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'Humbug' wrote an e-mail to Samizdata regarding the Free Expression versus Islamic intolerance issue that takes a more introspective view

I do not know why I am wasting my time waiting for Hollywood or anyone in the music industry to come out and stand up for free speech. Here we have a global conflict that will forever impact our future and these 'sophisticated elites' are hiding behind the gates in their upscale neighborhoods. The 'shocking' photo of the dull Kanye West or the equally 'provocative' photo of Madonna as The Madonna are simply boring.

Of course neither of them would ever dare pose as Mohammed or appear wearing a burqa. Heck no, that would not be the run of the mill, piss off the parents material, that might actually get them a fatwa.

Eminem, likewise would never dare insult the 'one who must not be seen'. No, he will stick with making fun of groups where the penalty is merely a slap on the wrist, like homosexuals and women. Michael Moore we can all forget about it, just as we can forget about the Dixie Chicks. The problem here is that standing up for free speech in this case, does not involve Bush bashing and it actually takes courage to fight this battle. With icons like these, who needs an invading army?

But then, I am just repeating what many have already said.

Update: however Lil' Kim shows the correct way to wear a burqa

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Whenever I write about something touching on my experience of communism, I get a few kind commenters encouraging me to share more of it. I rarely do so, as busy life takes over. Still, today I managed to post an article on my other blog, Media Influencer, that I felt was perhaps not coherent enough or too personal for Samizdata.net. For those interested, follow the bananas...

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There are some things that most people know (or think they know) about the British book trade. For example that books are very expensive compared to some other places, and that buying a paperback can be unwise - due to the system of "perfect binding" where the pages are just stuck on to the spine, so they fall out if one actually reads the book a few times.

However, I do not wish to examine such points here. I wish to point out the simple leftism of the book trade. This may seem a predictable whine from a libertarian like me, but it is more than a whine.

Recently I read a review of Robert Conquest's Dragons of Expectation in The Economist.

The review claimed that Conquest did not understand that his side now dominated the world. If by "his side" the review meant anti-Marxism, this domination does not seem to be in evidence in universities (or, in terms of attitudes, in most of the electronic media and much of the print media in the Western world - let alone in such places as Latin American governments), but let us leave that aside.

I went to bookshop after bookshop in search of Robert Conquest's work. Borders, Waterstones, W.H. Smith - you name the shop, no book.

"But you could order the book or get via the internet" - but why should I have to?

Why should a work by the leading historian of Soviet Russia (the author of "The Terror" and other works) not be found on the shelves, so that I can have a look at it and decide whether I want to buy it? In fact none of Robert Conquest's works were on the shelves of the bookshops of whatever town I happened to be in (London, Bolton, Manchester, York, Kettering - it did not matter what town). And remember Robert Conquest is not a radical libertarian - he is just a historian who did more than any other to expose the crimes of the Marxists.

Take the example of Borders in York - wall to wall Noam Chomsky. Literally wall to wall - a whole shelf full of his political writings (not his writings on the basis of language) and books on the next shelf to. And (of course) the endless works of M. Moore, and all the rest of the 'death to Bush' crowd.

Now I am no fan of President Bush, he has gone along with greater increases in domestic government spending than any President since Richard Nixon (and Mr Nixon had the excuse of a Democratic party controlled Congress). But the legion of Bush haters one finds in the book shops do not attack 'No Child Left Behind' or the Medicare extension or all the rest of the wild spending.

When they attack his foreign policy they do not understand that it is (for better or worse) a continuation of the policy of such men as President Wilson - i.e. an effort to impose democracy overseas. They present the whole policy as an effort to line the pockets of business contractors - or to impose Christianity in place of Islam. And when the authors discuss domestic policy they present a mythical anti-Welfare State pro-free enterprise President Bush.

Just as works on British politics present a free enterprise Mr Blair - rather than the real one of higher taxes, higher government spending and more regulations.

"Such ideas may be absurd, but they are the books that sell and book stores are in business to make a profit".

How do they know that these will be the only books that will sell when they hardly ever advertise anti-statist books? Certainly there will sometimes be a promotion for an anti-statist book (such as the recent Mao: The Unknown Story - although this work seems to blame Mao as a man, rather than socialism as a doctrine for what happened in China), but this is very rare.

If one sees the notice "We Recommend" or "We Highly Recommend" on or near a book, it is a fairly safe bet that the book is bad - full of factual errors and written by someone who would like to nationalize the bookshop and send its shareholders to the death camps [editors note: there are solutions to this].

I am not even sure that such books do sell well. After all, if this so, who does one see (every sale time) great piles of leftist books on sale at half price (or less). I say again, how do the book shop people know that British people do not want to buy anti-leftist books in economics, history, philosophy and politics when such books are hardly ever promoted and are mostly simply not on the shelves?

A person who comes into a bookshop (rather than buys over the internet) is there to see what sort of books are about in areas of knowledge that he is interested in. To physically touch and look at these books - to see what he might like to buy (rather than just trust reviews). And yet a person who entered a British bookshop would encounter (for example) in economics just establishment Keynesianism (with all the standard absurdities, such as the doctrine that an increase in government spending financed by credit expansion boasts long term income) and Marxist (or Marxiod) attacks on Keynesianism. Chicago school works are very rare and Austrian school works virtually non-existent.

The "passing trade" - the people (like me) who often go into book shops to look at books, just can not find works we want to buy. Someone who is not committed politically will find very little in British book shops to challenge the left and open new possibilities to him. And someone who already knows what he wants may as well go straight to the internet (after all the books are not going to be in the bookshop).

"Anti-statist books do not sell" - really? Or is it that British bookshops are dominated by people educated in the universities and these universities are strongholds of the left?

There will be token non-leftist books in the bookshops - but the weight of the left is overwhelming, and I very much doubt that he it has much to do with what sells.

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Stepping out of the Hyatt in Istanbul yesterday morning to the sound of the muezzins calling to prayer, an ancestral shudder came over me. The chant was alien but not insignificant. I grew up with tales of Turkish invaders ravishing my country’s land and no doubt many a fair maiden (no wonder that my eyes have a hint of almond shape). It was the buffer zone between the Ottoman Empire and the West and had endured the waves of invasions by Avars, Tartars and Turks throughout its history. There are many castles in Slovakia, each with its own story of siege and resistance to tell, which have become part of the fabric of the nation and its folklore.

I did not expect Istanbul to remind me of all this. I came here from an entirely different direction - to find whatever traces of Constantinople still remain. Hagia Sofia was to be the highlight of my visit. As a child I remember leafing through my mother’s books on history of art and two pictures made a profound impression on me – Sainte-Chapelle and Hagia Sofia. I promised myself that one day I would see them, no matter what. This was no mean feat for a 10-year old living in deep communism, with not much hope of ever getting as far as the other side of the Danube to Austria. But one lives and dreams.

So when I was invited to speak at a conference in Istanbul, I accepted. Time to see Hagia Sofia, I thought. I was very much looking forward to it, expecting the Byzantine shine through the ages of the Islamic. The entrance was grandiose and reminded me of old cathedrals, with rough walls and majestic ceilings. Once I stepped inside the main nave, there was no magic for me. It was dark and gloomy but I usually do not mind that. It struck me as dilapidated and forgotten, the calligraphic roundels with Arabic script the victor’s graffiti stuck on to mark his prize winnings. There are still marks on the wall where the original crosses were ripped out.

I wondered around for a while trying to unwrap the beauty of the place. I did find the magic in the end. The mosaics are exquisite and one has to gasp at the image of the entire church decorated with them. The great dome used to be covered in golden mosaic and the tinkling sound of pieces dropping to the ground was familiar to visitors until 19th century.

Above the mihrab, the niche indicating the direction of Mecca, is a striking mosaic of the Virgin with the infant and on its right, of Archangel Gabriel.

Mosaics of six-winged seraphim adorn four corners of the dome. They contrast strangely with minbar (imam’s pulpit) and other features added by Ottoman sultans after the conquest of Istanbul in 1453, when the church was converted into a mosque.

For various reasons I am reminded of a line from Kingdom of Heaven, although not the greatest film ever made, sums up the difference between Islam and Christianity - Mohammed says submit, Jesus says choose. And whether you are a believer or an atheist, there is no denying that this difference has affected the way the two cultures have gone.

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The recent death of the footballer George Best has seen an outpouring of sentimental remembrance about the skill and talent of one of Britain's greatest ever footballers. It has also seen a sober reflection of the darker side of Best's life. As Sue Mott pointed out:

As a sportsman, he was ruinously worshipped as a god. As society's golden boy, gloriously handsome, funny and highly intelligent, he enjoyed all life's little luxuries in conveyor-belt quantities. He was a Hollywood film star from Belfast and while we may now lament the wine, women and song, if you had been there at the time, could you have been the one to say: 'Shall we put the cork back in the champagne, George, I think we've had enough?"

It is a common theme of society that those who are blessed with extraordinary talents at one discipline are allowed special leeway in manners, morals and behaviour that are not bestowed upon lesser mortals. Had Best not been such a great footballer he would undoubtedly have been shunned by society as a drunk and a lecher. But because he was once a truly great footballer, he was treated as something different. People tolerated his drunkenness and women gave themselves to him sexually because he was genuinely seen as being cut from a higher cloth then other men. This may seem unfair, and in a way it is, but it was also the root of his downfall.

George Best, and footballers in general, though, are hardly the only sort of celebrity to take advantage of the special rules of society that are afforded to those touched by genius. And it has been going on for a long time.

Nearly 200 years ago, the poet Lord Byron made use of his fame as a poet to indulge himself in all manner of peccadillos, most of them sexual. That was perhaps not so uncommon for a Peer of the Realm back then, but it was mirrored by the behaviour of Percy Bysshe Shelley. A more dramatic example is in the personal life of Ludwig van Beethoven. Poor health, deafness, depression, loneliness and financial troubles made him a very difficult man to deal with, but he was indulged by many people precisely because he was obviously the greatest musical talent of his day.

Poets and classical composers do not have the influence on society in this day and age as they used to. The place of Byron and Beethoven has been taken by sports stars and actors and television celebrities. Some of these people, like Shane Warne are as gifted in his field as Byron was as a poet; and Warne has been noted for womanising on a considerable scale as well. Some are, in sober fact, non-entities, but we live in a vacuous time where everyone gets their 'fifteen minutes of fame'.

Many not so talented people have also exploited their celebrity to get away with actions that would not be tolerated in others; Hollywood is of course notorious for this sort of thing, where actors and actresses have their notions of their own worth and talent over-inflated by agents, publicists, and the media. A similar fate has befallen many popular musicians over the last forty years. This sort of bad behaviour takes many forms, not just in terms of sexual self-indulgence, but substance abuse, or simply by being a difficult and unpleasant person to be around. The life and times of John Lennon reflect this- he confused his musical talent with wisdom, and spent his latter years pontificating about a society of which his understanding of seems have been very limited indeed. However, because he was such a fine musical talent, no one was willing to stand up to Lennon and tell him that he was talking nonsense.

Why? Why do we allow this select group of people, not all of whom are that talented, to get away with this sort of thing. Why can't we "put the cork back in the champagne" as it were? There seems to be something innate to many people who must feel that they can reflect the glory of the star's achievements by indulging them in their foibles. This can not be healthy for us any more then it is healthy for the stars. Just look at George Best now.

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Poor old Harold Pinter gets a brutal ritualised kicking from the Samizdata commentariat here, and he's not even a Muslim. This (and a dig from Perry) suggests I should amplify my comments on that article, which (as ever) have been willfully misunderstood.

I am with 'Modesty Blaise' in thinking Pinter overrated as a playwright, but can not help feeling that it is just a bit unreasonable to attack him for being Pinter even when what he says is pungently expressed fair comment. Fate has twisted the knife in the June 20th Group quite enough by landing them with Blair. Be careful what you wish for.

The occasion is this dictum in a letter of support for the anti-Bush group, The World Can't Wait:

"The Bush administration is the most dangerous force that has ever existed. It is more dangerous than Nazi Germany because of the range and depth of its activities and intentions worldwide."

He may be mad, but he is half right for half of the right reasons. It is just the reasons and conclusions don't match up very much. He wants to hate Bush’s America by hook or crook. Rather as some of our commentariat want to love it and hate its opponents.

A pithy barb ought to make one think, not produce a spiteful reflex. American hegemony is not a bad thing in itself (pace Pinter). Capitalism is generally a force for good in human lives. But capitalism is full of discomforts (some of which Marxists hopefully identify as contradictions). And plenty of disastrous things have been done, and are being done, with American power in the world.

The Bush administration's combination of complete lack of doubt in its righteousness and unrivalled global dominance does make it dangerous, in the sense of hazardous, whether or not this or that particular action is good-hearted or objectively a Good Thing. In that sense, it is much more dangerous than Nazism. Because it is powerful, and unrivalled, a determination to use that power unrestrained can dominate the world in a way that was impossible for the Nazis.

I am not equating Bushism with Nazism. I am saying that Bush has greater power for good or evil in its hands than Hitler ever had. There is nowhere to hide from evils promoted by America. A straightforward, and here uncontroversial, example is the War on Drugs.

Where Pinter (and Chomsky, and the rest) go wrong is not in pointing out what they see as the bad things done by the US and by corporations. It is their drawing moral equivalence from the facts of power. Because US institutions are powerful and do bad things, they deduce that they are inherently evil and plan to do evil.

They are essentially materialists who cannot see that hyper-Americanism for all its vast reach, despite contingent horrors committed in its name, and despite even the AEI, is unsystematic and unprogrammatic at an ideological level. It is not necessarily destructive of humanity as Nazi racial theory was, as the communisms were, as the Salafist sects would be if they had their unlikely way. So what the “progressive critics” offer is a sort of well-presented, intellectually respectable, conspiracy theory.

But that does not mean they are wrong to criticize, or to point out the inconsistencies between rhetoric and practice of Americanism. It does not mean they can be dismissed or reviled simply because of who they are. It does not mean that a global monoculture in political economy, a particularistic imperial preference for Americans, enforced by the armed coercion of a single state is something that those who think of themselves as libertarians (even American ones) should welcome.

Adam Smith pointed out that businesses conspire against the free market, so why should we mock when Noreena Hertz or George Monbiot makes essentially the same point about modern corporations? We say want people to be treated as individuals, so why are the voices of those proclaiming a jihad more welcome than those saying that not all Muslims are the same? The diagnoses of The Left are often sound. It is the alternative medicine we should not swallow.

Besides, the juvenile disorder of leftism is not incurable. My old friend Jonathan Porritt shows that recovery is possible. They can learn some economics and appreciate that markets are merely a mechanism in the world, and that capitalists are just trying to make a living. Our side might too, one day.

If we want to live in a world where individualist politics and social variety are possible, then we should be listening carefully to the Pinters, welcoming them when they are right, and arguing against them when they are wrong. Criticism, not might, is the soul of liberty. We too should try to tell truth to power.

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GDP - or gross domestic product - is not a universally-liked measure. Its critics say it overestimates growth by not taking into account, for example, environmental factors. Kevin Carson complains that it does not deduct "broken window" spending. Trashing a window and then replacing isn't his idea of real economic growth. Yet I think GDP is a good measure precisely because it keeps things simple. Government statistics are difficult enough to objectively collect as it is: if statisticians have to make value judgments about how much a natural habitat or a certain type of bird flying in the sky is worth, the statistic will soon lose any meaning.

GDP isn't a perfect measure, but I think it's a mistake to say it overestimates "real growth". If anything, it underestimates it. In Off the Books, W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm point out that the statistic misses many of the improvements in living standards. Check it out.

Crossposted from The Globalisation Institute Blog.

