the young don't much care for the stuff in Japan or Norway. The market for whale meat is literally dying. As for any potential non-culinary demand in the West, we no longer need whale oil, and there are far cheaper sources of pet food. When viewed rationally, whaling is a non-event, and its importance is further deflating.

Considering the above, the anti-whaling campaign seems like a ridiculous waste of energy if "saving the environment" is key. One of the eco-pirates on the Greenpeace boat claimed, in a response to my initial post on their blog, that "Greenpeace's position is based purely on the need to leave healthy intact ocean ecosystems for future generations." If they were truly a group concerned with preserving ocean ecosystems, they would be concentrating their efforts in South East Asia, where numerous fisheries are in various stages of collapse due to rampant overfishing. The whaling debate shows Greenpeace for what they are - a bunch of filthy hypocrites who ignore true environmental catastrophes to chase after high profile red herrings. Please pardon the pelagic pun.

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Incoming email:

Greeting!

Keith Burgess Jackson, a tenured philosophy professor, has just started a new blog designed to deflate thuggish far-Leftist blogger, Brian Leiter. Leiter has a lot of influence and uses it to harm people who dare to challenge him. So Keith wants to try to civilize him a bit. Apparently Leiter is obsessed with his reputation. Keith says that Leiter scours the Internet for references to himself and then writes to people to get bad references removed. He has also apparently hired a lawyer to get the University of Pennsylvania law students to take down their rankings blog. Keith wants to put him down, but only by saying true things about him. Truth is an absolute defense to defamation. If you would like to help, at least please blogroll the new blog so that it rises in Google's rankings, so that when people type "Brian Leiter" into Google, the new blog comes up. I myself have no connection with the new blog - just a wish to see it thrive. The blog is here: http://brianleiter.blogspot.com

Thanks

John Ray

Sounds like a laugh. Presumably this posting will help.

I have no idea just how much of a shit this Brian Leiter is, and how much he contributes to the "Brians are bad" syndrome, but I expect that he is indeed a shit to some degree. I will visit this blog a few times, and then decide if I want to keep reading it. If I do, I will then blogroll it, here.

Nearly forgot. Happy New Year everybody.

(45)

From David Tebbutt:

This is the promise: "The Habitat JAM will gather your input and add it to thousands of others to identify actionable ideas for the Vancouver World Urban Forum agenda and influence the Forum's content. It will start conversations and build new networks that bring enormous potential to global problem solving."

It sounds more like a threat to me. At best, manipulated bullshit. Problem solving is a fine thing, but the fewer conversations and networks devoted to "global" problem solving, the better, I would say. This is, I think, because "global" bundles together lots of difficulties into one huge impossibility, which you then blame on global capitalism. But the way to actually solve problems is to do what actual capitalists actually do, which is break the problems up into solluble particles.

Still, "actionable" means that someone will at least be able to sue these people, yes? No. Non-responsibility for resulting chaos is of the essence of gatherings like this.

(18)

In response to overwhelming popular demand (Julian Taylor can be a bit overwhelming sometimes) here is the text of the Marie Antoinette International Dead Liberty Award for the year 2005, which has been awarded by the Libertarian Alliance to Robert Gabriel Mugabe, and which I featured yesterday in one of these photographs.

Click on this:

I hope you (Julian Taylor) can read that okay, and that it need not be typed in, again.

So, since we are on the subject of Mugabe, how are things in Zimbabwe these days? Well, this story says quite a lot:

Harare, Zimbabwe, 11/17 - A magistrates court in Zimbabwe Thursday dropped corruption charges against President Robert Mugabe`s nephew, two weeks after his high profile arrest on suspicion of graft involving billions of dollars.

Leo Mugabe and his wife Veronica were arrested on charges of illegally selling flour on the local market and exporting it to Mozambique.

Trade in wheat and flour, both of which are in short supply here, is controlled and exports are banned to preserve stocks for the local market.

No evidence, according to the magistrate. I do not suppose that lack of evidence is usually much of a problem, in Zimbabwe nowadays. But this case must have been rather different.

I wonder how Robert Mugabe himself feels about this. I do not assume that he will automatically side with his nephew. As I wrote here, a while ago, I was briefly acquainted with another relative of his, and I can report that the Mugabe family is not the proverbial big happy one. They do not all stick together. They quarrel. And Robert Mugabe is easily stubborn enough and self-righteously cruel enough to throw a relative to the wolves, if he decided that this was the right thing for him to do, just as he has decided that wrecking Zimbabwe is the right thing for him to do and will stubbornly continue with that, until death or ruin stops him.

In other words, this Libertarian Alliance prize will change nothing in Zimbabwe, nothing at all. But, future recipients of the award may perhaps be influenced by it.

(19)

The whole issue of Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize in 1932 has always pissed me off. It just rankles that he got away with it, so the least we can do is blacken the bastard's name posthumously for the sake of the millions of dead Ukrainians he lied about.

Now that Harold Pinter has won a Nobel Prize for literature, I guess the tradition of lionising men of letters who are apologists for mass murdering leftists is still alive and well.

Want to make your voice heard on the issue of Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize? Take a look at Cyber Cossack (and check out their great site banner) and if you are in the NY area, consider lending your hand to a bit of activism.

Better late than never.

(0)

Tomorrow (Wednesday) the issue of trade justice will be topical. Free-market NGO Global Growth is looking for volunteers in London who would be willing to help with a stunt outside the French Embassy. If you are free in the middle of the day tomorrow, e-mail your details to info at global-growth.org. Please include your mobile number.

(4)

Reporters without Borders has produced a useful handbook for blogging in an unfree environment. We will be adding a sidebar link to this useful resource which has some technical tips that may be of interest to people in places where Big Brother tries to controls everything you read.

It can be purchased or downloaded for free from here.

The guide to dissident blogging

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James Waterton of the Daily Constitutional sees the need for more hardcore activists to spread the word for classical liberal values... and he also sees the need for more people to read his excellent articles. We agree with him on both counts

I was having a chat today with two friends about the nature of a market society. Both guys are intelligent, open minded and lacking ideological zeal. After talking about this and that, the discussion turned into me defending the free market of commerce and culture. Neither of them are heavily interested in politics, however they both articulated their positions with cognisance and we had a good discussion.

Because of the above discussion and the assumptions my friends held of the free market, I came to realise that - as enthusiasts of the free market - we do very little to actively promote the cause and its benefits. We hope our continually improving lives do the talking for us. Trouble is, these benefits can be twisted by people who do not agree with us. We are getting rich, says Green Left, at the expense of those in the third world and/or in our underclass. This is rubbish, of course, but it is an easily grasped concept, no matter how misguided. A group like Resistance goes out to a lot of schools to talk to students about the beauty of socialism. It is rich pickings for them there, because the simplistic truths of socialism appeal to minds that are neither sullied with the realities of human nature nor self-supporting adults. It is not hard to make a teenager feel bad about our society. Ask them if they lead a comfortable life. Show them a few pictures of starving African children. Let them join the dots. Child's play.

Trouble is, as we all know, widespread socialism was a dismal failure, and the few countries that continue to fly the banner are collapsing failures. However kids - especially compassionate kids - are still easily conned. Okay, maybe conned is the wrong word. They are just not offered an alternative point of view, and what they are being shown by our leftist friends is easy to understand and makes sense prima facie. I was a high-minded socialist back in the day, and I believed a whole manner of things that I find utterly repugnant today. For example, I considered that an absolute majority was always right. Someone backed me into a corner once and posed the following scenario - if an absolute majority decided that it was okay to kill me, would I have a problem with that. I sacrificed sanity for consistency and answered, no, I would not, if that is what the majority wanted.

I have found that this kind of woolly thinking is common in politically aware teenagers, and I believe it is because they are never offered an alternative. Socialism appears to make sense. No one tells them how it produces undesirable outcomes. Even when the aforementioned teenagers embrace adult reality and do away with socialism and the chimeric solutions it offers, most still retain a general distrust of free markets into their adulthood, even though they more often than not have trouble justifying their position if prodded. In regards to my friends, I was presenting a model that they did not know a great deal about. They knew its ostensible failings, but knew little of its strengths. They would possibly never considered, and certainly never accepted, the moral argument for a free market. They knew my case was logical, however the conditioned response of the average young adult to free markets made them still suspect that "something was wrong" with capitalism, free markets, individual responsibility etc. even though more often than not they could not put their finger on what it was. This syndrome is politically important, because when multiplied across society, it has implications on policy and how far the remaining vestiges of the socialist state can be rolled back - for the good of all.

If someone had have presented me with the case for free markets when I was in high school, I would have probably dismissed it out of hand. However, planting the seed is half the job done. As it happened, I changed my stance a couple of years after graduation. It took about one and a half years of a relentless bombardment of logic from a bunch of Objectivists to bring me round. I am not an Objectivist myself, however they certainly influenced my current liberal outlook. The people I was talking to earlier today are probably where I was when I encountered the Randroids. Those guys took a year and a half to convince me; I wouldn't have even started to turn my friends around. On the whole, people do not radically alter their views easily. However, this process would be a lot easier and quicker if the pre-existing cynicism towards the free market that my friends held was not there.