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Today is exactly one month since I started on The Singleton Diet - and I've lost a stone and a half. Some people complain that they are "big boned" or point to others who seem to be able to able to consume huge amounts of food without getting fat. But often the people who can eat a lot also do a lot of exercise. And the simple fact is that if you can't burn off the food, it's time to cut it down - especially on the junk food, desserts and bread. That's exactly what I've been doing. As followers will know, my diet is very simple and not at all faddish: I eat less and better, and exercise more. And it works.

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I know this post is not 'on topic' in these days of Islam casting its shadow over the Western society but it is tonight I am watching Doctor Zhivago.

I remember reading the book by Boris Pasternak in 1980s, as a teenager. I got only about 70% of it because I was too young. Despite the fact that I was living in deep communism. I guess that was the reason I understood even that much of the story, at the tender age of 14... Never mind the love story - it is the backdrop that interests me. The Russian Revolution of 1918.

The film shows the destraction of an individual, educated and sensitive, a doctor and a poet. Not a perfect human being by far, who loved his country and saw it and his life rent apart by a brutal change, his loved ones in danger and all he treasured destroyed.

Let me relay some snippets that I found memorable.

Zhivago's house in Moscow has been taken over by the local Soviet run by two sour-faced comrades. They tell him, reproachfully, that there is room for 13 families there. He says: In that case, this is a better arrangement. More just...

Doctor Yuri Zhivago was a member of the Russian intelligentsia and believed that there was a need for reform of the country. At the start, he saw the Communist Party as performing a deep operation cutting out a cancerous tumour. Today he probably would be reading the Guardian or the New York Times calling himself a progressive. A bleeding heart liberal, perhaps. But Pasternak puts the Zhivago character through the reality of a dystopia coming true.

There is a conversation between Doctor Zhivago and Strelnikov, a commander of the Red Guard of legendary reputation, the scourge of the country.

Strelnikov: Are you the poet? I used to admire poetry, it's so personal, the flight of affections and humanity. Personal life is dead in Russia. I can see how you could hate me.

Zhivago: The fact I hate you, does not mean I want to kill you.

And later in the same conversation:

Zhivago: You burnt the wrong village.

Strelnikov [agitated]: A village is burnt, the point is made.

Yes, I remember the stern self-righteousness (or more accurately a psychotic moral high-ground), the fragile power that many experienced until they were the next batch to be devoured by the monstrous system. The glorious Party, the Workers, the Justice, Equality and the Better Tomorrow... airbrush the Gulags and you have the Guardianistas...

And then there is the nihilism of the 'revolutionaries'.

Tonya's (Zhivago's wife) father: They shot the czar and all his family... [exclaims] What's it for?

Zhivago: To show that there is no going back...

A young boy is found dying in the field after the attack of the partisans who kidnapped Zhivago for his medical expertise. The boy dies while Zhivago looks sadly on unable to save him. A partisan says:

It does not matter.

Zhivago: Did you ever have any children?

Partisan: I once had a wife and four children. None of this matters.

Zhivago: What matters, commander?

Partisan: Tell me, I have forgotten.

Towards the end of the film, Zhivago's brother says of Lara, his lover:

She vanished and died somewhere in one of the labour camps. A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid...

Watching the film reminds me of what an unqualified and unchecked evil the Soviet Revolution and communism was. Horrific in its suppression of the individual, ruthless in its ritual extinguishing of the human spirit and freedom, terrifying in its imposition of the most toxic variety of dystopia, arrogant in its denial of reality and brutal in the execution of those who dared even breathe against it. Evil, pure evil that will never be fully understood by those who have not experienced it.

Yeah, I should have gone out on Saturday night...

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"From a certain point of view, the journalist, the politician, the police chief, and the terrorist can be seen as locked in a macabre waltz of the mind, no less distorting for being unconscious. We should not join that dance."
- Matthew Parris in The Times

Indeed. What is it that causes skepticism here about the motives of the state and its agents to collapse as soon as Islamist violence is involved? I really want to know.

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I was on my way to hear a talk by Tim Evans in Putney about his work as the boss of CNE. Presumably it was going to be similar to the talk flagged up here.

Anyway, I walked to St James's Park tube station, which was open and functioning but with not many people using it. A train was standing at the platform and I ran down the steps in the hope of getting into it before the doors closed. I need not have bothered. It waited, and waited.

Until eventually, an announcement materialised saying: security alert at Victoria (the next station along the line). Damn. There I was, eager to do my bit to face down those moronofascist terrorists by going about my business as usual, as per the Spirit of the Blitz etc., which in my case meant a sweaty tube journey out to Putney to an evening meeting, but unable to make my journey. Very annoying. I would really have liked to have heard that talk of Tim's, but there was now no way I was going to get to Putney in time.

All those Londoners who would have had to share my inconvenience had they got caught by the same delay, but who had instead decided to give their work a miss today, turned out to have made a wise decision.

I asked the bloke at the ticket barrier I went back through if I could get my money back. He pointed at the ticket window where I had bought my ticket, but said he did not fancy my chances, on account of my ticket being usable to get to my destination by other means, namely two interminable bus journeys or one bus journey and an annoyingly long walk. (Which, by the way, I was not sure about and would have to find out about. Ugh!) So when I nevertheless asked for my refund I emphasised that there was no other way I could get where I wanted to in time. And guess what, he gave me my money back. However, I got the definite impression from all of this that under normal circumstances – no bombs yesterday, the usual crazy rush hour crowds – I would not have been so lucky. They are not usually this reasonable. Has the word gone out to these guys to be nice to the passengers, until we return in sufficient numbers to clog everything up again, and they can resume their normal level of small-print-based nastiness, in circumstances like these?

I can find no reference on the internet to this particular little flap, as of 10pm, which is when I am writing this. The only relevant thing I could find was a reference to "Minor delays are occurring on the rest of the line", i.e. the District Line, which is what it says around now at this Transport for London page.

My guess: jumpy people, chasing shadows, preferring the soft cushion of being safe to the faintest possibility of being sorry. Which is understandable. I am afraid London will be like this for quite a few more days yet.

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The day has been long, too long.

When we were finally released from the offices in the City, we headed for a public house and a pint, a token of commemoration and resistance.

The best way to remember those who are not coming home tonight is to have a drink amongst friends.

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"Cough, cough, cough," I spluttered down the telephone in shock when told the price. Markets are, in general, excellent at making things cost less - so effective that we are sometimes encouraged by campaigners to pay extra. So what was it that made me aghast at its high price? It was something called an ISDN mixer.

A few days ago I was in a BBC studio late at night once again. I really like doing radio, but at the same time I would prefer to be doing evening and late-night radio from home with a mug of tea. The problem is that, understandably, the BBC does not like you doing interviews down an ordinary phone line because of the poor sound quality. So while at the BBC, I got a pen and jotted down the make of the ISDN mixer being used.

What's with this ISDN mixer I am talking about? Apparently ISDN calls are not good quality on their own: I am told you need this ISDN mixer thing which has something called a "g722 audio codec", and it is this codec which makes the call quality broadcast standard. And do you know how much one of these ISDN mixers cost? The make the Beeb uses is £1679 + VAT, excluding microphone and headphones, but I found another make (used by an impressive range of charities and trade unions) which costs a few hundred less. Still, it seems remarkably pricey for what is essentially a box with a few buttons and a printed circuit board.

I am writing this for two reasons. One, it is possible that an enlightened reader will post a comment explaining that what I need is called an XYZ and costs $79 at Wal-Mart. The second reason is to make the point that markets are a process, not an end state. The high price is not market failure (inasmuch as I do not think there is justification for the government to start making the things), but I do think lots of Chinese companies ought to enter the ISDN mixer market. Let's hope.

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The following meme has been bouncing around blogdom and what the heck, I'll join in.

What are the five books that mean most to me?

1. The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas. This blockbuster of treachery, revenge and high excitement reads as fresh today as when I first came across the tale of Edmond Dantes' imprisonment and dramatic escape. Some say it is the best thriller ever written, and I am not going to disagree.

2. The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe (the movie is pretty good too). As an unashamed fan of aviation and Wolfe, I reckon this is his best non-fiction work. His description of Chuck Yeager's record-breaking adventures and the early Mercury rocket series has not been bettered.

3. The Happy Return. Never mind Patrick O'Brien, who was excellent, but C.S. Forester's Hornblower novels are my favourite stories of life set in the age of Lord Nelson. You can smell the gunpowder and the salt air.

4. Cryptonomicon. Neal Stephenson's masterpiece, in my view. Complex and very moving at times.

5. The Constitution of Liberty. Hayek lays out the case for classical liberalism and I pretty much agree with every word of what the great Austrian said.

Honourable mentions: Heinlein, Ayn Rand (of course!), John Varley, Vernor Vinge, Ian Fleming, Joseph Conrad, Victor Hugo, Evelyn Waugh and Wodehouse.

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I have often lamented that with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the forces of liberalism did not spend nearly enough time ruthlessly driving intellectual stakes through the hearts of all those who supported the 'Evil Empire' or preached appeasement or claimed that the Soviet system was 'just another way of living' rather than a mass murderous tyranny.

Well in this post-Cold War era in which the fight is now against militant Islam but the enemy within are in many cases the self same people who clearly thought the wrong side won the Cold War. This time we need to not just point out why these people are wrong, we need to grind their faces in their own words for all to see. It is imperative to show that there is often more than just mere ignorance or naivety at work when people choose to take an 'even handed approach' between Al Qaeda, the Taliban or the Ba'athists on one hand and the USA and UK on the other.

Now as I have said before on this blog, there are many people who opposed the war in Iraq for reasons that are clearly held in good conscience, fearing the cost to liberty in the West of such entanglements and I think it is important to differentiate between those people and others who oppose military action by the USA and UK for quite different reasons. Folks like Robert Fisk or John Pilger or Noam Chomsky are not neutral or 'pro-peace', they are actually on the other side because to them it is better to stand with people which makes women chattels, slaughters civilians intentionally, stones homosexuals to death and hangs female rape victims as well as the rapist, by simple virtue that anyone who is opposed to the liberal capitalist world is preferable to the United States. If the USA can be wounded, making the world safe for burquas and clitoridectomy is a small price to pay.

Well God bless the internet. By their own words they will be revealed. This is something that need to be an ongoing process, taking articles and 'inviting' the authors to confront their words and ask what they think now. Do not make the mistake of the 1990's and be magnanimous in victory. No, before forgiveness must come repentance. If the other side wants to be treated kindly then let them put their hands up in surrender and admit they were wrong. Until then it is time to follow the example of Hussein Shirazi and put the boot in. Hard.

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He has gone. As I said a few days ago, Pope John Paul II was one of the great figures of our age. However controversial a figure he may have been for his views on issues like abortion, birth control and capitalism, the late Pope was, in my eyes, a hero for playing a part in giving people in Eastern Europe the confidence to bring the Soviet Empire down.

In the days and weeks to come, people far more qualified than me will want to draw out the implications of the life of a very great Pole. At this point, all this lapsed Christian-can can say, is, "Thank You."

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It is often said that, in polite company, one should not discuss politics and religion. Samizdata does not pay heed to the first one and Brian and Jonathan have blown the second one, so I should be on safe ground.

Every year, at the Easter Vigil, a most spell-binding melody is sung during the liturgy. Last night, as every year, I listened to Exsultet chanted, this time at the church of Our Most Holy Redeemer and St Thomas Moore, in the darkness with only candles illuminating the entire church. Its purpose is to rejoice in the resurrection and marks the begining of Easter Celebrations. (Let's hear it for the barbaric Christian rituals.)

Exsultet of Easter Vigil is certainly my favourite piece of both poetry and music, with Allegri's Miserere coming close second. The orignal text, going back as far as St. Ambrose (4th century), entered the Roman tradition around the 9th-century as part of Gregorian chant tradition. It is a masterpiece of the liturgical tradition.

It is said to be the sublimest expression of joyful sound that has ever come from the human heart and mind. Mozart once said that it is the most beautiful music ever written and that he would have given all his works to be able to say that he had written the first line of the Exsultet.

I could not find a decent audio file that conveys its full beauty and impact, but I found the text and the music score.

Update: Here is an audio recording of the Latin version.

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I am watching the televised appearance of Pope John Paul at the Vatican at the moment. The old fella has only been able to say a few words for his regular Easter message to the masses thronging below in St Peter's Square. It cannot surely be very long before he steps off this mortal coil.

How should yours truly, a lapsed Anglican, think about what this man represents? Well, I am going to put any reflections on his contribution to the Catholic church, or his views about abortion, etc, to one side and focus on a more worldly fact about his extraordinary life and career. The Pope was, in my view, one of the three or four great men (and one great woman) who helped bring the Soviet Union, that evil and decrepit empire, crashing to its knees. Along with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Gorbachev and arguably, the power of cheap television advertising, the Pope helped bring about communism's demise.

I do not share the Pope's faith, but in reflecting on his life on this Easter Sunday, it was hard not to suppress a lump in the throat. In my book, he is one of the giants of our age.

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I will start this posting, having written the rest of it already and therefore possessing foreknowledge of what it contains, with a warning to easily offended Christians. This posting contains ideas that may offend easily offended Christians. So, if you are an easily offended Christian and sincerely do not wish to be offended yet again, best to stop reading now.

Christians are perfectly free to be offended by my anti-Christianity, just so long as they realise that I am likewise disgusted by many of the things they keep on proclaiming, mostly with no objections from me, both for its barbarity and for its contempt for normal standards of truth-seeking or logical argument. The offence is mutual.

Okay. Today being Good Friday, I have taken it upon myself to give the talk at my last Friday of the month meeting. Getting another speaker at such a time, and then perhaps having to soothe him or her because only three other people showed up, is more bother than the looks-bad factor of me doing the talk myself. (I did the same on the last Friday of December 2004, which happened also to be New Year's Eve. That went okay.)

And since it is Good Friday, I will be talking about Pain: its history; how that history might explain why Christianity, and in particular the crucifixion story, has done so well down the centuries; the fact that recently pain has abated for lots of lucky people in lucky countries like mine, and the fact that this might do something to explain the recent decline of Christianity in lucky countries. Christianity thrives in adversity, but wilts in comfort, not least physical comfort, which is why completely wiping out Christianity has proved so hard. Communism tried, but the more you torment Christians the more like Christ they feel. Meanwhile Communism, lacking a story that makes any sense for those unfortunates caught up in its numerous failures, is itself rapidly crumbling, not least at the hands of Christians.

Most histories of pain seem to be histories of pain relief, which is understandable. But what effect on life generally did the prevalence of pain have, in all the centuries when pain was prevalent? And what has been the effect of the recent and remarkable abatement of the pain, for millions upon millions of fortunate people, like me, and very probably, you too, for decade after decade?

I did not mention it in my email to my congregation, but pain also has a bearing on the libertarian political ideas that are the ongoing agenda of these Friday meetings. Libertarianism, you might say, is the idea that in our dealings with one another, we will forego the infliction of physical suffering upon each other, and confine ourselves only to doing things that all concerned consent to voluntarily, without any physical threats being exchanged. Libertarianism in this broader, non-ideological sense, of not getting what we want by hitting people, has been relentlessly growing in recent decades. We are now lucky (favourite phrase in that piece: "controlled oblivion") enough not tohave to endure nearly as much pain as in former centuries.

I have lived for over half a century and have experienced hardly any physical pain at all, and I am surely now quite typical, in my country. It took a recent and very minor accident to make me think seriously about the subject at all. But in former times, people suffered terrible pain quite routinely, from such things as frightful, unanaesthetised medical procedures, from childbirth, or from the fact that medicine could offer no cure and little solace for our pains (think only of dentistry), breakages and other accidents (often caused by arduous and prolonged physical toil such as most of us are now spared). This means, I surmise, that for us now to create pain for each other, just to get what we want, now seems far worse to us than it must have done in the past. This has all manner of intriguing effects.

Consider education. The command-and-control education system which our teachers still try to operate depends on, among many other things, the judicious application, every now and again - especially to boys - of torture. Certainly the people who began these educational arrangements had no compunction about inflicting the occasional beating. Our teachers now try to – or are told that they must – abjure torture as a means of classroom control. Yet they still try to exert the same old command-and-control, either out of sheer habit or because they have no faith in other, more libertarian, arrangements. Accordingly, we should not be surprised that the lives of our teachers have recently become more stressful.

At the other end of the age range, what effect will the increasing number of old people, kept alive by modern medicine and the modern food industry, hobbling about or driving about in annoying little electric trolleys, grumbling about their aches and pains, have on our beliefs about pain?

To me, the Christian obsession with their founder's crucifixion, however inspiring it may be in bad times, is absurd, not to say barbaric. I mean, a blood sacrifice to God, of God's only son? Is that supposed to cheer God up? Is that really something for civilised people seriously to believe in? But, as I (along with the rest of the Baby Boom) get older, as my body starts seriously to malfunction, and as hurts take longer and longer to go away, will the story of the crucifixion start to seem less daft to me? I cannot see myself overcoming my scientific type objections to Christianity as a body of supposedly truthful doctrine about the nature of the world, but I can see myself becoming slightly less scornful of all this crucifixion mumbo-jumbo that an atheist such as me who loves classical music has to put up with. I do not, however, think that I will ever modify my scorn for the notions embodied in the Holy Communion. Every week, we eat God. Charming.

So, in other words, if my attitude is anything at all to go by, I do not think that the medical travails of the Baby Boom in its dotage will be enough successfully to relaunch Christianity in the pain-free modern world. More likely responses will be redoubled enthusiasm for such things as yet more pain-killing drugs, and ever more intense argument about euthanasia, not least among the Baby Boom's descendants who will be keener and keener to be rid of this ever-ghastlier generation.

I love Grand Theories of history, and also their close cousins, Interesting Aspect theories of history: history as the history of the means of communication, history as the history of warfare, history as the history of the potato, or of art, or cultery, or sport, or travel. I loved Guns, Germs and Steel.

Pain seems to get less of a mention in such theorisings, which is especially offputting when you consider how prominently military matters figure in such ideas. (Sometimes, you can read an entire book about battles with hardly a mention of anyone actually finding the experience of battle painful.) No doubt there are histories of pain out there which are more than just the history of anaesthetics. If so, and you know of such, links please.

Just as a final, further for-instance, even my cursory pain-googling reminded me that the prevalence in our culture of alcohol owes much to the fact that, for many centuries, the only widely available palliative for pain was getting stupefyingly drunk.

Happy Easter everyone.

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While media attention is still on the Schiavo case, another legislature has been passing laws for specific individuals. In this case, the Icelandic Parliament has voted to grant citizenship to Bobby Fischer, the bizzare and deranged former Chess champion.

This act was done at the behest of supporters of Fischer, who has been imprisoned by Japanese immigration officials since July 2004 for trying to leave Japan without a valid passport. Since then, the US has been trying to extradite Fischer over his 1992 match with Boris Spassky, which, by being held in Yugoslavia, violated US sanctions.

I suspect that even if this new move is successful, the Icelandic authorities will come to regret their generosity. Fischer has a long habit of biting the hand that feeds, and Iceland may come to realise that there really is such a thing as bad publicity.

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I am not the world's leading authority on what Young People Are Getting Up To These Days. Nevertheless, today I spotted what looked to me like a new hairstyle, in Charing Cross Road in central London. And, on the off chance that it really is rather new, I photographed it from the top deck of the London bus I was in at the time, for Samizdata readers to wonder or sneer at. They were a group of five Asian boys, of whom three had their hair done thus:

At least two things may be wrong with this post. First, this hairstyle may already be old hat, and Asian boys have been swanning around for years with their hair done thus. Second, so what anyway? As to the first, well, I will take that chance. But re the second question, I think that human inventiveness and individuality is always worth a respectful nod. And yes, I daresay these were indeed juvenile delinquents, but that is always where these things seem to start.

How soon before David Beckham is to be seen thus adorned? Or maybe he has already sported such a hairdo and I missed that also.

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In one of his recent entries, Brian Micklethwait referred to that small but intruiging part of historical scholarship, the "what-if" variety, in which writers conjecture what might have happened if a particular event, such as a political assassination or piece of intelligence, had not taken place. What interested me was that one or two comments suggested that this was a pure "parlour game" of no significance and that grown-ups should not bother themselves with such playful nonsense.

Ah, play. The idea that history, philosophy or art could involve play and other frivolous activity is offensive to a certain type of person. I happen to think quite differently. Playfulness is in fact often very useful in the realm of ideas. When a good writer wants to illustrate a point or an argument, he or she can often do so highly effectively through such gambits as a "thought-experiment", or through borrowing from supposedly unrelated branches of knowledge.

A good example of this was the late libertarian author, Robert Nozick, who shamelessly borrowed from game theory, science and much else to make his arguments. He famously crushed egalitarian arguments for coercively redistributing wealth in his "Wilt Chamberlain" case by showing the injustice of taking wealth from a man who had earned it from the volutantary exchanges of people starting from a completely egalitarian starting point.

Maybe it is a product of puritanical Christianity, but our culture still revolts against the idea that ideas could, and should, be fun. I find that rather odd.

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This is the year that Denys Watkins-Pritchard was born, one hundred years ago, a minor children's author who bought joy to many schoolboys lurking around public libraries. Although Tolkien was the pre-eminent fantasy author, there were others to delve into on rainy afternoons, and under the pseudonym of 'BB', Watkins-Pritchard produced his own elegies to the passing of a pre-industrial England.

The most famous books were The Little Grey Men and The Little Grey Men Go Down The Bright Stream. The adventures of the four last gnomes in England, with the fantastical names of Cloudberry, Dodder, Sneezewort and Baldmoney, and their escape to a rural Ireland remind me of the 'rural retreat' that pervaded English literature from the beginning of the industrial age. As with the Cottingley Fairies, that famous fraud perpetrated on the gullible, BB recounted seeing a gnome:

The seeds of the idea for The Little Grey Men were sown when, as a small child, BB saw 'a diminutive being.3 It had a round, very red, bearded face about the size of a small crab apple. It wasn't a dream I can still see the little red astonished face.'

When myths and fairie-tales wove a stronger spell on the populace, brought up on rural tales of an idyllic past, the ring of authenticity provided that extra magical effect for the young audience, an extension of Peter Pan into real life.

There is a strand of merging reality and fantasy in British children's books and plays that can be traced to J.M. Barrie and probably precedes his Neverland. This proved a strong influence throughout the twentieth century and 'BB' tapped into the long retreat of magic that was to pervade the work of Alan Garner as well. Some may explain this as the workings of modernity or industrialism or empire but these authors wished to infuse their own pasts with a magical glow and pass it on to new audiences as part of their long summer childhood.

Sometimes, as I take the Bluebell Light Railway, I can imagine that it is passing through the Forest of Boland.

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Catoid Tim Lee grumbles about the American banking system:

When I was little, I'm pretty sure "bankers hours" meant something like Monday-Friday 9 to 5. So why do most banks in downtown DC close at 3 PM Monday-Thursday? Citibank is a brave exception, closing at 4. That still didn't do me any good when I set out at 4:15 yesterday looking for a new bank.

The British banks - which used to close at 3:30pm - do at least stay open a bit longer these days, normally until 4:30pm. But that's about all that's going for the British system.

In the US system, you get a cheque, take it to the bank that issued it, and they will give you cash there and then. On the spot. Go to a British bank, and they won't give you cash. It has to be paid into an account. Don't have an account? It's easy: all you have to do is to bring in your birth certificate and two utility bills. Don't have any utility bills because you're living with other people? Well, sorry, no bank account. It's the law, you know. If you have an account, that's great. No you can't have the money. It'll take four business days to process the cheque. We couldn't let people have access to money instantly, after all. Instead, we've put cheque clearing in the hands of a lethargic monopoly, the Assocation of Payment Clearing Services.

The banking system in Britain seems to operate in many ways skewed in the interests of the banks rather than the interests of consumers. Maybe adopting American regulations - and replacing our banks with American ones - would make the system work better.

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Just imagine a country with a low crime rate yet loads of people own guns and finding a fully automatic rifle in someone's house is not at all unusual. Imagine that this country does not even have a single unifying language, has a weak central government and strong regional government, yet is politically stable. It has few natural resources compared to many other parts of Europe yet has low unemployment, a diverse economy and one of the highest per capita incomes in the world (about the same as the USA). Of course like everywhere it has its problems and it is not a paradise on earth, but it is a pretty nice place to be and an even nicer place to do business. It is also a place that has been praised on this blog before.

Yes, I just got back from Switzerland.

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... no, not really, but that is scarcely less daft than the statement by the Archbishop of Canterbury that the calamitous tsunami made him doubt the existence of God. As a 'shoulder shrugging agnostic', I have serious doubt about the existence of God myself but surely re-evaluating a belief in God every time someone, or 130,000 someones, die does rather suggest a lack of having thought things through in the first place.

Unless we are nothing more that meat puppets dancing to a pre-ordained celestial script (which is certainly not Anglican doctrine), the fact we make use of our free will and thereby make decisions that result in us dying in a certain manner (such as, for example, deciding that we will live in a coastal community in southern Asia) neither proves nor disproves anything about the existence of God.

Now I have no doubt that the Archbishop is well aware of those arguments and is just indulging in the usual Anglican tradition of fogging issues whilst sounding concerned and looking earnest as an alternative to clearly articulating easy to understand (and thereby easy to attack) positions based on long established doctrines.

But then the current Archbishop is a strange bird and the things in which he has 'faith' suggests to me that placing too much stock in his judgement is faith misplaced. He says that he, like Tony Blair, has faith in the UN but thinks it should be reformed and improved by giving religious groups (naturally!) and nations not on the security council more power (such paragons of civil rights as Myanmar, Libya, Syria, Zaire and Iran perhaps?)...yes, he wants to have some official say over how the UN's tax funded patronage gets doled out. And presumably in the spirit of ecumenicist tolerance would also extend that to other religious leaders as well. It is a marvel how the UN gets held up as even a potential source of moral authority by people like Rowan Williams who are supposedly in the 'moral authority business', when by design the UN is a club of national leaders that admits mass murderers, fascists, communists, rabid nationalists and kleptocrats of every strip into its rank.

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There is an interesting article about the decline of religious belief in Britian that got me thinking. I am also one of those 'shoulder shrugging agnostics' yet it is not that I do not have 'beliefs', just not religious ones.

I often wonder though if the decline of religious belief across great swathes of western society is a product of the growth of rationalism... or is it a decline in the ability to think about abstractions by millions of folks who think 'Reality TV' has something to do with reality?

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If you don't like what the label on your clothes says - the size or the brand name - cut it off.
(From a beauty book or a women's magazine, I forget which. Sublime wisdom, whatever the source.)

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Another enforced absence from regular blogging can be explained (if not necessarily forgiven) by my currently being in Northern California on business.

Yes, here I am in downtown Monterey, seated at a table in 'Bay Books' internet cafe on the corner of Alvarado and Franklin.

While the climate is most agreeable, I must just say that this is not at all what I was expecting to find in 'George Bush's Amerikkka'. I have been here for very nearly a week now and I have not stumbled across a single Gulag. Perhaps they are all very well hidden. And if there are any Fascist Death Squads operating in the area, then the report of their rifles are being drowned out by the barking of the seals in Monterey Bay.

In fact, the only visibly disturbing characteristics of this place are a few too many ageing hippies and a zealous crusade against smokers. There are, however, compensations. It is mid-November and I can walk about in shirtsleeves during the day.

I cannot honestly say that I am enjoying myself but that is only because I have such a busy work schedule. I can say that I look forward to coming back here again.

I will be returning to Blighty early next week whereupon normal service will resume.

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My annual reminder that less government equals more wealth, or why I am English and poor, has come round again, with another vacation in the United States of America. This year, to combat the ennui and Autumn chills, Florida and the Keys beckons.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of a trip out West is finding some facet of American life that affirms the surprising echoes and extraordinary mixtures of the British Isles and other cultures. Such experiences confirm that the Anglosphere is certainly a cultural, if not a political project, although this is heresy in some quarters.

This year, my sojourn in the Keys coincides with the "Meeting of the Minds", an annual shindig for the Parrot Head Clubs, an organisation that I had never heard of. Since their gathering cramped my search for accommodation, this piqued my curiosity. The Parrotheads are fans of Jimmy Buffett, a country rock singer and aficianado of the island lifestyle, who I had also never heard of. He became a far more likeable figure as soon as a website on music banned by the BBC revealed that he was censored:

Jimmy Buffett's single, "come Monday" contained the line, "I've got my Hush Puppies on." Since the BBC considered this to be advertising he re-recorded that line so it said, "I've got my hiking shoes on."

The Parrotheads are a reminder of the strong links between civil society, charitable activities and other interests which bind individuals together. Such associations are now rare in Europe. The knowing classes would no doubt laugh at the voluntary activities of such simpletons and point out that their activities are wonderful examples of 'false consciousness'.

It is therefore no surprise that, in the most modern of societies, the prevailing moralism is a hard nut to crack for radical critics. This moralism is not only a theoretical matter, a form of false consciousness. From the seamstress to the First Lady, people have an urge to practice the ideals of altruism, modesty, honesty, compassion, charity, etc. Everyone donates to the Cancer Fund, UNICEF and so on. People join associations which promote stupidity in young people, firmly believing that this is an opportunity to experience something workaday life denies them: community of purpose, solidarity, friendship. They compensate for the necessity to compete against each other by forming disgusting groups on the basis of their ideals, even if their idealism demands further sacrifices.

However, groups still crop up amongst the British and their expatriate communities, proving our traditional bent for voluntarist activities. A recent phenomenon is the Hash House Harriers: running clubs that replicate the joy of hare and hounds:

The Hash House Harriers is a more social version of Hare and Hounds, where you join the pack of hounds (runners) to chase down the trail set by the hare or hares (other runners), then gather together for a little social activity known as the On In or Down Down. In most groups, all are welcome, young and old, fast or slow. The only prerequisite to hashing is a sense of humor, so check out a hash near you.

To split the cultural difference, the emphasis is on humour rather than charity Still, if they ban hunting, this will provide suitable enjoyment for the interregnum, until liberty returns.

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It has been a couple of hours since I watched The Power of Nightmares on BBC 2, the first programme in a major new BBC series. I put off writing about the program so I could decide whether I really wanted to get into what, I suspect, will be a can or worms. However, the issues this program raised are too important to be ignored.

Many libertarians will find the thesis of the programme attractive. This thesis being that a group of statists called 'neo conservatives' (inspired by the philosopher Leo Strauss) has created a series of imaginary threats to the United States, myths, to justify government power and to (in their own view) give the mass of ordinary people meaning and purpose in their lives. The Platonic 'noble lie' of our time. I can see in my mind the joy of (for example) people at the Ludwig Von Mises Insititute and the joy of people in the Libertarian Party, and the joy of old style Conservatives.

And I must say that have great respect for many aspects of the people in the above paragraph. I too dislike neocons (a neocon on BBC Radio Four's Start the Week show on Monday defined neoconservatism as acceptance of the Welfare State, of deficit finance, and of a positive duty for the United States government to spread democracy all over the world - and I oppose all those beliefs). I also questioned the Iraq war (and got attacked here for asking what the war was supposed to be about - although I accept that once Britain and the United States are at war with a bunch of terrorist scum it is too late for opposition "I would not start from here" directions are not very good).