Which is where we free market enthusiasts come in. The morality of Adam Smith's invisible hand is more sophisticated and is not as easily digested as the ostensibly moral "perfect equality" socialist model, however Free Marketeers should debate Green Left, Resistance and those of their ilk at schools or wherever they appear. Just taking a quick peek at their publications and arguments, it is quite obvious that anyone with even a thimble of debating flair could wipe the floor with these lefty halfwits and their demented, unreal truisms. Their creed is barren, it lost its dynamism long ago. However, it could rear its ugly head again with enough support. There are signs that it's happening already with governments across the world reversing the Thatcherite/Reaganite trend towards smaller government. I believe this has something to do with the fact that socialism's pallbearers are much better at spreading their message than the unknowing footsoldiers of capitalism toiling in banks, brothels, barnyards or any business large and small. The beneficiaries of the free market - that is pretty much everyone, even though realistically I could only expect enthusiasts to rally - need to understand that their right to trade freely is not inextinguishable. We should be making a stronger effort to communicate the superior free market message to the youth, if only to ensure that our way of living continues. The free market system is the hope of the world. Those who understand that should spruik its benefits to the neutrals and unbelievers. We should try much harder to sign up the former and sway the latter.

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Hate the idea of ID cards? Do not keep your views to yourself.

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I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund but only if 10,000 other people will also make this same pledge.
- Phil Booth, NO2ID National Coordinator at PledgeBank

Deadline is 9th October 2005, 2,934 people have signed up, 7066 more are needed. Those in the UK, please sign up.

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Incoming email from Sean Gabb:

Dear Brian,

I know this is not the best time or place for the debate � I believe much of the audience wants to leave afterwards to wander up and down outside Parliament waving candles or some such. I hope to be abed by then. But it may be an important event. If you cannot attend, please circulate.

Regards,

Sean

I could attend but do not want to. I am going through a quietist phase just now. But I am happy to pass it all on:

Free Trade v Fair Trade

A Debate Organised by Christian Aid
St Margaret's Church, Westminster (Near Parliament)
Friday 15th Aril 2005 � 11.50pm to 1am

What is best for poor countries? Do they need global free trade in goods and services? Or is this just a cover for western neo-imperialism? Do such countries instead need fair trade � a system in which local producers are encouraged to develop without competition from larger foreign countries?

Come along and listen, and have your say.

Chair: Alan Beattie, The Financial Times

For Free Trade: Dr Sean Gabb, Libertarian Alliance; Alex Singleton, Globalization Institute

For Fair Trade: Martin Khor, Third World Network; Prosper Heoyi, Oxfam

For further details, contact:
Leo Bryant
Campaign Events
Christian Aid
020 7523 2264
camtemp3@christian-aid.org

Sean adds the following:

Assuming other speakers will give permission, Sean Gabb will video the whole event, and will make DVDs available. He will certainly record his own contribution.

This flyer was put together by Sean Gabb on the basis of limited information. He had nothing to do with what he considers the dreadful time and place of the debate, but is told that around 700 people will attend.

Good luck gentlemen. I look forward to viewing the DVD.

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Another of my friends has succumbed to the inevitable and started a weblog, this time my Austin, Texas-based pal Alan R. Weiss. Alan is a tremendous dynamo of a character; he is a former vice president of the Free State Project and still closely involved in that venture. Alan is also a businessman an innovator who has harnessed cutting-edge venture capital financing techniques to accelerate the writing achievements of noted libertarian author and campaigner, L. Neil Smith. My girlfriend and I spent a wonderful long weekend in Austin staying with Alan's great family last September during a marathon trip around the country. I can strongly recommend Austin as a place to visit.

Oh, and he is also a big Firefly fan. Does the guy have no flaws?

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Last night I attended a fascinating talk about the libertarian movement in Spain, hosted by Tim Evans in Putney, and given by Gabriel Calzada, who had been known to me before last night only as the author (maybe � I was unsure) of this essay.

The message Gabriel delivered to a small but very attentive group of London libertarians can be briefly summarised as follows: the Spanish libertarian movement is extraordinarily big and is doing extraordinarily well.

Gabriel started his talk with some history, concerning the Salamanca school of Natural Law theorists, mentioning the names of Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco de Suarez, and Juan de Mariana. Here is a famous Mariana quote:

Taxes are commonly a calamity for the people and a nightmare for the government. For the former they are always excessive; for the latter they are never enough, never too much.

But that was a very long time ago, and that kind of thing only influenced modern Spain indirectly, via its influence on the Austrian school.

It became very clear as the evening went on that the enormous Spanish anarchist movement that flourished about a century ago is crucial to any understanding of the current Spanish libertarian movement. Anarchism as a political force in Spain was eventually decapitated by the supposed allies of the anarchists, the Communists, for being insufficiently obedient to Stalin, but the climate of opinion � what we here at Samizdata call the meta-context � of anarchism lived on in Spain. Whereas the typical political question in other countries is something like: How shall we govern ourselves?, in Spain the question is: How shall we be free? How, as it were, do you do freedom? With a question like that, it makes sense that the libertarian answer to that question (one word summary: property) would attract a mountain of enthusiastic attention, and it has.

Perhaps another reason for the dramatic impact of libertarianism in Spain is that Spain has, until challenged by the libertarians, been intellectually dominated by Communism. Anarchism having been wiped out, and anti-Communism having become so tainted by Francoism, that left the lefties ruling the media roost in Spain, in the form of such mass media giants as El Pais, the biggest national newspaper in Spain, which makes the Guardian seem to Gabriel like a centrist/liberal kitten by comparison. Lots of libertarians are converts from leftism, and Spain is very full of people who have been raised in a leftist manner but who are looking for different answers.

It may also have helped the rise of libertarianism, although this was not mentioned by Gabriel or in discussion, that Spain is now economically so vibrant, compared to earlier times.

Gabriel, interestingly, preferred to focus on the achievements of two individuals: Jesus Huerta de Soto, and Federico Jimenez Losantos. Huerta is the key scholar, and Jimenez is a key media performer, and both are men of "contageous enthusiasm", a phrase Gabriel used several times.

He also mentioned the vital role that the Internet has played in this story. Again, summarising brutally, whereas the Communists owned the old media, the libertarians own the Internet, to the point where the Communists are getting seriously worried.

Gabriel mentioned two internet sites in particular, liberalismo.org (scholarship) and Libertad Digital (current affairs). Both have astronomical hit rates, of the order of a million a month (sorry but I am bad at numbers). When those Communists type any Spanish 'issue' into their search engines, time and time again, the first few hits are libertarian analyses. No wonder they are so anxious, and have been saying that something ought to be done about controlling the Internet.

Jimenez is also doing extraordinarily well on the radio.

I could attempt to go on, on the basis of my scribbled and inadequate notes, but I will leave it at that for now, hoping that Gabriel will regard this report as better than nothing. (Antoine Clarke, also present, might like to comment about all the things I missed, and maybe clarify some of the numbers involved in this story, people, hit rates, etc.) I will add only that whereas there are now no Spanish libertarian sites which also present themselves to the English speaking world in English, this is apparently about to change. There will soon be an English language site devoted to Spanish affairs, written by Spanish libertarians. Gabriel has promised to inform us as soon as it gets going.

Altogether a fascinating, and most encouraging evening.

Afterwards we had a late supper at Tim and Helen's, which is where I took this photo of Gabriel.

Hayek (on the left in black and white) is saying: what is that greenery doing in front of me? Gabriel is a great enemy of greenery, having recently penned a denunciation of the Kyoto Treaty, so particular apologies for that blemish.

Oh, and did I mention that Gabriel Calzada has also just been made a Professor at the University of Madrid?

If ideas have consequences, and they definitely do, then Spanish libertarianism is going to have some very big consequences indeed.

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The No2ID campaign has established an e-petition aimed at 10 Downing Street demanding the end to plans for imposing mandatory ID cards and pervasive state databases recording a vast range of what you do in your life.

The No2ID campaigners have taken the line of principled objection, given that the government seem to have decided that there is no longer any room for public debate and refuses to engage with serious - and growing - civil liberty and privacy concerns with the scheme. The Home Office have not met once with civil liberties organisations yet say their concerns have been addressed whilst at the same time avoiding public meetings but at the same time having private briefing with technology partners for introducing the schemes.

Take a stand and make your voice heard while you still can at www.no2id-petition.net. Time is fast running out.

The state is not your friend.

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The No2ID launch was held in the basement bar of The Corner Store in Covent Garden, a spacious restaurant/pub catering for the tourist trade. The attendance was good, with more and more interested parties walking in as the clock crept past midday until the small room was overflowing.

The two speakers were Neil Gerrard, Labour MP for Wolverhampton, and Debbie Chay, the Chair of Charter88, representing the civil liberties movement, now repackaged as civil libertarianism, to distinguish itself from the Real Thing. Both provided telling anecdotes on the idiocies and dangers that an ID system would represent. Nevertheless, there was a telling gap in their analysis. Both were unable to provide a convincing story as to why the government was introducing this measure. Without understanding the motives behind the development of the ID scheme, it will prove far more difficult to halt or reverse.

I also had the pleasure of meeting Guy Herbert, a name not so unfamiliar here. His own fear was that the ID scheme will depend upon the establishment of databases that will require a far greater intrusion into the private lives of citizens if the state is to monitor them effectively.

My conclusions on the meeting were hopeful and fearful. As with any new campaigning organisation, there is a lot of work to be done in order to achieve the aim of defending civil liberties in the UK. Mark Littlewood, their National Coordinator, quipped that there were few organisations which could boast the Libertarian Alliance and Globalise Resistance as supporting organisations. Yet, as I talked with a couple of campaigners from the Left, they proved unresponsive to my thesis that they had to attract the middle classes: people who read the Daily Mail or supported the Countryside Alliance, if they wished to succeed. Since most of the activists were Left rather than Right in orientation, this may skew the activities and demands of No2ID.