However, I can not support The Power of Nightmares because this progam is based on lies. The program claimed that the neocons and specifically President Ford's "Team B". and later groups (both Team B. and the later groups were largely controlled by people who were not neocons, but the program, rather quietly, accepted that - so let me leave that aside for now) made up the Soviet arms build up of the 1970's. It was one of the 'myths' that the wise CIA rejected. The trouble is that there WAS a massive Soviet arms build up in the 1970s (at the very time that the United States military was in decline). This was even accepted by Russia (at least in the Yeltsin years I do not what the Putin government is saying). The evidence is overwhelming - it is not some Plato-Strauss 'myth'.

The program claimed that Soviet support for terrorist groups was another 'myth' indeed that the wise CIA rejected this 'myth' because they know it was originally based on CIA lies about the the Soviet Union. The trouble is that the Soviet Union DID support terrorist groups. The Marxist ones (including some in the Middle East as well as east Asia, Europe, and Latin America) were natural targets for Soviet support, and support them it did. The basic point of the Soviet Union was to spread Marxism all over the world - oh sorry this is another 'neocon myth'.

On the basis of the above if The Power of Nightmares claims that 'neocons' have made up a 'myth' about an international network of Islamic terrorist network, I will take it as an indication that such a network does indeed exist. Do not laugh. The program was already laying the ground work for claiming that no such network exists - just a few isolated individuals. And that these individuals are the way they are because of the wicked United States. For example the United States corrupted Egypt - under President Sadat the economy was controlled by a "handful of millionaires". The basic fact that Egypt was (and is) a state dominated economy and that Sadat only allowed a bit of private enterprise round the edge was utterly ignored.

"But" the defenders of the program will cry "The Power of Nightmares contained lots of interviews with neocons and other people who would defend all of what you say above". So it did, but it did not allow any of these people to present the evidence for what they said - it allowed them to say something and then (at once) treated what they said as utterly absurd. The program (and I suspect the whole series) has an agenda - and that agenda is to spread lies. Many of them (although not the one about Sadat) may be nice lies for libertarians and traditional American Conservatives to hear, but they remain lies. And the people who were interviewed by the program, in order to be held up to contempt, would have better advised to say "no I will not be interviewed by you, because you are from the BBC and will leave out any facts you do not like".

One last point (returning to something I mentioned above). A particular target of the program was Donald Rumsfeld - although the program accepted that Mr Rumsfeld is not a neocon, he is just 'right wing' (which, in BBC language, means 'evil'). If people are interested in what Donald Rumsfeld is really like I would suggest they read page 391 of Milton and Rose Friedman's memoirs Two Lucky People (paperback edition 1999).

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Libertarian types are all over the blogosphere, but you never actually meet any in real life, of course. So claim many people who have felt the need to inform me that the blog to which I occasionally contribute does not conform to mainstream thinking. I am not sure whether these people expect me to weep softly, wail loudly, or recoil in shock and horror when they share this revelation with me, but if they do, no doubt they walk away from our exchanges disappointed.

To me, the fact that individualists are thick on the ground in the blogosphere is no bad thing. I am not totally surprised that people whose views are not represented in mainstream media would take to their own media in droves, be it to connect to those like them or to communicate their ideas and beliefs to those who may not be familiar with such thinking. Usually, such blog-based conversations involve both of those objectives. For example, I would not liken Samizdata to a recruitment drive, but neither is it mere preaching to the choir. At the same time, Samizdata is not a love-in for those who share the same metacontext. When I read people writing about "what Samizdatistas believe," I have to laugh: Some of the most fierce, raucous debates I have ever witnessed have taken part between Samizdatistas.

But a conversation I had this week got me thinking - and no, I am sure it is not an original thought - that the reason individualists may seem so hard to detect in day to day life is because many of them have decided to assign politics and related discussions to the circular file of their lives. To them, the system is broken and they do not wish to spend their lives talking about how it got that way, figuring out how to put it back together, or contemplating how much worse things are going to get. Beyond jaded, they just do not get involved in any way. These people may never have heard the terms individualist or libertarian, but they may well qualify for either of those classifications. And because they do not go around wearing any party's badge on their lapel, or touting any party line that comes down the pike, it is easy to imagine that they do not exist.

And imagining as much is probably quite comforting to those who strictly adhere to party politics. As long as they are certain that their thinking is in line with some large consensus of public sentiment, then they have some hope and some delusion of accuracy and relevance to hold on to. Forced to choose between that and shunning political matters altogether, how much of a dilemma would any of us actually face?

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One of the most enduring, and in some ways quite endearing, characteristics of the British left is their propensity to take themselves so deadly seriously. It is precisely this characteristic that lies behind their customarily ludicrous, nay comical, aggrandisements.

There is not, I submit, a single Trot journal or website that does not periodically feature a 48-point headline declaring that "The Revolution Has Begun" in response to an afternoon of industrial action by a group of clerical workers at a Job Centre in West Bromwich.

For these people, the steps of the Winter Palace are always on the verge of being stormed and they appear entirely unable to grasp the fact that, the more earnest and po-faced they are, the more pant-wettingly hilarious they become.

The latest recruits to this mythical army of restless proletarians are American sociologists who are about to cast off their chains:

More than 5,000 American sociologists, plus a few foreign scholars, held their largest and, many said, most vibrant annual convention for years.

Bush and Kerry were campaigning through nearby states. Their soundbites were rarely mentioned, but the lack of serious debate is one reason for US sociology's new political engagement after decades of quiet since the 60s.

Be on notice you nattering nabobs of neo-liberalism! The sociologists are waking from their slumbers and soon the entire civilised world will quake to vibration of their sensible shoes on the warpath.

The profession's centre of gravity is moving left.

No kidding!!??

There is a drive to inject ethical standards into the analysis of what most agree is a US society becoming increasingly polarised beneath its veneer of shared consumerism.

Er, if the consumerism is 'shared' then who, exactly, is 'polarised' here?

Words like "empire" and "inequality" popped up frequently at this conference after their post-Vietnam war dormancy. New phrases like "the corporate state" and "global apartheid" appeared.

Any context at all? Or does one delegate simply sidle up to another delegate, whisper the word 'inequality' and shuffle off again with an enigmatic look on their face?

Half the world's PhDs in sociology are taken at American universities. The US has 13,000 career sociologists, a potential for extraordinary intellectual hegemony.

Not to mention an extraordinary waste of wood pulp. And one would think that this British author would appreciate that here in Blighty the word 'sociologist' has rather negative connotations. 'Career sociologist' is usually a euphamism for a middle-aged beardy-weirdy with no job.

Without rigorous scholarly standards no public sociology will be taken seriously.

Just ignore the first four words of that sentence, please.

The South Africans and east Europeans present were ex-dissidents who described how the advent of democratic and legitimate governments in their countries had brought new problems. Debate narrowed, intellectuals were less in demand and disappointment with rising social inequality and the new governments' economic policies was leading to public apathy.

So the useless, boring wankers of yesteryear are still, useless boring wankers only without a state stipend. Tragic!

Jacklyn Cock, author of a path-breaking exposure of the plight of domestic workers in South Africa, called on sociologists to stand in solidarity with the new social movements.

See, this is precisely the kind of thing I was talking about. See above.

Four days in California are not going to change the world. But it was hard not to feel that something big is stirring in US academic life.

Yes, a very large pot of tea.

The foreign subjects of America's global empire have been restless for years. Now some of the sharpest minds are raising questions. Even if John Kerry wins control of the White House, the rebellion is unlikely to stop.

Did you hear that, all you bourgeois lackies of the capitalist running dog? Do you imagine that your flimsy paper empire can possibly halt the march of truth, progress and historic inevitability? The sociologists people are angry and they are rising up in solidarity against the forces of Reagonomic reaction. The revolution is at hand!

I know, I know. This is the Guardian and I really should learn to pick on someone my own size. But when I come across comedic treasures like this, I simply cannot resist the urge to share them with the world. Just call me an altruist.

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During a very pleasant week in the island of Malta, I took a fair old mix of books to read while catching some rays on the beach. Among the books I had been meaning, out of curiousity. to read was Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. (A sort of upmarket version of Confessions of a Bored French Housewife). I read the novel in about three days and I can say that the book is one of the most overated pieces of crud it has been my misfortune to read for a long time. I have read a fair amount of famous French literature in my time (I love Dumas and Hugo) but this was poor.

I can see why the book appeals to a certain kind of reader. While it tilts at the vital issue of women's liberation and the dangers of destructive relationships, it is in fact also deeply cynical and negative. It maintains a sustained sneer at a whole way of being for about 290 pages. While obsessed about the "hypocrisy" of 19th Century social mores, it utterly fails to suggest how a more "honest" value system would work. (Never mind the old adage that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue).

At times there is almost Woody Allenish message jumping from the page: "Life sucks and then you die". It is also hugely conceited and snobbish about ordinary, middle class people. (Flaubert prided himself on not performing any productive work in his life). It set the precedent for a whole range of books and plays mocking the middle class and supposed stuffy convention. However, unlike the wonderful short stories of Saki or the plays of Osar Wilde, Flaubert is rarely funny.

Why worry now about a book by a diseased Frenchman penned 150 years ago? Well, as this fine short article by Anthony Daniels makes clear, we have been paying the price for sneering at the bourgois value system almost as soon as the word "bourgois" became part of our verbal lexicon. The greatest victims, invariably, are the poor and ill educated.

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Serial commenter Verity wants to share her thoughts regarding why she has also done what Samizdatista Alice Bachini did (well, sort of)

I've legged it. 'opped it.

There was no defining moment. No shock of recognition. No clap of thunder.

There was nothing, really. I had regarded Europe and Britain with lazy distaste for so long it had become woven into the woof and warp of my daily thoughts, barely surfacing.

The encroaching communism-lite of the EU, supinely submitted to by the 400m or so people who live there, most of whom have never experienced real democracy... that revulsion was always in the background...

...and the eagerness of the repellent Blair to give away our country, which he does not understand, or even know very much about, to 'Europe', an area of the world that sinks deeper into global irrelevance with every silly little 'summit' with red carpets and photo ops, every self-involved, fidgety little treaty between themselves that has no relevance to the rest of the world, every encroachment by anonymous apparatchiks into the lives of the citizenries. With their happy blindness to the fact that world has long moved on from regarding Europe as a beacon of intellectual and political sophistication, and the diminishment of the continent's economic influence on international events, the EU has begun to take on the comedic, self-involved air of a light operetta.

At home, Blair is chasing indigenes out of the country at a rate of knots. People fear for their lives in the most lawless country in the advanced world. The overweening ego that oversaw the dissolution of the civil society, outlawed self-defence and nurtured a sense of grievance among the criminal classes, promoted thought fascism and other forms of bullying of the electorate, impudently routinely over-stepped his remit as PM, created ever more taxpayer-funded slots for the lumpen nomenklatura, awarded special privileges to selected segments of the public – not because they had earned them by making a contribution, but because their inexplicable privileges threw the people whose families have lived on this turf, and formed its civil society, for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, off their stride.

Who dared say him nay? No one. OK. Peter Hitchens has been a brave voice. And a few others. But by and large, the Brits don’t seem to mind. They get tax credits for the large wodge of their income taken from them by the state, some of which is returned to them as supplicants. Don't worry. Be happy.

Britain had not been conquered by a William of Normandy with dash, vision and intelligence. Self-congratulatory, faintly creepy Tony Blair and his court of tenth-raters got elected with the aid of smoke and mirrors and practice the cheap deceits of the Wizard of Oz before Toto pulled back the curtain.

I loathed it all. Like Alice, as quoted by Mick, I decided to change continents. To put as much space between lawless yet over-governed Britain, and the absurd, oppressive, irrelevant EU. I put my house on the market and started cruising the internet looking for alternatives. I chose a place...

I tried to make it as easy as possible on the cats by splitting the trip into three segments. I booked a first class ticket on the TGV to Charles de Gaulle. First class because the train that travels from the south of France 700 miles north to one of the largest airports in the world does not allow luggage in regular class any more. Such a daring concept!

I overnighted in Roissy and the next morning checked into the hellish CDG three hours early, as commanded, because of the cats. We finally boarded and I pissed the authoritarian French purser off by demanding to see the captain and tell him personally that there were live animals in the hold. The friendly American captain told me he knew there were live animals on board and he would heat and pressurise the hold.

After the stressful and willful chaos of Charles de Gaulle, stage to a shifting cast of thousands - empty-eyed trolley pushers lost in space as they seek a clue to the whereabouts of their check-in area in this signage Sahara – DFW is a haven of tranquility, intelligent organization and responsive employees. Signage is plentiful and is designed to serve the passenger, not some attention-seeking poncy board of directors. ("Did you notice we built an entire vast airport without signage? Are we cute enough to kiss?")

The hotel shuttle in DFW, at a well-marked spot with a broad sidewalk for luggage (unlike shuttle hell at CDG), picked me up on the button, the driver cheerfully loading the cats with a mind to their greatest comfort.

It was great to be back on the well-landscaped freeways of Texas, so wide, fast and disorienting that agoraphobics stick to normal roads. The huge Texas sky. The dazzling sun. I felt an intense glow of homecoming. Jet-lagged, but happy, happy, happy. Then, just when I was thinking it could not get any better, as we exited for the hotel, I looked across the verges, bridges and traffic and there it was on the far side of the expressway, the shining citadel on the hill. Wal-mart...

I called down to the front desk half an hour later. "Wal-mart? Sure, no problem! The shuttle'll run you over." God, I love America! Within half an hour, I was stocking up on cosmetics whose prices were determined by the demands of the market, not the cost of transfers to social programmes. Everything looked dazzlingly cheap.

But there was one more segment to go, and the next morning, it was back to the airport for a flight to Houston and then a connection to our destination even further south, but still in North America.

And so, readers, I decamped to Mexico.

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Natalie's post below, referencing 'new age travellers' reminded me of something I saw on TV the other night: One of the reality TV programmes littering the Channel 4 schedule is Wife Swap. This features two families of contrasting lifestyles swapping wives for a couple of weeks. This week saw unabashed 'consumerist' Joanna exchange with soi-disant 'eco-warrior', Emily.

The violent disagreements frequently showcased in this series were notable by their absence but a source of intense irritation for me was the smug way that Emily's family presumed to lecture Joanna's family about the 'unsustainability' of their 'consumerist' lifestyle. This was to be set in contrast to the supposedly sustainable, humble way of life enjoyed by the environmentally friendly family. Yet it seemed clear to me that it was the lifestyle of the latter which was truly unsustainable. After all, this particular eco-family, eke out an idyllic idle existence in their forest house... courtesy of state benefits!

If all of us capitalists downed our tools to live in the woods and embrace the eco-lifestyle there would be nobody paying the taxes which fund these 'alternative' lifestyles, nor indeed would there be an economy to provide all those things you can't just grow. Whatever chance a self-supporting eco-warrior has of convincing me of the superiority of that lifestyle, when one attempts to do so from a position of state-funded idleness, the proper reaction is derision.

The principal reason this is worth noting is that guilty consumerists prove notoriously receptive to the kind of nonsense peddled by the likes of Emily, probably imagine that the greater virtue lies in the faux-sustainable lifestyle and provide insufficient defense of the capitalism which actually 'sustains' all of us.

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I think I may have stumbled upon (or possibly even coined) a counter-cultural smear word for deployment by the good guys against the bad.

I was having lunch with a business associate today and, at some point, conversation turned to discussion of a mutual acquaintance. While groping for the right words to describe this persons character, the word "liberophobe" just seemed to pop out of my mouth.

Liberophobia - an irrational fear of freedom.

I do not not know whether this word popped out of my brain prior to popping out of mouth or whether is was lying subliminally in wait as a result of my having heard the word elsewhere. In any event, I am far more concerned about spreading this meme than I am about claiming any moral rights to the term.

'Liberophobic'. I like it and I recommend that it be put to good use by whoever feels so inclined.

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We at Samizdata are always happy to awe. When the occasion merits we also do our best to agitate, derange and discommode.

Basically the only tenable defence against our collective awesomenosity is to flatter our socks off. What a very sweet thing to say, Mr Goldberg, and me likey you fine.

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When told once too often that President Reagan was 'just rhetoric' ("he did not reduce governement spending, either in California or with the Federal government, he did not get rid of X regulation, he did not...") the late M.A. Bradford replied "You will miss that rhetoric when he is gone".

Ronald Reagan has gone, and I do miss the rhetoric - and I miss him.

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Sean Gabb, who has been involved in libertarian circles for many years, will be well known to many readers of this blog. His personal website and his Free Life Commentary are always a cracking good read, even if one disagrees with some of what he says. Sean has never allowed his fierce passions thus far to break elementary good manners, as far as I can tell, until now.

Mr Gabb opposes the Coalition powers' overthrow of Saddam and his regime, which he deemed as essentially harmless to Britain and the West, and considers the venture of seeking to transform that injured nation into some form of pluralist, liberal haven to be an act of folly. The plight of the people living in Iraq under Saddam, while obviously awful, was not deemed by Sean to be reason for overthrowing Saddam's vile rule. Fair enough. A lot of people whom I hold in esteem share that view - mistaken though I think such 'realists' to be. But by now the arguments on both sides are well known and I will not go into them again.

What I really dislike about so much anti-war commentary to date has been in many cases its pompous anti-Americanism, a sort of drawn-out sneer. The likes of Times journalist Matthew Parris and Sir Max Hastings are particularly egregious sinners in this respect. Well, in his latest commentary, Mr Gabb comes out with a paragraph of breathtaking rudeness at the expense of Americans and their country, of the sort that might possibly give even those gentlemen a moments pause:

It is, I admit, inappropriate to ascribe one state of mind to a nation of more than 250 million people. But Americans remind me increasingly of someone from the lower classes who has come into money, and now is sat in the Ritz Hotel, terrified the other diners are laughing at him every time he looks down at his knives and forks. I suppose it is because so many of them are drawn from second and even third rate nationalities. The Americans of English and Scotch extraction took their values and their laws across the Atlantic and spread out over half an immense continent, creating a great nation as they went. They were then joined by millions of paupers from elsewhere who learnt a version of the English language and a few facts about their new country, but who never withheld from their offspring any sense of their own inferiority. The result is a combination of overwhelming power and the moral insight of a tree frog.

The reference to 'paupers' who 'never withheld from their offspring any sense of their own inferiority' is particularly vile. Some of the people who have made their home in the relative freedom and prosperity of America did so by successfully fleeing despotisms similar to Iraq.

I have known Sean for such a long time and enjoyed talking to him down the years that it would seem churlish to get too outraged at something like this. But it would be dishonest of me not to record my disgust at what was a particularly oafish piece of writing, all the less forgiveable for coming from one of the finest writers I know.

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Some people do not like having their photos taken by strange strangers... but some love it! These two for example, having a day out in London by the look of it, thoroughly enjoying it, enjoying London and enjoying themselves, and in a state of... mutual support. I took photo number one.

And they said: Oooh! Are you doing us?! Do another one!! So I did.

... and captured another of those characteristic Photography Moments. In the background: the objects of my attention, while in the foreground another Londoner hurries past. Like most people in London he has a purpose. He is going somewhere. He is in too much of a hurry to actually stop, but he is as polite as he can be without seriously interrupting his business and he does not want to get in the way of my business if he can avoid this, so he ducks as he passes. And for once, I get it all: him hurrying and out of focus, and the ladies in focus behind him.

But, one more, eh ladies? And that one comes out okay too. Sometimes everything clicks. Three out of three. This is not my usual hit rate, I can tell you.

These photos are even more entertaining if you look more closely at the label on the red bag:

All hail to the marginal cost (zero – near enough) of digital photography.

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The Guardian, dubbed The Grauniad for its typos, seems to be in a world of its own. Its articles are full of polytoines. The Britain it describes seems not to have anything to do with the one here on Earth, but on some distant land - the Planet Guardianopolis perhaps. The paper's spin rarely gets corrected but, in the face of undisputable facts, corrections and clarifications do get published. Here is one example:

In our report, Life after Living Marxism, page 10, July 8, we referred to the Reason Foundation and said its "leading writer, the syndicated columnist Sandra Postrel, is author of the libertarian book The Enemies Of Freedom and frequently talks at the Hudson Institute". The Reason Foundation points out that no one of that name works at the Foundation or for Reason Magazine. The editor-at-large and former editor of the magazine is called Virginia Postrel. She is a columnist for Forbes and the New York Times but not a "syndicated" columnist. Her book is not called The Enemies Of Freedom. It is called The Future And Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress (Free Press). The Reason Foundation says Ms Postrel has never been to the Hudson Institute and has no connection with the organisation.

Good work, chaps.

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It was said that El Sado's (or whatever the man's name is) newspaper in Iraq was closed down because it was "inciting violence". I think that is true - I do not have to read the newspaper to guess what sort of things it was printing "mutilate, kill, feed what is left to the dogs" (and so on) or therefore understand why it was closed down. However, hearing of this did make me think of the following.

One does not have to be a libertarian to think the government of the United States has treated the Constitution of the United States as a bit of toilet paper for at least the last 71 years. And, of course, President Bush far from fulfilling his Oath of Office to "Protect and Defend the Constitution of the United States" has added new unconstitutional programs (the 'no child left behind' thing, the extension of Medicare, and so) in addition to all the existing unconstitutional programmes.

Whilst I am not drawing a direct analogue to what is going on in Iraq (for obvious reasons), I wonder what the Founding Fathers would be writing if they were around today - I think they might well be inciting violence (although, I accept, they would not be writing about mutilating or feeding to dogs).

Please no comments about how "time changes how a text should be interpreted" or "the Supreme Court says X is O.K., so X must be O.K."

The Constitution of the United States is not some strange mystical text written in an ancient language - any person of average intelligence (who bothers to read it) would know that most of what the United States government now does is unconstitutional.

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Over the last couple of days in days I have in the North West of England. Or rather two bits of it - Bolton and Manchester.

Bolton did not seem to be the hell-on-Earth that it is normally presented as. The people did not seem very poor (although the local 'everything for a pound' shop was crowded) and the local Muslim (mostly brown) folk did not seem to be about to fight to the death with the local non Muslim (mostly pinkish-gray "white") folk.

The town seemed fairly clean and the town hall, art gallery and museum were quite nice.

One thing that sticks in my mind was a church in Bolton (St George's I think) that has been turned into some shops. As an Anglican (one of the few left) and a cultural conservative I should have been offended by this - but I was not. It "worked" - seeing the pulpit and stained glass windows (and so on) all still there, next to stores selling various nice things was actually quite nice (perhaps the decline of the Church of England can, in part, be blamed on too many Anglicans being like me).

As for Manchester.

Well first a word of explanation. Manchester in Britain is not famous for the old "Manchester School" of Free Trade (as it is overseas), although one can still find statues of Cobden and Bright and even the Conservative Peel who repealed the Corn Laws (there is also a statue of the Duke of Wellington - but that is another matter).

However, the Manchester of free markets is long gone (even the Free Trade Hall is now gone). Since the late 19th century Manchester has become famous for "social reform" (statism) - the same passion to help the poor and weak, but seeing the state (or "the community" in a sense that includes the public authority) rather than voluntarism as the way to do it.

Many conservative minded people (such as Lord Melbourne) warned that when free trade did not produce Paradise (the end of poverty and so on) radical people would turn to collectivism.

Manchester became known (in Britain) for not just local statism, but for a strong socialist tradition seeking to create a new society in the United Kingdom and, indeed, the world.

Birmingham may have just as much of an active local council as Manchester - but Birmingham did not seek to build the New Jerusalem.

Manchester was the city of Christian "social reformers" such as Archbishop Temple, and non Christian ones like Karl Marx (among many others), had strong connections to the city. And the Labour party has controlled Manchester for time out of mind - whereas many other English cities had Conservative party councils only a few years ago.

So what is the place like now?

Well it is not that bad.

In some nations (such as the United States) local leftism manifests itself in such things as high taxes and lots of regulations.

It used to be that way in England. I can remember in the 1970's when Conservative Leeds and Labour Manchester faced each other, in mutual hatred, on the two sides of the Pennines (the range of hills separating Yorkshire and Lancashire) and I can remember talking to Yorkshire people who said things like "it is not true that Yorkshire people hate Lancastrians - I just hate Manchester".

Of course the days of Conservative strength in parts of Yorkshire have been gone for some years, but that is not the main point.

In England almost all taxes, council spending and regulations are now decided at central level (as the people of my town of Kettering, in Northamptonshire, are finding to their cost), now this may mean that voting Consevative at the local level does not make much difference - but it also means that local radicalism can do only limited harm.

Manchester seems fairly prosperious and only partly because of the vast subsidies it gets from central government. The local authorities just do not have the power to turn the city into a total economic wasteland.

So how does Manchester's collectivist traditition manifest itself?

Well there are some silly things at the art gallery - but most of the gallery is nice.

The town hall makes a big thing of Manchester being the first city to become a 'nuclear free zone' back in 1980 (I rather doubt that this would have impressed anyone planning a nuclear attack on Britain) - but the staff of the town hall treat the memorial as a joke, and the hall is a nice building full of interesting information about the history of Manchester.

The city library has lots of Marxist (and other socialist) books in it - perhaps slightly more than in other cities' public libaries, but there were still a few pro freedom books (if one looks hard for them). Sadly the layout and entrance was poor - a nice building spoilt by badly thought out changes. But it could be worse. (The building could have been torn down and replaced by something vile.)

The local cathedral did have lots of stuff on South Africa (and local multiculturalism). But the old banners of units of the British army with local connections were still flying (yes, sorry, I am sucker for the warfare part of the 'warfare-welfare state' my libertarian doctrines have not managed to crush the romantic conservative in me). And the quiet dignity of the place was not destroyed by the new stained glass. The blackened walls of the repaired building were caused by German bombing in World War II and by an I.R.A. bombing some years ago - and, in a way, the damage actually helps the building's dignity. Old tattered banners with records of battle after battle, set against the bomb blackened walls ...

And (of course) J.S. Bach was being played as I entered the cathedral. Indeed the centuries-old school of music (a fine building, with free public concerts every week day at 1330) is only a few feet away.

I do not know what the 'People's Museum' is like as I did not visit it. But the only obvious communists I spotted were five people (wearing the standard signs) near one of the railway stations - they were shouting about something or other, but seemed to quiet down when I looked at them (I was not aggressive in any way). I looked about and I was the only person who had stopped to look at the communists. Perhaps they were just shocked that anybody would notice them.

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A mercifully uneventful journey for me on the London Underground this morning. Nonetheless, I reached my destination feeling ever-so-slightly disturbed.

No, I did not see anyone holding a Koran and muttering incantations while trying to wire two batteries together. Worse still, what I noticed was quite a few teenagers (who boarded and alighted separately so unlikley to be a group) dressed entirely in full-on, recreation 60's hippy gear. Yes, I do mean the Indian scarfs, the bell-bottom jeans, flowers-in-hair, tie-dye T-shirts and white lipstick. And the girls were dressed exactly the same.

I was shocked, I tell you, shocked. Is this the latest trend? Is this what is 'hot and happening' among the 'yoof'? Has anybody else observed this elsewhere? In America? Europe? Australia? Israel? Japan? Anywhere? Or is just the UK? Or perhaps just London?

I assure you this was not a mirage. These youngsters were genuine retro-hippies but what I want to know is whether this is the burgeoning new fashion or merely some isolated cases of severe mental disturbance that happened, by pure coincidence, to be travelling on the same train as me?

If it is a case of the former then I have a message for any impressionable teenagers who might be reading this and feeling the temptation to abandon themselves to a re-heated Age of Aquarius: for chrissakes, get a grip!!

I realise that you are too young to have been psychologically scarred by the 60's first time round but, for heaven's sake, do you realise just how nauseatingly sanctimonious all this flower-power mummery can be? What the world needs now is not love, sweet love but a swift and well-aimed kick up the jacksy. The last thing we need is for heaps of you to start mooning around looking for your Shakra. Or growing organic lentils on a commune in Wales.

So just stop it. Now

Of course, today's teenagers can hardly be blamed for the cultural stony-desert in which we presently dwell but since they are forced to go trawling through the archives of late 20th Century youth sub-cultures for inspiration then I sincerely hope that they have the good sense and common decency to revive the snarling, anarchic (and far better dressed) age of Punk Rock.

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Perry has I think given me the urge to buy a ticket and go to Kenya too. (Sadly, I can't actually manage it right now). I have also been to a fair few of the places mentioned in the article, and I too am getting visions of endless plains, interrupted only be the odd 6km high extinct volcano, and a strong desire to see them again myself.

I visited Kenya in 1993. I spent some time in the countryside in some indeed gorgeous country (some of it in Tanzania rather than Kenya). Having failed to reach the top of Mt Kilimanjaro due to case of altitude sickness (which was made worse by the fact that I was suffering from an as yet undiagnosed case of hepatitis) the friend I was travelling with and I returned to Nairobi for a couple of days before flying to London. Under instructions from the IMF, President Moi had in the previous months semi-floated the currency, and it had lost about half its value against the dollar. The day before I returned from the countryside, President Moi had announced that he was not taking instructions from the IMF any more, and that he would stand up to the "third world exploiters" in the west. Therefore currency trading was suspended until he decided what the exchange rate would be. I had run out of local money, and upon returning to the city I discovered I was not legally permitted to obtain any. I did have enough to buy a local English language (and state controlled) newspaper full of rants about how poor countries like Kenya were deliberately exploited by the west so that the rich people of Europe and America could be rich. (I didn't realise it, but this was all pretty par for the course in Kenya at that time. Telling the IMF to get stuffed once in a while was just what President Moi did).

Walking down the street, we were accosted by a tout who had previously attempted to find us accommodation, restaurants and all sorts of services, who now assured us he could take us to someone who would change our US$ travellers cheques into local money. He guided us down a few streets, into a shop selling carved wooden model animals, in another door at the back of the shop, up a pair of steps, and into a small office where there was seated a middle aged Indian gentleman. This man was quite happy to provide us with money at the exchange rate that had prevailed the previous day, and our problem was solved. We changed some money, and were able to do such important things as buy dinner.

This was my first trip to the third world. It was a real eye-opener concerning poverty, corruption, dictatorship, corrupt African governments using western agencies as scapegoats, economically dominant ethnic minorities, and many other things. There was also a stark lesson between different kinds of government. Although Kenya was clearly staggeringly corrupt, Kenya chose the capitalist dictatorship route. Tanzania chose the socialist dicatatorship route. (The third portion of former British East Africa, Uganda, took a worse route than either, of course). And however corrupt it was, Kenya was far, far better off than Tanzania. Kenya had a middle class who looked to be doing okay. I saw no such thing in Tanzania. (Yes, there is a wealthy Indian class in both countries that essentially runs the economies and which I came into contact with as described above, but these people keep almost entirely out of sight). Mail sent from Kenya reached Australia and England within a week or two. Mail sent from Tanzania took between three and six months, although it did ultimately arrive, which I suppose was something.

The most striking demonstration came at the border between Kenya and Tanzania. On the Kenyan side it was a fairly decent highway: a good sealed road that looked like it had regular maintenance. On the Tanzanian side, the "highway" was little more than a dirt track. In this and many other ways, Tanzania was a vastly poorer country. Kenya is by almost all standards a poor country, but even despite this I have seldom before or since seen as stark a contrast on two sides of a border.