Secondly, the lack of analysis may prove a boon for libertarians. Neil Gerrard asked "why anyone would wish to introduce ID cards?". The answer is complex: strategies to control the individual by the state, which has an increasing need to obtain information (once deemed private) in order to further this end. Boondoggles such as the evil machinations of private capitalists who could make vast profits from any contracts awarded by government should remain a sideshow. They will not convince people fearful of a terrorist bomb. Libertarianism provides the strongest resource for crafting a message that can appeal to all of those affected: from men with the wrong colour of skin who will be stopped even more often and asked for some form of ID to the yound, single professional who never encounters the state, until this drops through their letterbox.

However, if there is a bomb in the United Kingdom on the scale of Madrid or the WTC, all bets are off. The government will argue that a terrorist atrocity requires the development of the surveillance state, backed up by authoritarian laws.

Crossposted to White Rose

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The stunt pulled by pro-hunting protestors of intruding into the inner sanctum of the House of Commons has produced a large number of very predictable responses. MPs and other establishment figures harrumphed that "Parliament's privileges have been infringed!" and "This is an attack on democracy itself!" and "We must protect this most important of our institutions!" and "The protestors must not alienate people by acting so despicably!"...

Well I have a suggestion for the pro-hunt protestors: ignore all those remarks because the only way to win is to fight your battles on ground of your choosing. As David Carr pointed out earlier with regard to when one of the protestors in the Commons shouted "This isn't democracy. You are overturning democracy." - Wrong. This is democracy in action and you are on the receiving end of it.

What they really, really need to understand is that the majority of people in Britain are urban folk who are at best utterly indifferent to the protestor's concerns and frequently somewhat hostile to them. The hunters and their supporters cannot hope to convince a majority that hunting is something that is either important or even needs to be tolerated.

Do not waste your time making arguments about 'country livelihood' or 'managing pests' because not only do most people not believe you (such as me, for example), most simply do not care because they feel no particular affinity with you. It is preposterous to argue that the only effective way to put down vermin is to chase them on horseback with hounds.

It is simply not a matter for highly questionable utilitarian arguments but rather for arguing for free association to do what you will on private property. That is the only coherent and more importantly resonant argument to make.

If gay men can congregate together in clubs to do things the majority of people find deeply distasteful, without having to worry about being raided by the fuzz, why cannot foxhunters congregate together to do things the majority find distasteful without worrying about the Boys in Blue showing up? Successfully point out to gay rights activists that making the prejudices of the majority the law of the land is not something they should be comfortable with... and suddenly the class warriors behind the hunting ban might find it much harder to 'bash the toffs' as the implications of where this is clearly heading starts to dawn on altogether different groups.

In short, stop making invocations to the graven idol called 'Democracy' because it will not hear your prayers. Accept that you are a heretic and raise up an idol of your own. Call it, say, 'Liberty' and then challenge your enemies to denounce it.

If you want to defend your liberty to do things in free association with likeminded folk on private property, you will have to come to some very sobering realisations.

Firstly, realise that you will always be a minority and may never be a match for the political machine arrayed against you. However that does not mean are alone. There are millions of people who support your views with far more intensity than the many million more who oppose them.

Secondly, accept that The System which the Barbour jacket, flat cap and green wellington set always assumed was, when push comes to shove, there to protect them, is in fact run by people with whom in many instances you have about as much in common culturally as Osama Bin Laden. Moreover, a great many of those people who are oiling the machine under which your aspirations are being crushed are actually members of the Tory party and some of your friends are in fact members of the Labour party. That said it is true that most of the people behind what is happening are indeed Labour and LibDem drones... so just stop thinking it terms of party politics because political parties, any political parties, are just components of the system you are going to have to confront. If you think a mere change of government can make your problems go away forever, you are sadly mistaken.

Thirdly, democratic politics is not the only way to cause political change. Cast your mind back to the days of the Poll Tax and also try to take a dispassionate look at the political realities in Ulster. It is not really violence that is the issue but the fact substantial activist minorities simply refused to accept the verdict of the democratically sanctified political process and yet ended up with at least a significant part of what they were after.

What you need to understand is that you cannot trust to democratic politics: in fact you must confront democracy and be prepared to say that your liberties are not something that the political process can legitimately abridge in this manner, regardless of how many people vote for it. It is the system which allows this to happen that you must confront, not just whatever party happens to be running it right now.

If there are some liberties you are simply not prepared to surrender, then you must be prepared to refuse to accept the authority of the state to impose its institutional will on you and accept the possible consequences of that... I say 'possible consequences' because Sinn Fein/IRA, the Animal Liberation Front, various 'Traveller' groups and all manner of other people have demonstrated that consistently and collectively refusing to obey the law is by no means a guaranteed road to ruin. I am certainly not urging activists to blow anyone up, invade anyone's property or terrorise anyone's family like the groups I have mentioned are prone to do, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that working well and truly outside the democratic system of politics in various ways is both less dangerous and considerably more effective than the Establishment would like you to think.

However regardless of what the pro-hunting protestors and activists decide to do, it seems that Britain may be about to undergo a dramatic and quite possibly earthshaking change, which most people will of course remain oblivious to just so long as it does not interrupt the flow of reality TV shows and sporting events - If the government does indeed use the Parliament Act to impose certain laws when there is clearly no state of emergency, then we must accept that Blair has shattered Britain's constitution (with scant opposition) and we are in a situation a thousand times graver than I would have ever dreamed possible just a few weeks ago.

Moreover I suspect even this will not rouse the Tory party from its torpor and induce them to actually make a coherent civil liberties based argument and promise a policy of non-cooperation. This is vastly more serious than the issue of red jacketed country folks galloping around the fields in pursuit of small mangy quadrupeds. If the Parliament Act is used, we are suddenly living in a country with no checks and balances on the ruling party's power other than the one on Election Day. That is not alarming, it is terrifying.

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NO2ID is launching its activities publicly:

Saturday, 18 September 11:00am - 2:00pm
The Corner Store
Covent Garden
33 Wellington Street,
London, WC2E 7BN, Map

There will be a couple of speakers before lunch, including a Labour 'rebel', Neil Gerrard MP followed by campaigning around central London, i.e. handing out leaflets, setting up stalls on the street in a number of locations until mid-afternoon.

Please join them to Stop ID Cards and the Database State!

The NO2ID Coalition, who are trying to make sure Blunkett fails in his attempts to introduce mandatory ID cards, argue that:

• An ID scheme won't stop terrorists
• An ID scheme will not control illegal immigration
• An ID scheme won't enable you to have anything you do not already have
• An ID scheme will cost billions in taxpayers money and achieve nothing
• An ID scheme will mean your most intimate details will be controlled by the government forever
• An ID scheme will cost everyone £75 every year

Cross-posted from White Rose.

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Funny how one posting leads to another. There I was going on about books, and now, as David Carr has already flagged up in a posting below, here come a thousand books.

I agree with David that this Liberty Library is a very important development, with potentially enormous long term significance to the cause of liberty. And it so happens that when I was in Brussels earlier this year, in addition to snapping the new EUro-parliament, I also took photos of, among many other interesting people, the two men in charge of this other and far better project.

Here is the techy of this operation, CNE webmaster James Rogers...

... and here is the academic supremo, Dr Hardy Bouillon:

Good as Hardy Bouillon is at this kind of thing there are almost certain to be some omissions, and there may even be the odd mistake in what is up there already. In either event, Hardy wants to know.

As it happens I think I may already spotted an error, in the form of a duplication. Government Failure: A Primer in Public Choice by Tullock, Brady and Seldon, seems to get two entries, the one right above the other. That is no big disaster, two mentions of this fine volume being greatly preferable to no mentions.

There is no explanatory verbiage attached to each title. It is just a plain and simple book list, with subject area (economics, history, literature or whatever), title, author, and link to where you can buy it and where you will find explanatory verbiage. A simple idea, simply done. I am told that it will be possible to search for an individual title, or to search for all the works of an individual author, but I cannot now find that facility. Unless this is just me, these further features have yet to materialise, but presumably they will very soon.

The sort of people who find books rather heavy going to plough through, and who prefer lighter reading of the sort supplied by things like Samizdata, are prone sometimes to underestimate the importance of books. We want action not words, blah blah blah. And it is true that people who already have classical liberal or libertarian opinions, and who have their lives and careers all up and running and who hence have only so much time to be reading books, are probably not the target readership of this site, although if that description fits you and you still want liberty-inclined books, got there and click away. But students, meanwhile, and younger people generally, with their opinions as yet unformed and their entire adult lives still ahead of them, are likely, insofar as they have been persuaded to look at this site at all, to be profoundly influenced by it, that is, by the enormous volume of writing to which it now provides easy access. I wish the project all the best. It can only make the world a better place.

I only discovered David's post about the Liberty Library just before I was about to put this up, and of course I then had to scurry back to the drawing board, so to speak. And I obviously considered not bothering with this post at all. But, like that Government Failure book mentioned above, if this Liberty Library is good enough for one mention, which it definitely is, two mentions, although a trifle confusing, can do no very great harm.

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I have been invited to join a panel discussion on Nanny State .vs. Personal Responsibility scheduled for 10.00pm UK time tonight on BBC Radio Five.