And one other little anecdote. I did not get to Masai Mara, but I did visit another national park closer to Nairobi. I saw a vast number of different animals: zebras, antelopes of many different kinds, ostriches, even a rhinocerous. However, no big cats. No lions, no leopards. Although there were apparently plenty of these animals around, they tended only to come out in the twilight, and they were relatively hard to spot. Our guides were used to western visitors being disappointed at not seeing any lions, and so the tour concluded with a visit to a local zoo, where we could see lions, in cages. Wonderfully, this zoo also contained some animals which are not native to Africa. I was very careful to make sure I got some photos in which the cages and bars were not visible.

As a consequence, it was really quite amusing to show my photos of this African trip to my friends and family. It was really quite remarkable how many of them found nothing untoward about the tiger photos.

But certainly it is a country I would like to see again. And I would also like to get to the top of that damn mountain.

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But parts of it are bloody close.

Laura Bailey described her time in Kenya in a splendid travel article the other day and it damn near had me ordering tickets for the next flight out there myself. I have visited many of the places she mentions, although the most recent time was over twenty years ago. However much of what she describes just goes to remind me how timeless some places like the Masai Mara are.

I recall visiting the Masai Mara for a week, a few days before the great migration (the mass movement of about a zillion Wildebeests, closely followed by sundry hungry lions etc.) arrived at where they have to cross the Mara River. The scenery itself is simply stunning but when the Wildebeests arrive en-mass across the plains which were largely empty the day before, it is a truly amazing sight. Nor have I ever smelled anything so 'memorable' in my life.

Thousands upon thousands of Wildebeests drown whilst trying to ford the Mara River, many within sight of a bridge (they are not known for their brains), bringing crocodiles by the hundred to pick off the weak and vultures by the tens of thousands to feast on the ex-Wildebeest as their bodies quite literally clog the river. It is a breathtaking spectacle which has to be seen to be really appreciated.

If you are looking for a holiday with a difference, Kenya is an excellent place to try for all sorts of reasons, but do try to plan your itinerary so that you hit the Masai Mara. It is certainly one of the most fascinating parts of the world I have visited.

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It is a well-worn aphorism that you should avoid meeting your heroes, because up close and personal they will often disappoint you with their inevitable human foibles, as compared to their superhuman attributes as witnessed from a worshipful distance, often spilling tomato juice down the tie of your admiration. But although I have personally found this to be true, with an old Sheffield Wednesday sporting hero of mine who I once discovered sneakily chatting up a girl I was after, the cad, I still feel one must gather one's rosebuds from life. So despite the aphorism above I always take the risk of meeting heroes, however briefly, on the rare occasions when I get the opportunity to do so.

And last night, when I met one of them, alas very briefly, it proved no risk at all. For not only was my hero just as good in the flesh as he is as a picture on the Internet, he was even better. Far better, a true heroic star, a man of penetrating intelligence with a hint of self-deprecatory humour, a man of sparkling West Coast eloquence with an ability to make uninteresting questions put to him seem vital and imaginative, and a man of such devastating rhetorical ability that in just half an hour he managed to destroy a New Left edifice, constructed out of glue and matchsticks over three decades, to leave it as a dusty pile of splinters on the floor.

He was outstanding. He was inspirational. He was magnificent.

And no, I'm not talking about David Carr. Because I met him last year. I am, of course, talking about Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Michael Jennings, below, details Mr Lomborg's short talk for the Adam Smith Institute, last night, so I'll break my usual habit and keep this short. First, you must buy the book, if you haven't done so already you naughty person. Second, we're not going to run out of Shale Oil until about the year 5000. Third, that won't matter, because we'll be off fossil fuels by the end of the 21st century. Fourth, I was the first one to get my book signed last night because I'm one of those sorts of people. Fifth, if you ever get the chance to hear Bjørn Lomborg speak, yourself, just stop everything. Take that opportunity!

My greatest hero of all, Ludwig von Mises, once stood alone to take on the entire world before he then beat it. Bjørn Lomborg is a man in that vein. Almost alone, and despite copious icebergs of abuse, he has dragged the gun down from our heads that Greenpeace eco-warriors were gleefully pointing at us and wiped the imminent smile of success from their faces. Think Agent Smith. Think Mr Anderson. He is the one.

The book is available on all good websites everywhere. It's a no-brainer. Just buy it.

[BTW, for all Lomborg groupies, such as myself, there is another great review of the event here, by Andrew Medworth of the ASI]

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That's it, I've had enough. I just could not believe my ears, last night, listening to some po-voiced BBC reporter agreeing with some equally pompous do-gooding UK doctor that British people simply cannot be trusted to look after their own health. They also agreed that Wanless Chinder's HM Treasury proposal, to introduce yet more tax-funded social engineering into British health care, was a desperately needed breath of fresh air.

Jesus H. Christ. Just when will you people get it? When will you get it into your thick skulls that it is your damned social engineering policies, over the last sixty years, which have created all of your alleged problems in the first place? When you take away people's responsibilities for their own health care, by providing them with an MRSA-infested paid-for-by-everybody-else National Health Service, the obvious response is for many of them to start abusing their own bodies, or at the very least to start taking less care of themselves. Why? Because someone else will be forced to pick up the pieces afterwards, that's why. So what the hell, let's eat another cream cake, let's drink another bottle of whisky. Because the NHS will pay for any liposuction I may need, afterwards, and the NHS will always supply me with a new liver, should I need one. And if they refuse to, then I'll sue them for a loss of human dignity.

Take, for instance, asthma patients who smoke. I came across many of these, as a medical student, when I worked in the Northern General Hospital, in Sheffield. So why do they smoke when this lands them in an oxygen tent manned by a medical student making a mess of their right-arm, in his pitiful attempts to take blood samples from them every morning? Because the NHS supplies all of the Ventolin Inhalers they may need, supplies all of the incompetent medical students they may need, and supplies all of the sick notes and hospital beds they may need, to help their damaged lungs recover from their stupid and continuing nicotinic self-abuse. Some of them were even happy to be there, to spend a few weeks away from home, relaxing, getting paid on the medical sick note, watching television all day, and chatting to nurses and medical students. Oh yes, and when well enough, slipping outside for a quick smoke.

Would they abuse their bodies as much, smoking with asthma, if they had to supply their own wages insurance, had to pay the full cost for their own Ventolin supplies, and had to pay for their own hospital treatment insurance, to pick up the pieces, at a special ten times rate for asthmatics testing nicotine-positive on their blood samples? Of course they wouldn't. And will more social engineering and more extravagant government targets make them quit smoking? Are you kidding me? They're in hospital, facing death through smoking, right in the face. And a subsidy on Kumquats funded by a tax on chocolate Kit-Kats is going to make them give up? Beam me up, Nanny. Even an outright ban on smoking would only stop them for a few weeks, until the rapidly expanding tobacco and chocolate black markets got them hooked back in again.

When nanny supplies a comfortable cot and a bottle of warm milk, baby is just going to lie there lapping it up, even if it begins a process of artery clogging. And by the way, just what divine right is it you possess anyway to stick your noses into their lives, even if they did choose to be so stupid? I suppose, you might say, because Joe Taxpayer is forced to fund the NHS, so Joe Taxpayer, in the form of your good selves, has the right to make people obey health diktats. I have a better solution. Let's get rid of the filthy disgusting chippy-staffed NHS, instead, problem solved. And let's not forget the sheer hypocrisy of your leading priests, as they genuflect at the font of the God of Society.

You've got lardy High Priest Gordon Brown, whose fat jowls are now dropping well below his tailored shirt collars, and the even fatter and the even lardier Head Whipping Boy John Prescott, whose broad face is the very road map which highlights the dangers of personal over consumption.

And then, of course, there's Social Engineer-in-Chief and Lord High Defender of the Faith, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, a coffee-abusing man who can only carry out his job because there's a team of heart specialists waiting 24 hours a day at the Nomenklatura Hospital, in Chelsea, waiting for him to collapse again through overwork, so they can re-start his heart. I assisted in such procedures, in the Rotherham General hospital. But despite what Blair's aides have reported, even when such heart restart procedures are scheduled, they are never routine. Stopping and re-starting someone's heart, to get it into the correct sinus rhythm, is not something you do either lightly or while scoffing a Kit-Kat. It is always dangerous and it is sometimes lethal. Everyone around the table, especially the man with the shock paddles, gets a big hit of adrenaline when the capacitors charge up. Many people die in hospitals. But it's not every day you get to personally perform the action which kills them, especially when it is the bare chest of a British Prime Minister in front of you, all smothered in conductive K-Y Jelly.

But yet we all have to take lessons on health from this workaholic man, who is driving himself into an early grave through endless political briefs and night-time flights, because he is Social Engineering Superman. Despite heart restarts, which are nature's way of telling you to stop politicking and to start gardening, he still knows better than the rest of us as to how we should look after our own health. He even has the right, apparently, to force us how to look after our own health, through taxation and social engineering, because assorted health fascist Guardianistas, who make their obscene gravy-train living from the health-and-welfare monster that is the British state, say that he has this right, as they float around in a comfortable tax-funded sea of their own, smoking cannabis, drinking Chardonnay, and engaging in dubious STD-inducing night-time practices of sexual self discovery.

Well, good luck to you in your private lives. But if you do it, why can't anyone else? Your stupid social engineering, your filthy hospitals, and your unbelievable waste in the NHS, make me, and everyone else, sick. We will all be a damn sight better off, if we simply got rid of all you social engineers, and all of your terrible self-defeating Nanny State works, which make everything worse rather than better. Do you never learn anything? Sixty years of continuing NHS failure and your benighted solution is yet more of the same. It is simply unbelievable. It is time this ratchet was broken.

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The following point may seem obvious, and my apologies to you in advance if it is, but it did wake me this morning, at around 5am. Which is unusual for me, because at that time in the morning, before my first cup of tea, I normally have the mental capacity and memory attention span of a small flea. A particularly unintelligent flea. A flea, perhaps, in desperate need of a government initiative.

It's because of all these strikes we've been having recently, within the foaming shores of these sceptred isles. We had a paralysing Firemen's strike, in which 17,000 soldiers, with 50-year-old equipment, unflappably replaced 55,000 strikers. We've just had a catastrophic government Civil Service strike, in which I was unable to claim state benefits for almost two whole days. And we're currently enduring a calamitous state-owned University strike, where a bearded lecturer called Kevin, at the Friedrich Engels College in Newhaven, is refusing to deliver his annual keynote lecture on the philosophy of Schopenhauer. It's been hell, it really has.

In some ways you could imagine that British industrial relations are heading down the same pan they headed down in the late 1970s. But wait! None of these strikes are actually industrial. In fact I cannot remember, for the life of me, the last serious strike which occurred, at all, in the industrious wealth producing private sector. There may have been the odd Spanish practices walkout in previously nationalised industries, such as British Telecom or British Airways, but a question formed in my mind, this morning, when by all that is great and good in the world it should have been dreaming about Penelope Cruz instead.

Have British strikes, to all serious intents and purposes, become an exclusively public sector phenomenon?

Are British strikes the last refuge of incompetent non-tax-paying public sector 'key workers', who wish to hold Britain's wealth-creating taxpayers to ransom via the coercive hand of their idiot socialist friends in government? And is the public sector exclusivity of these strikes yet another testament to the enduring genius of our very own Joan of Arc, political saviour, and English heroine, Margaret Hilda, the Baroness Thatcher?

Your country is plagued by strikes and you want rid of them. Solution? Get rid of the public sector. Job done. Problem solved. Another instrumental Thatcherite lesson for politicians everywhere.

Baroness Thatcher. We truly are not worthy.

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I rarely write articles about ongoing discussions in the comment sections of Samizdata.net, but I think this is an appropriate continuation of the discourse.

Whilst I find being referred to as 'dear leader' a bit disconcerting, Frank McGahon does ask the questions which have vexed me for quite a long time. I refer to myself as a 'social individualist', as does Gabriel Syme. I also have no problem with 'minarchist'. Others tend to call me a 'libertarian'. Whatever... the general thrust of what I think is no secret to any regular reader of this blog. I see the state as at best a necessary evil and generally just an evil; I see constrained democracy as a tool to secure liberty, not an end in and of itself; I am all for free markets and 'Austrian' economics; I regard several property as the key underpinning of any civilization worth having; I see individual liberty as first amongst many virtues. Label all that as you wish.

So how does a person with such views, i.e. someone who is profoundly at odds with the system of regulatory democratic governance that prevails in the First World, and who regards so much of underpins everyday life in a legal sense as essentially illegitimate, act to advance his or her objectives? Or more particularly, how does one take action without legitimising what they regard as nothing less than threat-backed theft? How does one act without either fatally compromising one's beliefs or alternatively retreating into intellectually pure ineffectiveness?

This is a question I keep kicking around... over and over again. The problem with voting Tory (or in many states in the USA, voting Republican) is that it rewards both outright lying when they describe themselves as 'the party of free trade' and does little more than slow the rot of regulatory statism rather than reverse it. If they know you will just hold your nose and vote for them regardless just to keep Labour out (or the Democrats out), what possible motivation do they have to actually pander to your views in any meaningful way?

I am inclined to see things more Julian Morrison's way, at least somewhat: go for control of the zeitgeist and wait for the politics to follow. In this at least the internet in particular is a very 'liberty friendly' medium. Sure, pro-totalitarians like Stormfront and Indymedia can be found on the net, but for every one of them are a vastly greater number of genuine pro-liberty sites. We are actually voices in the on-line mainstream. That is by no means the same thing as 'the mainstream' within the broader context but it is a brave man who is willing to bet that 10 years from now that the net is not going to be the medium. Our early and heavy colonisation of the virtual world may give us a prominence that may well surprise people looking at how things are today. The culture war is by no means over plus we have the advantage of economic reality on our side. Only time will tell if that proves to be the case but that is certainly what I think.

And yet... we do not just live for the long term. In the here-and-now we have to continue to live and act with things as they are. So the question is 'does one participate in The System' or does one find other ways to resist right now?

The way I see it, generally voting for the lesser evil just encourages the lesser evil to remain evil. After all, if the Tory party (or Republican party in the USA), which is often The Party of Lesser Evil (but by no means always so), has little motivation to adopt more radical policies of cutting core functions of the state rather than just moderating the rate of real growth, if they know full well that true free market, pro-liberty voters will just hold their nose and vote for them because the other guys are ever worse. In such situations a vote for none-of-the-above or even an electorally hopeless third party (such as the Libertarian Party in the USA) is the only vote to case.

So if one is not going to vote, what then? In my case, I set up Samizdata.net provide a pace where the Samizdatistas try to suggest that there is another way to look at the world which you will rarely see mentioned in the New York Times or the Guardian or the Daily Telegraph. About 7000 people per day read this blog, some who agree with what is written and some who do not... which in the over all scheme of things may not be much, but I like to think it is not a waste of effort and certainly the intermittent donations via PayPal we receive and the e-mails we get and suggest enough other people agree with that notion. To be honest I would probably do this even if we only have 7 people per day reading us but it is nice to know there are rather more than that.

All that said, although many of the things I have written in the past seem to suggest otherwise, I would never rule out voting under any conditions. If I end up in New Hampshire with the Free State Project, I will almost certainly be voting, at least locally. Likewise I would vote if it seemed to make sense because a genuine reformer was on offer by a major party (as if) or if the alternatives were between slow rot and utter evil.