I do not know the identity of my protagonists yet, nor do I have any idea as to whether or not the broadcast is available outside of the UK.

Should be fun, though.

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Although transhumanism is a broader church than libertarianism, it does approach many issues from a similar background: challenging current obstacles that prevent individuals from deciding that they wish to fully benefit from the range of cutting edge technologies that are now moving from speculation to experimentation. Like all movements, it has many variations, from those who champion pragmatic, short-term, measures to those who take a more visionary stance, dwelling upon the joys of uploading.

The United Kingdom has always provided a sympathetic culture and activists for transhumanism, notably its libertarian variant, extropianism. However, after the early 1980s, there does not appear to have been any group within the United Kingdom, which could organise and focus the efforts of likeminded individuals to provide an alternative voice to those organisations that wish to retard technological progress and promote the precautionary (reactionary?) principal.

In the last few two years, people interested in transhumanism have been meeting on a monthly basis in London and listening to guest speakers on various subjects. This social exercise, called Extrobritannia, has proved extraordinarily successful at providing links and full kudos to its founder, Fabio, who continues to put in a determined effort to engage a series of strong speakers. Past speakers have included Nick Bostrom, who argues that we may live in a computer simulation, Aubrey de Grey, a gerontologist at Cambridge (whose interview with Glenn Reynolds can be accessed here) and Alex Ramonsky, a wearables experimentalist and neurohacker (in the lexicon).

Most of the regulars to these meetings have become increasingly concerned at the influence of groups inimical to the development and application of technologies beneficial to humanity, whether they be environmentalists or bioconservatives. To combat these trends and to provide an alternative voice, we have decided to set up the UK Transhumanist Association as a non-profit organisation that will, hopefully, publicise and act as a coordinator for interested parties within the United Kingdom that can recognise the benefits of current and future developments within science. The papers were signed today.

At the moment, the UK Transhumanist Association is an embryonic organisation, with ambition rather then experience, but there is a role that needs to be filled.

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This is oh so typical. Support Marxism and Islamo-fascism, and you get French police protection... support the USA and you get arrested.

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...but not for us. We want to see if we can get anyone to make contributions, however large or small (large is better, of course!) to help out Stefan Metzeler's good work evangelising liberty and capitalism in Eastern Europe.

I met Stefan recently in Switzerland and what a very fine and exuberant gentleman he is. Any assistance will be gratefully received and duly passed onto Stefan. We already have a couple contribution (thanks!) and would love to pass on more. Our PayPal buttons can be found for the currency of your choice in your left sidebar.

Really large donations just might get you dinner with the Samizdatista of your choice (subject to availability)

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I am going to give a hard time to someone I like immensely, but sometimes, it must be done - more on which later. In this case, it is blogger Harry Hatchet, who has posted an online poll on banning "junk" food advertisements, along with his argument for why the state should step in so that he does not have to say no to his child when she asks for "bad" food from McDonald's.

I will quote Dr Sean Gabb on the "obesity epidemic" (which might more accurately be described as a "sedentarism epidemic"):

Whenever the government does something for us, it takes away from our own ability to do that for ourselves. This diminishes us as human beings. Better, I suggest, a people who often eat and drink too much, and who on average die a few years before they might, than a people deprived of autonomy and shepherded into a few extra years of intellectual and moral passivity.

Lest you think that I am preaching to the converted here, I mention this to make a larger point: These ideas are nothing new to those who believe in the concepts of personal liberty and the free market and who reject the slave-to-the-state mentality that's all too prevalent in western society. But it is worth remembering that not everyone accepts these truths to be self-evident. And, unless you only surround yourself with those who agree with you on every single issue, sometimes (just sometimes!) the people who reject such truths will not be total idiots who are not worth engaging in discussion. Sometimes they are, like Mr Hatchet, intelligent people with whom you are friendly and with whom it is often possible to find common ground.

In cases like this, when we are dealing with fantasy "epidemics" spun by the government and irresponsible media outlets, I think it is worth making the effort to find that common ground, even if it is only an inch. Labour MP Tom Watson once told me that reading blogs had led him to change his mind on ID cards; he was once in favour of them, but blogs like this one gave him a fresh perspective on what he previously thought to be an open-and-shut case, and his opinion changed. I did not need to hear this to know that persuasive writing - in this case, in the context of a blog - can actually persuade. But in order for people to be won over, some of us have to be bothered to fight the fight in the first place.

And in case anyone's thinking that there is nothing that lefties like Harry Hatchet could ever change our minds about, I confess: I used to think that the output of British rapper Mike Skinner, aka The Streets, was not that bad, but thanks to Harry's quoting of some choice lyrics, I now know otherwise.

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On our trip to Geneva we encountered some interesting people. One of them was Stefan Metzeler, who is a co-founder of Pro Libertate in Switzerland. It was Stefan's question (the seventh picture) to the panel consisting of the assorted tranzis, leftists and self-propagandists, that set the tone of the debate and demonstrated that the members of the audience are not all on the same side...

Among other things I have learnt that Stefan likes to practice what we preach - for the last three years he has been organising informal libertarian meetings called Assens & Mt. Pelerin and helping as many people from Eastern Europe to attend as possible. This year's will fall on June 19-20th. This is what Stefan says about the event:

The most important aims are to:

• Show people from the ex-communist countries how things work here in Switzerland, which - as we all agree - is still the most liberal country in Europe and last but not least, not a member of the EU
• Get them to spread that information, which they will undoubtedly do

I believe the programme for the first day includes a visit to a local shooting range, instructing the novices in the art of firearm handling, followed by a lot of practice for all. I mean, how sound is that?!

So far, we've got three people from the Lithuanian Free Market Institute lined up, one student from Belarus and another, just graduated, from a university in Ukraine, all of whom I met last year at the ISIL event in Vilnius, plus some interest from members of a liberal organisation in Poland. None of them can come without financial help.

By plane, we can probably pay for at most two people. If four to six want to come, they will have to travel by car. Cost per person will be very reasonable, estimated at about $120 - $150 each, plus visa, for those from Belarus and Ukraine.

So far, a German businessman and I are each putting up about $400, plus some $200 promised from other participants.

Most of the participants from France, Switzerland and Germany are also short on money. As capitalists, we have to get serious about getting beyond the theoretical stage, I think.

Right, you heard it. We do not usually do this sort of thing on Samizdata.net but we think this is a worthwhile cause and are happy to publicise it. If you share this view, please feel free to hit our paypal button. (You'll just have to trust us that Stefan gets it.) Anything that arrives there between now and 1st June, goes to bringing as many people from Eastern Europe to the Assens & Mt. Pelerin meeting.

We promise to publish how much money has been received and how it was used. We will introduce those who make it to the meeting from Eastern Europe and blog about their impressions of Switzerland and the ideas they encounter at the Assens & Mt. Pelerin.

(13)

Gabriel Syme and I (and a certain Frogman) have been away from our keyboards for a few days because we have in Geneva, adding our efforts to that most worthy of activist groups, Bureaucrash, on the occasion of the first outing of Eurocrash in Switzerland. The target for our attentions was the Fifty-seventh World Health Assembly held by that hotbed of socialist obscurantism, the World Health Organisation.

The simple message of the Eurocrash was not something all too many of the people participating in that tax funded Tranzi event wanted to hear: Capitalism Heals/Socialism Kills

Step One: Infiltrate the WHO events by getting a badge...

Step Two: wander over to the UN Palace of Nations...

Step Three: take embarrassing pictures of UN type folks smoking in front of where WHA sessions are going on...

Step Four: hand out pro-capitalist leaflets designed to demonstrate that there is more than one point of view...

Step Five: get run out of town by UN cops...

Although it was all only a very small fly in their ointment, it was all worth it just to see the incredulous expression of people at the notion of pro-capitalist demonstrations on UN property.

The next round of jolly japes immediately afterwards was to crash the screening of a new film by socialist activist German Velasquez, called 'Profits or Life?', which criticises attempt to uphold the intellectual property rights of pharmaceutical companies who have developed many life saving drugs. Velasquez was supported on a Q&A panel afterwards by Marxist activist Carlos Correa. Twenty or so Crashers turned up to to ask a few rather awkward questions and distribute some rather clever leaflets which dissented from the movie's message...

Crasher Niger Innes asks why, given that the
panel was representing itself as the voice of the
poor in Africa, there were no Africans on the panel? Ouch.

Crasher Stefan Metzeler points out that as the
majority of drugs are not under patent anyway,
blaming intellectual property rights for the Third World's
health problems, rather than massive regulatory statism and
a lack of free trade, is rather idiotic...

And then who should appear in the audience but Dr. Harvey Bale, who Velasquez's movie has cast as 'the ugly American Bad Guy on the side of the evil pharmaceutical companies'. Far from being the sinister character 'Profits or Life?' portrayed him to be, he turns out to be an urbane and very articulate fellow as he addressed the point which had been made on-screen. Never have I heard a man demolish another man's arguments so systematically and yet remain utterly charming and polite.

And then Dr. Harvey Bale, the Director General
of the Geneva-based International Federation of Pharmaceutical
Manufacturers Associations had a few words...

And with that, the Crashers vanished into the surroundings... well, into Geneva actually in search of food and drink. A fairly interesting time was had by all and I found the event a very useful networking opportunity as well.

(16)

I am about to be on Talk Sport Radio, at about 1 am tomorrow morning, they said. I have just done an interview about President Bush's crackdown on porn, with a guy called Duncan Barkes. I tried to make sense, and probably made some sense. The purpose of this post is to tell you this, not to spend the next three quarters of an hour telling you what I think about it all.

But I will summarise it:

Duncan Barkes: Should porn be illegal?

Me: No.

(22)

This could all be a tease (there have been hundreds of similar reports about a referendum on scrapping the pound for the euro).

The EU constitution in itself may not be worse than what the British version is mutating into. If adopted our choices become a pan-European libertarian movement or a secession.

The latter may not be as easy as the Confederate attempt in 1861 from the USA (less public support in the UK, more heavily outnumbered by the rest of the EU etc). Hopefully such a secession could be more Slovenian than Croatian.

The advantage of a referendum is that it cannot be worse than letting the Prime Minister decide alone.

The disadvantage is that it will only happen once the result is known in advance to suit the government, so that when they win, it can slip through the single currency without a vote (that is what the French government did with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992).

Either way spread the word: by next weekend we could have a live campaign on our hands.

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The other day, in connection with my soon-to-end duties as the Libertarian Alliance Phone Owner, I got a call from a householder who is having a run-in with his local politicos. I gave him the same answer I give to all such persons. Write down your story, and send it in. If it is a story worth telling, we will spread it around. Here is an email to send it to. Oh, all right then, here is an address. (No email is a very bad sign. You can't do any sort of politics these days without email.) Sometimes I then have to add that we are a (heavy emphasis) publishing organisation and not a "campaigning organisation", i.e. zero expense lawyers and PR experts who will do all your fighting for you. Generally that is the last we ever hear from such persons.

But this latest call was different, because today I received an email, exactly as was promised, and these people have clearly taken the trouble to be easy people to help (a very important art if you want to get ahead in the world, I think):

Dear Brian,

As per our discussion please find below some information on my fight against overarching government Please let me know if you have any questions and if you list the story at one of your blogs. Please let me know if you have any other ideas of how I can drum up support or highlight this excess of regulation, loss of property rights and waste of taxpayer's money.

Thanks for your help

Christian
____________________________________________________________

Government spending £100,000+ to have our skirtings lowered by less than an inch!

This is a personal call for support. Hammersmith and Fulham Council has taken issue with the internal renovation of our home of a Grade II listed building (a detailed description of the dispute is on www.stpaulsstudios.com). The council asserts that the skirtings we inserted are 0.8 inch too high and has pursued us in court three times over the matter and losing each time. We have recently won again in the Court of Appeal. During the proceedings Lord Justice Longmore called the council's conduct vexatious. Despite having already spent more than £100,000 of tax payer's funds, some council officers want to continue this extremely wasteful activity.

This is the right time to have your view heard. There is a meeting by the Planning Application Committee on March 8. We would like to ask you to either get in touch with one of the councillors on the committee (preferred solution) or to express your support to us. Despite it going on for 4 years none of the committee members have asked for a site visit!

Colin Aherne, Labour, Tel: 020 8753 2192
email colin.aherne@lbhf.gov.uk

Will Bethell, Conservative, Tel: 07980 017 569
email will.bethell@lbhf.gov.uk*

Michael Cartwright, Labour, Tel 020 8741 5238
email michael.cartwright@lbhf.gov.uk

Caroline Donald, Conservative, Tel 020 8749 3859
email caroline.donald@lbhf.gov.uk*

Greg Hands, Conservative, Tel 020 7381 2593
email mail@greghands.com*

Wesley Harcourt, Labour, Tel 020 8749 3298
email wesley.harcourt@lbhf.gov.uk

Jafar Khaled, Labour, Tel 020 8753 2020
email jafar.khaled@lbhf.gov.uk

Dame Sally Powell, Labour, Tel 020 8753 2021
email sally.powell@lbhf.gov.uk

Frances Stainton, Conservative, Tel 020 7385 3672
email frances.stainton@lbhf.gov.uk

Charlie Treloggan, Labour, Tel 020 8753 2013
email charlie.treloggan@lbhf.gov.uk

The councillors with an asterix are new to the committee.

Your action can rescue us from this futile and erroneous legal interpretation and save all of us from our tax money being wasted (the rates already high enough as they are).

Yours Sincerely,
Christian and Katya Braun
137 Talgarth Road - London W14 9DA
020 8563 0612 - Fax 020 7691 7185
support@stpaulsstudios.com

Now that is how to campaign. That is how to get other people to help you. And if you follow the link in the paragraph under their subheading, you'll find further details of the dispute, just as it says, and you will be even more impressed.

This listed building thing has really got out of hand. It has got so that if they list a building no one wants to own it and it collapses into a ruin.

(18)

Yesterday afternoon I was out and about walking in London, and just before I got to Parliament Square I encountered a demo. It was not raucous or unpleasant. It was nice. It was old people complaining about their council taxes, which obviously I am all in favour of.

Following the example of supreme Samizdatista Perry de Havilland, I now take my DigiCam with me whenever I go a-wandering, so I was able to start snapping. At first it was just nice old people accompanied by nice policemen, with nice buildings in the background, but only very crude signs to say what it was all about. However patience was rewarded, and some of the signs were highly informative.

27.2%. Ouch! Whatever happened to stealth taxes? (Hey hey LBJ, you killed 27.2% more kids today than yesterday, you bad bad person. Not the same ring to it, somehow.)

And this one takes onlookers into the university lecture theatre.

Okay, okay, I'm excited, and I want to know more. How can I follow it up?

Wow, a website. They say, in fact Perry just said it to me in connection with this post, that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I reckon best of all is pictures with words embedded in the pictures, explaining everything. Preferably with an internet link.

(19)

I disagree almost completely with George Monbiot's political ideas, but I share his curiosity about the Revolutionary Communist Party, that's Living Marxism, no: LM (as LM for Living Marxism as in L for nothing M for nothing), no Spiked, that is to say Institute of Ideas. Who are these people?

Here is the Monbiot version, from last Tuesday's Guardian:

The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter called the Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out to destroy competing oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners marched for better pay, it picketed their demonstrations. It moved into the gay rights group Outrage and sought to shut it down. It tried to disrupt the miners' strike, undermined the Anti-Nazi League and nearly destroyed the radical Polytechnic of North London. On at least two occasions RCP activists physically attacked members of opposing factions.

In 1988, it set up a magazine called Living Marxism, later LM. By this time, the organisation, led by the academic Frank Furedi, the journalist Mick Hume and the teacher Claire Fox, had moved overtly to the far right. LM described its mission as promoting a "confident individualism" without social constraint. It campaigned against gun control, against banning tobacco advertising and child pornography, and in favour of global warming, human cloning and freedom for corporations. It defended the Tory MP Neil Hamilton and the Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansers. It provided a platform for writers from the corporate thinktanks the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. Frank Furedi started writing for the Centre for Policy Studies (founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher) and contacting the supermarket chains, offering, for �7,500, to educate their customers "about complex scientific issues".

In the late 1990s, the group began infiltrating the media, with remarkable success. For a while, it seemed to dominate scientific and environmental broadcasting on Channel 4 and the BBC. It used these platforms (Equinox, Against Nature, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Counterblast, Zeitgeist) to argue that environmentalists were Nazi sympathisers who were preventing human beings from fulfilling their potential. In 2000, LM magazine was sued by ITN, after falsely claiming that the news organisation's journalists had fabricated evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian Muslims. LM closed, and was resurrected as the web magazine Spiked and the thinktank the Institute of Ideas.

All this is already in the public domain. But now, thanks to the work of the researcher and activist Jonathan Matthews (published today on his database www.gmwatch.org), what seems to be a new front in this group's campaign for individuation has come to light. Its participants have taken on key roles in the formal infrastructure of public communication used by the science and medical establishment.

I am in favour of good science, progressive technology, and I'm pretty sure I like genetic engineering insofar as I understand it. Above all, I'm in favour of what Monbiot calls "individuation", and despise the idea that this makes me or anyone else who believes in it "far right", i.e. (the old smear) in league with Nazis (who flatly opposed "individuation"). And "confident individualism" sounds great, and I believe that it is restrained by the confident individualism of other individuals. I'm against gun control, and against banning tobacco advertising.

So, does all that make Spiked/Institute of Ideas good guys? Apparently.

I'm confused about the Balkans. I don't know what LM/Spiked's stuff about Serb atrocities that according to them were not atrocities makes them. Probably best not get involved in that one now, although I can't stop anyone. I still don't know what to make of Neil Hamilton, but I have many friends who back him to the hilt, give him awards, ask him to make speeches and generally make much of him at a time when few others will.

I definitely do not like the sound of "Revolutionary Communist Party". That sounds very bad. I despise the whole idea of "Living Marxism". That makes these people sound ridiculous and evil at the same time. And I also despise any organisation which identifies itself with initials which did once stand for something, but which it later pretends stand for nothing but a casual name, like Fred or Colin or Beverley. I remember asking them about this during their LM as in LM, meaning LM and nothing but LM phase. What does LM stand for? � I said. LM they said. Nothing to do with Living Marxism, Karl Marx, that old gaffer? No? No. LM. LM meaning LM. Standing for nothing except LM.

Odd. Worse: brazenly contemptuous of the thought processes of other people. Suggestive of a bunch of people who think that reality means � or can be made to mean � simply and entirely what they say it means. As Monbiot says, a cult. And now, does Spiked or the Institute of Ideas have anything to do with LM, as in nothing but LM? I haven't asked them, but I bet the answer is another idiotic and brazenly contemptuous blank wall.