Yet the reality is that whilst some of the trends are very alarming indeed, we do not live in a police state in Britain or in the United States or anywhere in the EU, so that is not the choice we (currently) have to make. This is also why, when looking for alternative ways to resist the system of democratic regulatory statism, it is preposterous to think in terms of violence: it may (or may not) be too late to play within the system, but it is certainly not time to start chucking Molotov cocktails or sticking bombs under some people's cars. If you live in a place like Belarus, Burma, North Korea, Tibet, China, Iran or Syria, it is well past time to say 'sic semper tyranis' and meet violence with violence, but the idea that things are so bad that this approach is the way ahead right now anywhere in the First World is a notion best left to purveyors of tinfoil millinery.

The questions of 'what to do?' and 'do I vote?' are difficult ones, but they are not going to go away anytime soon either.

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My friend Ed Collins passed away at 12.45am this morning.

He will be greatly missed.

Rest In Peace, Ed.

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Compared to other people (or rather, other people of my acquaintance) I joined the internet revolution rather late. While most people I meet are able to boast that they have had an e-mail address since the late (or even mid) 1980's, I was not similarly endowed until 1998.

But what I lacked in early adoption techniques I made up for in subsequent enthusiasm. This was a whole new frontier and I revelled and rejoiced in the exhilirating liberation it provided. I am sure that plenty of our readers have experienced that same feeling.

And it was while I was on this big journey of discovery and emancipation that I stumbled across a forum (there were no blogs in those olden times) run by LM Magazine. LM stands (or stood) for 'Living Marxism' and it was run by the same people who, today, run Spiked-Online.

As with most internet fora, there was a regular contingent of posters and, in the case of the LM Forum, this consisted of a whole gaggle of Marxists, Communists and Trotskyites. Into this lion's den barged (or perhaps blundered) two libertarians; one of them was me and the other was an American called Ed Collins.

I have to tell you that Ed and I had a whale of a time thrashing away at this brigade of assorted bolsheviks and, while the debates became intense and vigourous, it all remained remarkably even-tempered. In fact, and strange as it may sound, the whole forum was awash with a consistent and comprehensive good humour. I suppose this was, at least partly, down to the fact that the LM regulars were old-school lefties who still had some respect for intellectual rigour and a contempt for emotionalism and establishment conformity (unlike their po-faced, post-modern successors). There were even some things which united us all. For example, we all loathed the PC paternalism of people like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and we all really, really, really hated the Greens.

I have truly fond memories of the old LM Forum and its idiosyncratic spirit of freewheeling, anarchic political debate.

In 2000, LM Magazine was on the wrong end of a disastrous libel suit as a result of which it was driven into bankruptcy. The magazine closed down and the forum went with it. I know not what became of its revolutionary leftie cadres but Ed Collins and I stayed in touch. In fact, we became pen-friends.

Ed and I would exchange letters by e-mail in which we discussed our ideas, disected current affairs and, occasionally, expressed our despair at that state of things on both sides of the Atlantic. From his postings on the LM Forum, I already knew that Ed was one of the good guys but it was not until we started to correspond regularly that I learned to appreciate his wit, his humanity and his majestic intellect. He has truly been an inspiration to me.

Ed and I would often speculate on the possibilities of actually meeting face-to-face. Either I could take a trip to Colorado or he to London but, either way, we always planned to meet up at some point, sit down together with a few frosty beers and set the world to rights. But we both had careers to pursue and busy lives and, somehow, that meeting did not come to pass.

And now it never will.

In the Spring of 2003, Ed wrote to me with the gut-wrenching news that he had been diagnosed as suffering from cancer. In response, I was as tongue-tied as most other people seem to be when presented with such a bombshell. All I could do was to assure him of my friendship and support and offer up my hopes and prayers for a full and speedy recovery.

Since then, Ed has stayed in touch with me, despite having to endure this savage affliction and the necessary, but debilitating, medical treatments. For a while the prospects for a recovery looked quite promising but, as time passed, it became clear that the tumours were spreading and that the cancer was voraciously and inexorably consuming him. As a helpless onlooker on another Continent, all I could do was to continue sending him my prayers and my support.

It was not enough. Ed Collins is now in hospice care at the Denver VA Medical Centre where he is living out the last few days of his life.

I have never met Ed Collins. I have never even spoken to him on the telephone. I do not know what he looks like or how old he is and I really know very little about his life. I know that he had a good life and I know this because he told me so in one of the letters he sent to me at a time when he was already expecting with worst. I am grateful that he chose to share some of that good life with me and, in doing so, make my life better than it otherwise would have been.

I must also take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Ed's friend, Jeff LeFlore. Jeff and his family have looked after Ed these past few months while his health and body were deteriorating. Jeff has also taken the time and trouble to speak to me by telephone and act as a go-between to pass my last letter to Ed now that Ed is no longer capable of corresponding himself. Thank you, Jeff.

The last communication I received from Ed was on 12th January this year. At that time, although I knew that things looked rather grim, I do not suppose I really appreciated just how bad they were. This is an excerpt from that e-mail:

I've tremendously enjoyed reading your stuff over on Samizdata and other places, and wish I felt like participating rather than merely being passive.

I rather like the sane and thoughtful comments of the Samizatistas. Keep up the good work, David, and always remember that there is Hope in the world.

I am sure that Ed knew exactly how bad things were and just how close he was to the end. Yet, there was no faltering in the towering dignity and resilient heroism that was the mark of the man.

Yes, there is hope for the world. But I cannot help but feel that there will be marginally less of it when Ed Collins dies.

I am writing this not because I want to share my grief and sadness at his passing. That is, and will remain, a private matter. But I want the world to know about Ed Collins. I want the world to know that he is among the best of us. Above all, I want the world to know that I am honoured and privileged to be able to call him my friend.

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Let me first of all state my basic position. I love America. There, I have said it. But I think there is a problem. I think the citizens of the United States are deluding themselves that they live in the 'Land of the Free'.

As I write this, in the downtown financial district of Boston Massachusetts, I am a hundred and fifty yards from the site of the historic Boston Tea Party, right here on the harbour lip of Fort Point Channel. In my opinion this site rates as one of the most significant places on Earth, third in my list of inspirational locations which I have personally visited, right behind Avebury and Stonehenge, and even creeping ahead of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Yes, I am one of those obsessive libertarians. I really am that sad.

Because in the future, when all of the current omnipotent state machines of the world have shrunk to nothing, this site in Boston harbour will be hailed as the Mohawk-dressed pinprick which first burst their bubble, the very point in space and time where the idea of the necessity of the state first started to die.

Birthplace of a libertarian revolution

But I fear we have a long road to travel before we reach that heady day, when the final Byzantine Emperor of the state is killed defending its walls of mediocrity, defending its rights to general taxation, and defending its monopoly provision of both justice and security. Because what I discovered, in Boston, admittedly in a state which ought to be renamed Taxachusetts, was a shock.

The first shock came downtown. I was admiring a fine statue of Samuel Adams, the first ever Governor of Massachusetts, and a notable early American Patriot. This liberty-slogan encrusted statue stands out in front of Faneuil Hall, itself known as the 'Cradle of American Liberty', where George Washington himself toasted the first birthday of the new nation. But just look at what they have made Samuel Adams stare at, in statue form, for the last thirty years:

Boston City Hall

I wonder how many American taxpayers it takes to keep the candles burning in this particular concrete monstrosity, of an afternoon. If someone were to offer me a hundred million dollars, and ask me to create a life-size model of George Orwell's Ministry of Truth, I would decline the cash and simply hand my sponsors the address of this statist horror.

Designed with the feeling in mind of 'making the individual look small' and 'making the state look big', this wind-chilled horror also cloaks itself in one of those Red Square style plazas so beloved of socialist architects, one of those communal areas that nobody in any community ever wants to spend any time in, unless 'persuaded' to go there, to wave happily at their leaders, by men with guns in their pockets. Apparently, according to my Bostonian sources, this North Korean style plaza was created by the destruction of an earlier much-missed and much-loved Bostonian cavalcade of buildings, you know the sort, filled with life, character, spontaneity, and individuality. But no, all swept away to create this hideous parasite-drenched edifice. Words alone cannot describe my shock at encountering this cuboid spawn of the Borg, and even now, my jaw is dropping at the incredulity of my discovery, as I turned away from Mr Adams' statue to witness the sharpness of those Gulag-inspired concrete guillotines before me. Nightmarish.

Even my personal old Smeagol chained in his socialist cage in the centre of my mind had to laugh, in sympathy, with the new capitalist me. For we were both brought up as Marxists in a union-dominated 1970s England, and like every other collectivist mind in England, we drank from the milk of the idea that all capitalist evil in the world emanated directly from the Great Satan in the west, from the land of John Wayne, from the land of Walt Disney, and from the land of Davy Crockett.

Little did we realise that even as we washed our developing minds in Das Kapital, there existed places in this same America portraying an undisclosed triumph of the world's collectivist social will.

I wandered up the steps of this terrible building in a daze, wrapped in fifteen cold-protecting layers, to find the City Hall's windswept plaza spreading out before me. And what was the sole building permitted within the confines of this vast empty frozen public arena? Think 'monument to collectivisation', and you may get it. Yes, it was the entrance to a collectivised transport system. Unbelievable.

An entrance shack squatted like a flue pipe directly up from hell, on one side of the plaza. This chimney led down to a dilapidated subway system. One of the escalators was out of order. Surely it can't be collectivised, I thought? Surely not in America? My blessed America? But it came as no surprise, later, to discover that this one-fee-fits-all subway system did indeed 'benefit' from generous government handouts.

It only took one or two long delays on short simple routes to remind me of London's similarly lobotomised Underground system. Though saying that, the staff were far more helpful here in guiding this stranger in a strange land to a remote cinema complex, for his second viewing of The Return of the King.

But that is what I love about America, even though it is more socialised than it apparently realises. The women are still sexier, the men are still handsomer, and everyone is still better dressed. Even the grunge kids are grungier, the lowlifes are lowlier, and almost without exception everyone is far more polite than we precious tight-assed Brits. Even a beggar I met in the doorway of a Wellesley breakfast coffee shop was polite, wishing me a good day, despite my absolute point-blank refusal to give him a dollar. Well, I did not say anything. He just knew by the look in my eye not to ask.

So, getting back to the story, what was the name of this subway station, this dribbling Shelob spider of a station, at the heart of Boston's Transit system? Just to keep the Orwellian motif going, the state-based God of Collectivism had, without the slightest trace of apparent irony, decided to name this particular subway station Government Center. I almost ran screaming from the shack. I looked up half expecting to see the picture of a man staring back down at me, his face bearing a thick luxuriant black moustache, and to hear a distant bell chiming thirteen o'clock. There was indeed a large face on the wall of the City Hall, but I was in no mood to snap it. Fortunately, I can find no pictures of it on the Internet, either. Which is a good thing.

I had to get out of there. So I staggered back down to good ol' Uncle Sam, outside his Cradle of Liberty:

Samuel Adams, Hero of Liberty

Now that's more like it, I thought. For I really do love America, and I am sure this travesty of a City Hall building is still curable. Do yourself a favour, Bostonians, and give Samuel Adams something decent to look at. If in the intervening period of time, before states cease to exist, you still need something to house your city administrators in, and even private city street owners will need some kind of office, knock the whole thing down and replace it with something Greek and magnificent, like the splendid Widener Library in Harvard Yard.

And so, escaping from America's worst building, please God do not ever let me find anything worse, I walked through the financial district, my home for the next five days, down to the Boston Tea Party ship. Again, it came as something as a surprise, in the frozen Arctic air, to discover the following sign:

The Boston Tea Party site is closed, indefinitely

I had expected that being British, they would not let me in, but for the whole thing to be closed to everyone started to worry me, again, on your behalf. For as Wendell Phillips said in his 1852 speech to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 'Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty'. And if you are going to let a site like this get rundown, and let it get surrounded by castaway concrete from a swathe of ugly federal building programs, you must ask yourselves if your vigilance is indeed slipping.

But maybe I am overdoing the doom-and-gloom thing, mainly because I wanted to be photographed throwing a tea chest over the side. If people refuse to value a thing, such as a constantly open Tea Party site, could it said to be a good thing that the state fails to make taxpayers pay to support it? Well, yes, maybe it could. But of course, the taxpayers of Boston have very little cash left to support Tea Party ships, because for the next 100 years they are going to be paying back the twelve billion dollars it has cost them for The Big Dig, a massively expensive Keynesian pump-prime pork-barrel project to build various tunnels through the cream cheese of Boston's complex soil structures.

Has it been worth it? Only you Bostonians can decide that. I certainly hope all the community outreach programs you've been subjected to, in mitigation of the project, and costing up to a third of the outlay, have proved worth it to you, as well as the tens of millions spent on the preservation of Rumney Marsh. I know I can never let a day go by without logging on to my nearest community outreach activist outlet or squelching through my nearest city marsh.

But before I continue, I really do have to mention the weather. I thought we Brits were obsessed. On my favourite news outlet, NBC channel-7, my favourite meteorologist, Pete Bouchard, spent up to 15 minutes every hour giving me the latest blow-by-blow account of every single snow cloud, or every single possible snow cloud, in the entire New England area. What's more, it took me just two days before I stopped seeing him as Bill Murray, in Groundhog Day, and started seeing him as my very own personal friend, Uncle Pete, helping me through the weather-torn day.

And boy, did we need helping. The day I landed it was colder than the dark side of the moon. On a cold day. In an Ice Age. With the windows open.

To say it was cold, would be like saying a Super Nova is slightly hot. I have never experienced such depraved iciness. How any of you manage to stay living in Boston, when our fine brave Patriot boys can walk around in light sweaters, in Houston, defies me. Yes, you have history, and bendy streets, and autumn, or as you bizarrely call it, Fall, but crikey, such cold. Chill the marrow? I may never be able to father children again.

Your intrepid hero found his future barricade gear great for the cold

Saying that, though, after a couple of days I started getting used to it. Americans started sounding less American, and I suspect that I may have started sounding less English. I once spent three weeks in Vancouver, and when I left everyone there was speaking plain unaccented English, and everyone back in England was speaking like David Niven, old boy. I fear I have a chameleon-like adaptability to foreign culture, particularly when I find it preferable to our own homegrown English chip-on-the-shoulder culture.

Indeed, in many ways, as I wandered around Boston, I increasingly came to think that New England is the England we stupid English threw away a hundred years ago, in our doomed bid to grow our heavenly unions and socialised culture into an Earthly Paradise. And even despite the cold, and the lumpen presence of City Hall, I felt increasingly comfortable, to the point where if you could've got my wife to agree, whisked my children over, and swapped my purple passport for one with an eagle on it, I would have kissed you.

But these little things just kept niggling away at me:

Rauchen verboten

Why are you, in the US, exporting socialism to us, in the EU? That's our job, the other way around. I'd heard New York had a smoking ban. But New York is surreal. It does not actually exist, except that bit where NBC broadcasts from, in Rockefeller Plaza. But to find smoking banned and illegal in private establishments, even in Boston, once again threw me out of kilter.

And then there were all those New Hampshire Primary statements, from the Democrats, along the lines of this:

We're going to find ways to cut Middle-Class health bills

What? By breaking the protectionist power of America's oldest producer-interest union, the AMA? Or by removing all that state subsidy, to enable tax cuts, to help ordinary people pay their medical bills? Oh, no, sir. By robbing successful people via raised tax levels. Not that successful people will pay these tax hikes, of course, because their accountants are too well-paid to allow it. What the Democrats will actually pay for it with will be even greater deficits. Which is free money. Right?

Nobody on the TV debates seemed to challenge the Democratic wannabees on any of this. They just let it go. And removing Bush's tax cut seemed to be stated as a good thing, and yes his deficit is outrageous, but you cure this by cutting government spending, not by abandoning tax cuts. And the questioning audiences and newscasters just let it go. And at that point I let it go, too.