If they'd said, when the question of not calling themselves Living Marxism any more came up for discussion, that after thinking about it they'd come to realise that Marxism was tripe and in fact not "living" at all, so they were changing their name to something sensible, fine. I could have understood that. I might even have joined. But if any such public statement was made, I entirely missed it.

When they were LM as in Living Marxism, I could laugh and sneer, and keep clear. But for years now now these people have been sending me emails inviting me to their events, and when I get there, everything seems absolutely sensible (provided you forget about LM as in Living Marxism as in Revolutionary Communist Party). And now, once again, George Monbiot � who has long been as suspicious about them as I have long been, I because I despise their past, he because he despises their present, and both of us because we'd love to know how they see their future � is seriously skewering them in the Guardian, as has his pal Jonathan Matthews.

The danger is that RCP/Living Marxism/LM/Spiked will discredit any idea they have anything to do with. Do all those corporations who back them realise what they are dealing with? Maybe they do, far better than I do, but in ways I've not been told about.

Was all that "Revolutionary Communist Party" stuff a pure piece of flypaper to confuse the left, and are they sincere in their currently expressed beliefs in science, "individuation", etc.? If so, why don't they come clean and say so?

So. Who the hell are these people? What the hell do they think they are doing? Any comments that make (any) sense of them would be most welcome.

(15)

I bought the paper version of the December 2003 issue of Prospect yesterday, and was all set to quote from the two pieces I've already been reading with particular interest, while apologising for not supplying any links. Well, I can, but in the case of the longer article only to an introductory excerpt. How long even these links will last, I cannot say.

From Michael Lind's review of D. B. C. Pierre's Vernon God Little, which won the Booker Prize.

At one point Pierre's cartoon Texas sheriff says: "How many offices does a girl have that you can get more'n one finger into?" The comic malapropisms of pompous black characters were a staple of racist minstrel-show humour of the Amos 'n' Andy kind. If Pierre, purporting to unveil the reality of black America, had depicted a leering, sex-obsessed African-American police officer unable to distinguish the words "office" and "orifice," would jury members like AC Grayling � a distinguished philosopher whose work I have long admired � have voted to award such bigoted trash the Booker prize?

But I don't want to be too hard on the Booker jury. They've democratised literature by proving that a book doesn't have to be any good to win a prize, so long as it exploits socially acceptable national and ethnic stereotypes. ...

Assuming Lind is right about the crassness of this book, and although I've not read it I have no particular reason to doubt him, the next question is: why? What gives? Why this animus against Americans, and especially against those most American of Americans, the Texans.

In another article ("Vengeful majorities") in the same issue, Amy Chua writes about (as it says on the cover of the issue) "The global backlash against successful ethnic minorities":

Market-dominant minorities are the Achilles heel of free market democracy. In societies with such a minority, markets and democracy favour not just different people or different classes but different ethnic groups. Markets concentrate wealth, often spectacular wealth, in the hands of the market-dominant minority, while democracy increases the political power of the impoverished majority. In these circumstances, the pursuit of free market democracy becomes an engine of potentially catastrophic ethnonationalism, pitting a frustrated indigenous majority, easily aroused by opportunistic politicians, against a resented, wealthy ethnic minority. This conflict is playing out in country after country today, from Bolivia to Sierra Leone, from Indonesia to Zimbabwe, from Russia to the middle east.

Since 11th September, the conflict has been brought home to the US. Americans are not an ethnic minority. But Americans are perceived as the world's market-dominant minority, wielding disproportionate economic power. As a result, they have become the object of the same kind of popular resentment that afflicts the Chinese of southeast Asia, the whites of Zimbabwe, and the Jews of Russia.

That makes a lot of sense to me. Americans as kind of global white Zimbabweans. It certainly fits everything I read and see around me.

And it leads me to think that it is among these "market-dominant minorities" that what is variously called (by the bosses of this blog) the Samizdata meta-context, or (by me, for these purposes) libertarianism, is likely to catch on most enthusiastically. Here, unlike how it is at most intellectual addresses, we both (a) note the conflict between liberty and democracy, and (b) pick a side without any waffling or muddling of the two together, namely: liberty. Hurrah liberty, screw democracy. Accordingly, we side unequivocally with the market-dominant minorities and against the vengeful majorities who now torment them, as and when they can. I warmly recommend reading all of Chua's piece.

It so happens that, in between reading Amy Chua's piece last night, I also participated in an LSE Hayek Society discussion, on the subject of free market education. This turned out to be a pretty accurate summary of the themes we talked about, despite it only being a guess/preparation for the event rather than a report. A minority said have a complete free market. A majority said: no, education has to be a little bit state funded, otherwise the poor and potentially uneducated would suffer too much.

But my point here is not about education. It is that the feeling I got was that there were basically two types of people in the room with me. There were Brits. And there were members of the world's various market-dominant minorities, including a couple of Americans. And I guess you could say that we Brits are members of the "American" minority ourselves, for these purposes. If you do include us Brits in this category, practically all those present were ethnically on the liberty side of the liberty/democracy divide that Amy Chua writes about.

Although - big caveat which complicates things a lot - many of the most ferocious 'anti-Americans' are also Brits, and Americans. A lot of them don't like anyone being "market-dominant" either.

It is, as the Anglo-American example illustrates, a lot more complicated than slabs of ethnically uniform opinion. Nevertheless, these market-dominant minorities are a big part of the human territory where, you feel, our stuff is now catching on most strongly. It's not just Americans. It's not just the Anglosphere. It's not just the Anglosphere plus the Jews. There are lots more people involved than this. What the consequences of this global, albeit still selective, spread of our ideas will be is very hard to guess. But I bet you anything that, given the resources, talents and sheer numbers of these people, consequences there will be.

(34)

For those who missed it, Instapundit is having a go at the Chinese authorities and...Walmart. November 7th is the anniversary of arrest of Liu Di by plain-clothes police. No charges have been made and she has not been heard of for the past year. Petitions have been started, in China, with people putting their real names to them and being arrested for that themselves. This is the story:

Until the authorities tracked her down a year ago Friday, she (Liu Di) was one of the most famous Internet web masters in China. A third-year psychology student at Beijing Normal University, Ms. Liu formed an artists club, wrote absurdist essays in the style of dissident Eastern-bloc writers of the 1970s, and ran a popular web-posting site. Admirers cite her originality and humor: In one essay Liu ironically suggests all club members go to the streets to sell Marxist literature and preach Lenin's theory, like "real Communists." In another, she suggests everyone tell no lies for 24 hours. In a series of "confessions" she says that China's repressive national-security laws are not good for the security of the nation.

But since Nov. 7, 2002, when plain-clothes police made a secret arrest, Liu has not been heard from. No charges have been filed; her family and friends may not visit her, sources say; and, in a well-known silencing tactic, authorities warn that it will not go well for her if foreign media are informed of her case.

It is largely the attention of the Western media and public that keeps dissidents afloat and their oppressor in some sort of check. Those who are visible beyond the barrier erected between the oppressed and the outside world tend to fare marginally better. At least they get publicity for their sacrifice and if the campaigning on their behalf is persistent enough, they may even get out of whatever hell-hole communist officials put them in. The thousands (in China probably an order of magnitude larger) 'small' human tragedies go unnoticed just as they did in communist Russia and Eastern Europe.

Looking back at the Cold War days it seems incomprehensible that such horrors could be tolerated next door to Western civilisation and capitalist liberal democracies. Marxism and communism - top candidates for the most barbaric and inhuman ideologies - have absolutely no redeeming features, whether in practise or in theory. Not only they create a living hell for 'ordinary people' but they bring destruction to those who perpetrate it. Communism, time and again, produces monstrous regimes that like Saturn devour their own offspring.

And for those who believe that letting China 'evolve' out of its totalitarianism is the best way forward, this conclusion is not an optimistic one.

...the Chinese security and police are regularly told to crack down. There may be exceptions, as when the daughter or son of a high party member or rich family gets in trouble; or when there are excesses of youth.

But these are exceptions. The rest - labor activists, upstart college students, journalists, writers, intellectuals, professors, dissidents, religious believers with too much spunk, those who stand out in a too-public fashion or attract too much attention - are warned, or arrested. In this reading of China, free expression is not improving in the short- and midterm.

Despite some changes of style, more arrests are taking place, and ordinary Chinese are still strictly censoring themselves.

It is the pressure from the outside that can have the greatest impact on what happens in totalitarian regimes. Glenn Reynolds thinks that challenging Walmart is a way to increase it. Well, that's good enough for me.

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For reasons I cannot even begin to adequately explain, the gatherings of the increasingly angry and militant pro-hunt movement conjours up 'spaghetti western' images in my head; the brooding silence, the tumbleweed, the flinty, menacing stares and the 'man's-gotta-do-what-a-man's-gotta-do' atmosphere of grim resolve.

Yes, somewhere out in merciless, sun-baked badlands, guns are being greased and cheroots are being lit. The Hunting Clan is fixin' for a showdown:

Thousands of people have gathered around England and Wales to protest against moves to outlaw hunting with dogs.

Organisers said 37,000 protesters at 11 rallies on Saturday and one on Friday, to mark the first day of the new hunting season, signed a pledge to ignore any ban.

Alright, it is actually the middle of the verdant English countryside, but you get the gist.

Having failed in their appeals to reason, common sense and principle, the hunters are still threatened with a government prohibition that will eradicate a centuries-old tradition and the way of rural life that has grown up around it. They are being 'run out of town' for no better reason than that they are perceived as an easy target for a government that wants to score cultural 'brownie points' with the metropolitan elite.

So the hunters have decided that they are not going to be such an easy target after all. I do not see what else they can do. It is fight or die and they have chosen the former:*

The Declaration is an opportunity for those who support the freedom to hunt to demonstrate to the public, press, Peers, parliamentarians and the Government that we will never accept unjust law. Critically, it aims to convey in an unambiguous way that enough people are committed to either refusing to accept any law that comes into effect (if it does) that any such law would be unenforceable and so fail.

While the language is temperate, the intention is unambiguous: they intend a campaign of civil disobedience. It is an open and explicit challenge to the authority of the British government. What started as protest has become insurrection.

It is still not clear whether the government will press ahead with the abolition of hunting in England and Wales (the ban has already passed into law in Scotland). But, if they do, and these people are good to their pledge, then they are quite capable of making life very difficult indeed for the authorities. In effect, a low-level civil war will be waged in the English countryside.

Regardless of whether or not that scenario comes to pass, I get the feeling that the hunters have started something that will have consequences in the future. The Labour government's sustained attacks on rural England have led to an awful lot of people getting angry, getting political and getting organised and of such activism are revolutionary movements born. I have no idea how long it will take or what it will become but I do strongly suspect that the countryside movement will metastasise into something much broader and wider than the issue of fox-hunting.

[*The link is to the homepage of the Hunting Declaration where sympathisers can download a copy of the Declaration to sign and send in with or without a donation to the cause.]

(14)

I could not resist a bit of mischief making... The BBC has set up something called iCan, which Wired magazine described thusly:

A couple of years ago the British Broadcasting Corporation was blindsided by a grassroots campaign against rising taxes on gas. Although discontent had been growing for some time, the BBC didn't report the story until the British army was called out to protect gas stations from protesters. Hoping to avoid this kind of blindness to ordinary Britons' political concerns, the broadcasting behemoth is launching a radical online experiment to reconnect itself with grassroots sentiment.

[...]

On the other hand, the effort is intended to counteract what officials at the broadcasting network feel is widespread political apathy in the United Kingdom, marked by low voter turnout at elections and declining audiences for its political programming. As a state-financed institution operating under a royal charter to inform, educate and entertain, the BBC feels it is within its purview to help disenfranchised citizens engage in public life.

And therefore I have taken it upon myself to set up an iCan campaign aimed at... encouraging people to not vote (i.e. active voter apathy, yeah I know it is an oxymoron) and to regard politics as just proxy violence. I have called this Anti-Activist Activism. Come join me as I take some herbicide to the BBC's grassroots.

It is just too damn tempting

Update: I have made the first journal update at Anti-Activist Activism called Turning iCan into iShouldn't.

(2)

Following up on this earlier report here, more London School of Economics Hayek Society, here's their latest news, from the society's President Nick Spurrell:

Compassion and Capitalism Event � There will be held a major event tomorrow, Wednesday 29th October, with French thinker Christian Michel from Liberalia, entitled "Compassion and Capitalism". Please do come along. There will be a talk and then questions and debate. D703, Clement House (Hong Kong Theatre Building) on the Aldwych. 12pm. Wednesday 29th October. No tickets necessary.

Students' Union Elections � Tomorrow and Thursday (29th and 30th October) there will be held the LSE Students' Union elections for various positions which hold authority and influence on the policy of the students' union, the body which regulates the work of student societies including the Hayek Society.

Should you wish to vote, you may do so in the Quad, off Houghton Street on Wednesday or Thursday. The following Hayek Society Committee members are standing:

General Course Representative: Jonathan Gradowski (Hayek Society Auxiliary Officer); NUS Conference: Nick Spurrell (Hayek Society President), Peter Bellini (Hayek Society Financial Officer), Daniel Freedman (Hayek Society PR Director); Postgraduate Students� Officer: Natalia Mamaeva (Hayek Society Secretary), Ryan Thomas Balis (Hayek Society Auxiliary Officer); Court of Governors: Daniel Freedman (Hayek Society PR Director); Alykhan Velshi (Hayek Society Journal Auxiliary Officer), Matthew Sinclair (Hayek Society Auxiliary Officer); Academic Board: Nick Spurrell (Hayek Society President); ULU (University of London Union) Council: Alykhan Velshi (Hayek Society Journal Auxiliary Officer), Matthew Sinclair (Hayek Society Auxiliary Officer)

Discussion Group Next Monday � There will be held, as usual, next Monday evening, the Hayek Society discussion group. All are welcome, in this informal environment to take part in a chaired discussion. The topic this week will be on the environment. More details soon... Monday 3rd November, 7pm, George IV pub, on campus, upstairs. Please feel free to come along.

The thing that impresses me about all this is that the stuff in the middle, about standing for various electoral offices, is not happening on its own. These people are holding speaker meetings and discussion groups as well.

Libertarians/classical liberals/whatevers who get involved in student politics often justify this by saying that the politicking "draws attention to the ideas". But often they get so busy politicking that they forget about pushing the ideas. Worse, in order to get more votes in their damned elections they actually conceal or even contradict the ideas in their public statements, on the grounds that the important thing is "successful" politicking and if the ideas don't help with that, then they must be dumped.

But the important thing is to do the ideas successfully, and if the politicking doesn't help then the politicking should be dumped.

Politicking makes heat, and you make this heat is to draw attention to the light, which is the ideas. Trouble is, politicking sometimes burns up all the energy that ought to be used making light. All manner of "attention" is thus drawn, to nothing.

These guys don't seem to be making this mistake. I'm impressed.

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My thanks to CNE President Tim Evans for emailing me about this New York Times article, about the Free State project. I usually look at the daily NYT menu. Sod's Law (and a rugby game � won by plucky little USA) decreed that today I didn't. First few paragraphs:

KEENE, N.H. � A few things stand out about this unprepossessing city. It just broke its own Guinness Book world record for the most lighted jack-o'-lanterns with 28,952. It claims to have the world's widest Main Street.

And recently, Keene became the home of Justin Somma, a 26-year-old freelance copywriter from Suffern, N.Y., and a foot soldier in an upstart political movement. That movement, the Free State Project, aims to make all of New Hampshire a laboratory for libertarian politics by recruiting libertarian-leaning people from across the country to move to New Hampshire and throw their collective weight around. Leaders of the project figure 20,000 people would do the trick, and so far 4,960 have pledged to make the move.

The idea is to concentrate enough fellow travelers in a single state to jump-start political change. Members, most of whom have met only over the Internet, chose New Hampshire over nine other states in a heated contest that lasted months.

(The other contenders were Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming. One frequently asked question on the project's Web site was "Can't you make a warmer state an option?")

Once here, they plan to field candidates in elections and become active in schools and community groups, doing all they can to sow the libertarian ideals of curbing taxes, minimizing regulation of guns and drugs, privatizing schools and reducing government programs.

I've quoted at some length because the New York Times' stuff has a habit which I've recently learned about of going out of one-click no-cost reach after all while. (Is that recent? Or was I just ignorant about it all along?)

I predict two things about what will happen as a result of this project.

1. It will have results.

2. The most momentous results will not be what anyone envisaged to start with.

The law of unintended consequences applies, after all, just as much to libertarians as it does to anyone else. Most gatherings of the faithful in the USA seem to result in a bit of spreading of the faith but not a lot, and then, interesting business activities.

One thing already seems likely, however, which the moving spirits of this project did intend. It will stir up media interest in libertarian ideas, not only within the USA but to some extent also beyond it, this New York Times piece being a perfect example of that process.

(16)

The GATSO killers must be starting to give the state a serious headache.

From the UK Times:

THE police have come up with a new way to catch irate motorists who vandalise speed cameras: set up other cameras to film them in the act.

And then other cameras to film those cameras and still more cameras to film those cameras and......

A closed-circuit television system would be installed beside the speed traps under plans being considered to curb a spate of attacks in which 700 cameras have been burnt, pulled down or had their lenses spray painted.

Of course this means that the closed-circuit security cameras will become targets as well. It seems that the campaign of the GATSO killers is moving beyond the sporadic outbursts of pique and onto a low-grade insurrection.

(1)

Today I received an email from the LSE (that's London School of Economics) Hayek Society. I've been in occasional touch with this operation over the years, and have attended a few of their events, which have always been lively and well organised. It would appear that, this academic year, under the leadership of Nick Spurrell (whom I met again a few weeks ago at the office of the International Policy Network office where he was helping out over the Summer, alongside samizdatista Alex Singleton), the Hayek Society is keeping all this going in fine style.

They have elected a new Committee. Here it is:

President: Nick Spurrell; Vice-President: Lauri Tahtinen; Treasurer: Sarah Meacham; Secretary: Natalia Mamaeva; Financial Officers: Vicky Yuen, Peter Bellini; Events Officer: Szymon Ordys, Louis Haynes, Oliver Dully; Editor-in-Chief: Erica Yu; Co-editors: Michael Chen, Harry Cherniak; PR Director: Daniel Freedman.

Now apart from Nick, I don't know who these people are whose names I've just put up here in lights. But I like it that many of these names are female (Sarah, Natalia, Vicky, Erica), and that many are non-British (Tahtinen, Mamaeva, Yuen, Ordys, Yu). All the non-Brits could just be Americans, but I'm pretty sure that there are more places of birth involved that that. These people are bound to attract lots more people, of lots of types, from lots of faraway places. I mean, if each of them invites four friends � In a university, a mere two or three people can make a huge difference. The Hayek Society already has a definite thirteen, and the year has only just started. Extraordinary.

The Hayek Society has for years now been dosing the LSE with the message of limited government liberalism � liberalism, that is, when it really was liberalism and before the socialists of the sort who infested the LSE during an earlier era got hold of the word liberalism and turned it on its head. And through the LSE, the Hayek Society will dose lots of other places besides in the years to come. Get them when they're young �

The LSE is an important place and always has been. For good or ill, what they think today, the world thinks tomorrow. And this time around it's for good.

(29)

The Free State Project is a group in the USA looking to get at least 20,000 liberty oriented activists to move to a single state in the USA so that they can have more political impact somewhere rather than be lost in the sea of Republican and Democrat statists by being scattered across the country.

And the result of the vote to see which part of the USA they would all move to is� New Hampshire.

Godspeed to you all. I shall be watching this project with great interest.

(22)

You've had a long, hard day. You want to go home to relax and unwind. You can hardly wait for that sweet moment when you place your key in the lock of your own front door. You make your way back to your car as it begins to rain. Your feet hurt. You're getting wet. You want your comfy sofa and a hot meal and the TV and your warm bed. You finally reach the place where you parked your car only to find....disaster! It's been clamped!

You stand there helplessly while the rain pitter-patters on your brow. Your blood begins to boil into toxic fumes of rage and frustration. You are stranded and alone, feeling victimised and vulnerable.

But, just at that moment, from out of the scudding, grey skies there swoops down a heroic figure of salvation to end your torment and set you free. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's Angle-Grinder Man!

Clad in a blue leotard and wielding a saw, a man claiming to be the UK's first wheel clamp vigilante is offering his services to motorists.

Angle-grinder Man - a self-proclaimed superhero - patrols by night looking for unhappy drivers who have been clamped and then sets their cars free.

He's fighting for truth, justice and the (now long defunct) British way.

"I may not be able to single-handedly and totally cast off the repressive shackles of a corrupt government - but I can cut off your wheel-clamps for you."

He says he decided to go "full-time vigilante" in May this year.

"My obsession with wheel-clamping is actually a rebellion against a much deeper malaise," he said.

"Namely, the arrogant contempt that politicians hold for the people who put them into power, and whom they claim to represent."

He is certainly heroic in thought. But is he really heroic in deed?

A Kent Police spokeswoman said no complaint about wheel clamps being cut off had been made by either a clamping firm or a member of the public.

That could mean that the police simply don't want to admit to this man's successes in case he inspires copycats. On on the other hand it could be a case of the spirit being willing but the flesh rather less so.

Angle-Grinder Man has a website but, as at the time of posting, it appears to be down. If he was whizzing round supersonically trashing wheel-clamps the details on his website would make it a doddle for the police to track him down.

So maybe Angle-Grinder Man is just a harmless glory-seeker and self-publicist. Or maybe he is a sincere, angry but ultimately ineffectual fantasist. Who knows?

But I think I have spotted a trend here. Or leastways, a mini-trend. I wrote a few days ago about the GATSO-killers who claim their legacy from Robin Hood. Now we have a comic-book superhero complete with mask and tights. Is it because the real world of today is so dull, so conformist and so timid that these would-be rebels are forced to delve into the wellspring of myths and legends in order to find their inspiration?

Whatever the explanation, there does seem to be this groping, amorphous need for maverick heroes who will put the world to rights. Maybe, some day soon, a gawky, bookish, weedy British teenager will get hit on the head by a vial of radioactive material and the revolution will begin.

(26)

Like I said, respect for the law appears to be on the wane. Although the word 'hostility' might be even more apposite:

They are the black knights of the road; balaclava-wearing highway hitmen out to burn, bomb, decapitate and dismember. But drivers need not fear, for it is speed cameras that this growing band of rebels are after.

Up and down the country, the tools used to keep roads safe are being ripped down, blown up and even shot apart as part of a campaign orchestrated by a gang of web-surfing outlaws. They threaten to become the most popular gang of criminals since Robin Hood and his Merry Men stalked the countryside.

Forsooth, methinks the commoners may be in need of folk-songs.

From the south coast to the Highlands no camera is safe. Known as Gatsometers, or Gatsos, they are being destroyed at a rate that has alarmed police forces. Particularly destructive cells are operating in north London, Essex and Wales - where they rage against machines deployed by renowned anti-speeding police chief Richard Brunstrom.

With each unit costing £24,000 to replace, a huge bill is being run up. But the rebels are unrepentant, claiming the cost is more than met by speeding drivers' fines. Speed cameras, they argue, are not about keeping roads safe, but about raising revenue. The charred remains of their victims are often adorned with stickers or graffiti which declare cameras to be stealth tax inspectors.

Of course, we at Samizdata.net could not possibly condone these irresponsible actions by an anti-social minority.

The Target for Tonight?

[My thanks to Dr.Chris Tame for posting this story to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]

(55)

Emma, in a piece here entitled "Outnumbered 15 to 1", touches on a problem that I find gruesomely fascinating, and have had to deal with a lot over the years. How do you conduct yourself when in company which you want to keep in with but which holds your opinions about some hot issue of the day in very low regard?

Scenario: you are at a dinner party with several friends with whom you enjoy discussing all sorts of things NOT including politics.

One friend, in passing, drops in a little "it's all about the oil" or [with sarcasm] "well, the french were just cowardy custards, that's why all good patriots hate them", or [in tones of deepest contempt] "it's just finishing off what Daddy left undone".

Do you

A) Remove the rather good bottle of Australian wine that you brought, leaving them to drink some French blanc de plonk that one of the Guardian readers brought along, and never darken their doors again.

B) Reply "were the Normandy landings an equally unjustified completion of unfinished business?" (or equivalent riposte, depending on the precise nature of the comment), segueing neatly into a heated discussion in which no one will listen to anything anyone else says and everyone will go home riled up.

C) Change the subject to more neutral ground through whatever means necessary. "Oops, I seem to have spilt red wine on your yellow dress" would serve a dual function of diversion and oblique admonition.

What is the best strategy when talking to people about matters on which they disagree with you? - child rearing, say, to pick an example at random. Persuasion? Leading by example? Dropping in odd hints to indicate that there is an alternative and viable point of view? Careful avoidance of tension filled areas?

Help!

I suggest that for the purpose of this discussion we set aside the matter of whether we actually agree with Emma about the Iraq war. The point of these questions is to dig out some general principles for conducting ourselves in company which disagrees about some contentious public issue, but with which we wish to remain on cordial speaking terms.

I'd like (us? � I hope others join in with comments) to come up with answers which would be just as much of use to an anti-war activist at a table of Emmas as they would be to Emma at the actual table which she describes.

As a general point, it's perhaps worth saying to Emma that some very bright people over the centuries have found themselves at a loss to answer these questions. I can just about remember when the Suez crisis of 1956 used to divide families. In the USA, I'm sure that the Vietnam war caused rows among people who would otherwise have got along far better. And the history books are full of such episodes in the past. In the seventeenth century members of the same family were on opposite sides of the English Civil War, and actually fought against each other.

Let's hope it doesn't get that bad for Emma, but in the meantime, as she says, what does she do?

If I have a general suggestion, it is that when under attack like this, you should hang on to the distinction between (a) stating your own views and (b) saying that others ought to share them. In circumstances like these abandon all ideas about converting anyone. (The paradox is that if you want to convert them, not "trying to" convert them is actually the way to do it.)

If possible, avoid even saying what you do think. If compelled to state your position, keep it short, and state your view with the mind fix in place that they aren't going to be persuaded. However, the sillier ones among them will try to persuade you. Listen carefully. With luck they will all want a turn explaining how wrong you are, and may forget about wanting to listen to your reply. At all costs avoid the trap of expecting equal time. On the contrary be grateful that you are not subjected to it. If you are, keep your answers (for you will be under cross examination) brief. Above all keep them "self centred". Use the word "I" a lot, as in "I think" and "it seems to me" and "from where I sit". Describe what you do truly think, and do truly believe. Abandon all attempt to deploy "arguments" or worse, "facts", of the sort that you imagine might persuade them of your rightness, but which meanwhile were not central to making you think as you do. The advantage of concentrating on your own thoughts and beliefs like this is that you avoid saying anything about their beliefs, which is when things can get nasty.

Think defence. Defence defence defence. Don't attack. Don't criticise. Don't even "argue", even defensively, if you can avoid it. Just stonewall. Well, I think what George Bush did made sense. The way I see it is, Saddam's regime was bad, and it was good to end it. I think (provided you do, of course) that toppling Saddam did help the fight against terrorism. I think (ditto) that the world is safer now than it would have been if the invasion hadn't occurred. Yes, war is terrible. Yes, foreign intervention is dangerous. Keep the answers brief and to the point. Don't answer with yes but. The yes but nature of your view will be obvious, and need not be stated explicitly. Try to keep calm throughout.

(As I say, if your actual objective is to get all these people to change their minds and think as you do, do the exact same thing. That way they will perhaps understand your position, and decide that they agree with it. Or not as the case may be.)

Eventually, your companions may realise that they aren't going to bully you into chan