It is not my problem, I thought. It has really got nothing to do with me. But, of course, it does have something to do with me. Because we, in socialised Europe, look to you, in America, as beacons of freedom and as rays of hope in our own feeble fight against the massive forces of collectivisation, as we slide into our death pit of EU taxes and totalitarianism.

But it seems you are getting to be just as bad over there, and in some ways worse, as for example with the smoking bans in private establishments. Even New Labour in the UK will not contemplate that. Just yet. But it is only a matter of time before they will say:

If they've even banned it in America, then it's OK for us to ban it over here, too

For our home-grown socialists to use the good ol' US of A as a beacon of socialised perfection may disturb you. I hope it does, anyway. It certainly disturbs me. And it is happening more and more. I just thought, as a friend, I should warn you. Think of me as Paul Revere, whose splendid horse-borne statue I discovered on a very brisk walk up to Bunker Hill. Think of me as an American Patriot in disguise. I even have a T-shirt with 'New England Patriots' on it, if it makes you feel any better. Not that we Pats fans need such things, any more, with our almost Jonny Wilkinson style late Superbowl win.

The Old State House

The subtle use of language of these Democratic candidates, several of them from New England, also set my mind on edge. It took me a few hours to figure out why. Reading some books on New England history and the Boston Freedom Trail, where I later encountered the splendid Old State House still resplendent under the Lion and the Unicorn of Great Britain, I realised what was causing this edginess.

They have twisted the language of your revolution. The American Revolution was a libertarian revolution, a movement against the state, against taxation, against coercive will, but mainly a liberty from the oppression of political tyrants. But Democrat proto-statesmen now describe it habitually in terms of socialist revolution, in terms of a liberty from the oppression of the rich. They dress it in the blood-drenched colours of the French Revolution, rather than the clear red, white, and blue colours of the true American Revolution. This use of language is very clever, it is very subtle, and it is very dangerous. Beware!

There are two sorts of rich people. Those who serve consumers spectacularly well, and those who serve themselves spectacularly well via the corruption of politics. The early Americans revolted against the second political kind, particularly the get-rich-quick Members of Parliament and landed gentry back over the Atlantic, in Britain. The Democrats are now using this perfectly decent anti-rich motivation to direct an attack against the first kind, the ones who serve society, by using even more political power against them. What you will then receive is more of these second kind of rich, the odious kind, the kind who should be removed, the kind who would suck your bones dry, given the opportunity. What the Democrats would destroy are those rich people who made America great through their innovation and industry, by associating them in their use of language with the power brokers of Washington, the lobbyists, and all the other snouts in the trough of political power. It is a very clever trick. The way to get rid of these people is to lessen and then remove politicians from having any power. Not by giving more of it to them, as the Democrats would have you believe.

Which leaves us with just two more important questions to answer, the first concerning liquid refreshment. Namely, what is the finest beer in New England? Oh, easy peasy lemon squeezy, my friends. How could it be anything other than Samuel Adams, perhaps the finest beer in the world. Let's hope this well-deserved accolade, tested in some depth by your humble correspondent, makes it up to poor old Sam's statue for having to look upon the ghastly Boston City Hall, for eternity. What ever did he do to deserve that? So in recompense, tonight, I shall raise a glass to dear old Sam.

[BTW, I managed to avoid going into the hideous Cheers bar. Those of you in Boston will know where I mean.]

And so finally, we come to the most important question of all, for a man on a five day business trip. That concerning lunch. Which is better? Finagle Bagel or Dunkin Donuts?

After much deliberation, it has got to be Finagle Bagel every time. Those so-called bagels from Dunkin Donuts just suck. Big time.

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Having just returned from a roundtrip flight to Texas during the "high" level alert this past week, I can report first-hand on airport security and its hidden costs.

First, I didn't notice anything new in airport security procedures during the high level alert. Whenever I travel to Texas, I take a rifle or two. Not as protective coloration, but because Texas in general, and my father's ranch in particular, are full of things I want to shoot. Specifically, during the Christmas season, white-tail deer. I am pleased to report that my shooting iron did not set off any alarm bells (by now, I know the drill for transporting firearms by air), and I had a very pleasant conversation with the guard in Wisconsin who confirmed that it wasn't loaded. Whereupon I locked it up in its case, as required by law, and didn't think twice about it until I got to Texas.

I drove out to the ranch at the first opportunity, gun and various hunting supplies in tow, and had barely been sitting in my blind for an hour when one of the larger deer I have ever seen in the wild came strolling by. He passed within 40 yards of my blind, and I watched him feed and mess about for over half an hour. He was a big eight-pointer, with heavy, symmetrical antlers.

At this point, one of the hidden costs of airport security reared its ugly head. I had, you see, forgotten to unlock my gun case when I got to my parent's house, and had left the key firmly attached to my briefcase sitting on my bed. I was sitting in my blind unarmed, the rifle securely locked in its case back at the pickup. I didn't get my deer, and its all BUSH's fault!

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Of all the tax payments I make in a year, either direct or indirect, the largest cheque I'm compelled to write has to be registered in Her Majesty's Treasury by January the 1st, each year. This is so Gordon Brown can then burn it, of course, on even more government regulation, on even more government corruption, and on even more government waste. And today was the last day free for me to get the ink onto the paper.

Ho ho ho, Gordon. I hope you choke on it.

Having just returned from the Post Office, where I schlepped the loot over, I wondered whether the British state has ever had it so easy. The Sheriff of Nottingham, in Robin Hood's day, had to go round digging up peasants' gardens, to see if they'd buried any taxable wheat. Here, in modern Britain, even one of Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe's (slightly critical) Austro-libertarian extremist disciples will calmly walk into a government controlled bank, and just hand the loot over, knowing full well that every penny of this hard-earned moolah will be wasted on Guardian Reader parasites.

No, not every penny. Most of it will be wasted on Guardian Reader parasites. The rest of it will be spent on making the life of this humble Austro-libertarian even worse, with an even greater intrusion into his life, and an even greater government commitment to increase the regulation over his already over-regulated life. Don't ya just love state socialism!

And there he was, the libertarian fool, desperately trying to make sure he got the cash in 'on time', and making sure he got a dated receipt for it, 'just in case' some drunken government half-wit, on January 2nd, pulls a sickie holiday, and fails to register my payment until after the 'deadline'. Can you imagine asking a mugger for a receipt, and then making sure they get the full amount from your wallet, in plenty of time for the bus, without going to the trouble of threatening you for it?

This institution of monopolised judicial state control and taxation is a madness, and I must do something about it. I can't just sit here and take this government abuse any more. I must help Professor Hoppe in his quest to free the world.

So, choices.

Should I pick up a Kalashnikov and run down Whitehall seeking out that fat slob Gordon Brown? No, I'll only end up dead. Should I run back to the Post Office to grab the cheque and rip it up? No, I'll only end up in jail.

No, it's time to be radical. I shall order the Professor's new book, The Myth of National Defense. With it I shall try to remove my own personal stumbling block on the final road to full Austro-libertarianism, namely the big question over societal defence and security.

Hey, I know it's not much, and it'll be slow getting to me because I've ordered it on standard shipping from American Amazon in a grouped consignment with Ludwig von Mises' slow-to-order Bureaucracy. But it's the best I can do without a government agent either filling me with lead or placing me behind bars.

And no, it doesn't amuse me that I paid for the lead, or that I paid for the steel in the bars. What does amuse me is that I wrote out the cheque to 'The Post Office Limited', a privatised Post Office counters company, because despite the valiant attempts of the British state to control everything that moves in this country, even the old government Post Office monopoly is being broken up by the malevolence of evil market forces. Why? Because even with a government-protected monopoly, it's considered a financial triumph if the government-owned Post Office delivery service doesn't lose more than a billion pounds in a single fiscal year.

And long may this break-up process continue. For my New Year's resolution is to try to play my part in the break-up of the British state, for as long as I can draw breath.

Though I do hope the Professor's philosophical ammunition gets to me before Easter.

Here's to hoping that with his help one day we will all be free.

Happy New Year!

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The Lord God is a jealous God, and in his Christian form he is followed by hypocrites and fools. Or at least, that's what I was thinking yesterday after a 'debate' with what polite British society calls a 'Mad Christian Socialist'. I say debate, but what I really mean of course is a verbal fight to the death.

Much of socialism draws its strength from Christianity. Indeed, you could argue that socialism is simply late radical Christianity by another name. Instead of worshipping God, its followers worship the State. Instead of donating a tithe of their income to the Church, they donate a tithe of their income to the Socialist Worker 'newspaper' collective. Instead of blindly following the teachings of Jesus, they blindly follow the teachings of Marx, another heretical Jew with a beard.

Even the glorious European Union, that flowering of socialist omniscience, can be seen as the latest papal plot to castrate the protesting rabble in England, to bring them under the heel of Rome. Or should I say, the Treaty of Rome. But yes, I'm getting off-topic, and straying towards Godwin's law, so let's get back to the central thrust of my point.

This Christian socialist was railing about how the rich people of Oxfordshire are evil because they won't give Christmas cash to the poor children of Reading, in Berkshire, whose parents are too busy jacking up with heroin to worry about their sorry offspring. Interesting, I thought. Let's see if we can swing this round.

I tried all the usual gambits. Aren't the evil rich people of Oxfordshire being sensible, because any cash given to these poor children will immediately find its way to the poppy fields of Afghanistan via the grasping hands of these children's parents? Didn't really get very far with that one. Indeed the Christian's head nearly exploded. I didn't want a medical emergency on my hands, so I desisted.

How about this? The reason there are so many heroin addicts out there is because fifty-eight years of welfare state socialism has sucked out all of the personal responsibility from millions of Britons, allowing many of them to indulge in the low-life extravagance of full-time heroin addiction in the knowledge that the state, i.e. me and all the other taxpayers, will be forced to pick up the pieces via the well-paid ministering of the Guardian Reader class. I got a verbal kicking for this, losing on points, and perhaps deservedly so. These children are suffering now, whatever the historical cause, and need help now. But at least I had made the point.

So to another tack. Why don't we remove heroin's illegality, so these feckless parents can get much cheaper and cleaner drugs, thereby draining the health and welfare state less, and creating better lives for themselves and their children? Oh, and by the way, we cut off all the welfare cheques to encourage them to work all day rather than squat in empty flats all day sticking dirty infected needles into themselves. Heroin will become a clean evening pastime, after a hard day of work, rather than a creator of slaves.

Here I hit the richest seam of all. Abolish the welfare state? Not only is the welfare state the greatest creation in the whole of the history of mankind, it should be massively enhanced and extended. These evil rich people in Oxfordshire should not only give more to Christian charities, they should have no money left to give to charity because the state should have taken all of their 'extra' earnings away already to help all the needy children in the world. Basically I was the devil, the personification of all evil, and a blasphemer of the filthiest water.

Now I was in a tricky corner, here, my mind forgetting all the arguments on why private charities are so much better than public welfare for cleaning up problems, rather than generating more of them. I'm not really the hottest at verbal debate. Some would say I'm not even the luke-warmest. And it was at this point that if I'd been richer I would've got on the phone to Michael Howard to bring him in to defend me. His politics are terrible, but his rhetoric is scaring the living daylights out of even the once indomitable Tony Blair. I needed such rhetorical help. Quickly.

And then it dawned on me, as it has dawned upon many fellow libertarians before me. But please, pray, grant me this indulgence. This was a 'scales falling from my eyes' moment, and another step on the road to removing state-induced institutional hypocrisy from my mind.

Hang on a minute, I said, forgetting all about the economic arguments of wealth creation and personal motivation. You're a Christian, right? Yes, you atheist monster and whore-master of Babylon! You want taxes to go up, to the point where people like me have nothing left except just enough to exist on? That's right. To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities! But isn't the central pillar of Christianity, its ultimate source of moral strength, the Ten Commandments of Moses? Certainly is. Thou shalt have no other gods before me! But doesn't taxation break one of the most vital commandments of all, second only to "Thou shalt not kill", that "Thou shalt not steal"? In what way foul demonic fiend?

Because all taxation is theft.

Bang to rights. Following the two second pause in which the mad Christian, who possesses even madder staring eyes than me, adjusted their world view to defend themselves, I had taken the field. There then followed a subsidiary argument about how this Christian willingly paid all taxes. Good for you, I said. I don't pay a penny willingly, except perhaps a little for the Scots Guards, the SAS, and Her Majesty's after-dinner tipples. At least ninety-five percent of what the state takes from me, I said, is taken by duress. I pay it because if I don't, the state will kidnap me, slam me in one of its gaols, and refuse to release me until I pay off its ransom. If tax isn't theft, I said, desperately trying to remember the correct quote from one of Uncle Murray's books, you should try asking the UK population for state contributions, rather than taking them under duress, and see how far you get.

Let's take a look at those five societal commandments, those relating to interpersonal human relationships, rather than those on how one should actually worship God:

Thou shalt not kill
Thou shalt not commit adultery
Thou shalt not steal
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour
Thou shalt not covet they neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's

Let's rephrase them slightly for modern libertarian use:

Thou shalt not kill, except in self-defence
Thou shalt not break contracts freely entered into with other people
Thou shalt not steal
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour
Thou shalt not covet any thing that is thy neighbour's

Now let's rephrase them for modern socialist use:

Thou shalt kill your opponents when they're in the way of your new political world order
Thou shalt break contracts freely entered into with other people when you want to re-nationalise or nationalise other people's property you once said would remain private and sacrosanct
Thou shalt steal everything thou can get thy hands on, through taxation
Thou shalt spin, distort, and tell lies about everything, to protect 'The Project'
Thou shalt covet everything belonging to thy neighbour in the politics of envy

I reckon that of all the political creeds it is libertarianism which most closely follows God's important societal commandments. It most certainly is not socialism.

I put it to you, therefore, that God is a libertarian. Nice one, God. Merry Christmas!

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Today my salary appeared in my bank account. I am definitely happier than I was yesterday, when my bank account contained a very little indeed. The conventional wisdom is that I should not be happier. "Money does not make you happier," the anti-progress crowd say.

But if that were true, then Africans who get clean water for the first time are not any happier than when their children were dying from disease. OK, maybe the anti-progressites merely mean that once you get to a certain basic income, earning any more from that point does not make you happier. Really?

Let's take a young family who pay fees to send their children to school. It is a bit of a struggle paying the fees. If they had a bit more money, they would not have to worry about it. Would that do nothing for their happiness? Or let's say environmentalists had their way and they had less money. The fees would become much more of a burden. Surely that would make them less happy?

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...can also be our enemy too. Just because a person dislikes the regulatory state, that does not mean they see several liberty as first of all virtues.

Here on Samizdata.net, we have written many articles abominating the coercive law enforced process of moral relativism called 'Political Correctness'. As a result, it is a measure of how bizarre some commenters can become when they starts accusing us of being PC because we do not have a problem with women joining the military, regardless of the fact none of us ever suggested a significant number of women have the physical strength to be front line infantry. It is apparent that the reason we are called 'PC' is that we do not think the only reasonable role for a woman in society is that of bearing and raising children.

Now I for one am all in favour of people who wish to have and raise children doing exactly that. Yet when it is suggested that a woman who might like to, say, spend her time flying a combat jet or wandering around lawless Basra as a military policewoman, we start seeing quack-science trotted out about 'evolutionary biology' and psychology and words to the effect that 'real women are just unsuited to such things' regardless of the mountain of evidence to the contrary... whilst somehow missing the rather obvious fact that actual biological evolution seems to have equipped woman, as well as men, with vastly powerful brains imbued with a capacity for reason and informed choices beyond crude instinctual motivations. Women have absurdly overpowered heads if the totality of their lives is driven by evolved psychological imperatives to immerse themselves in simple tasks such as having sex and keeping the house clean.

That some of Samizdata.net's commenters takes such an old style 'breeders' line is somewhat surprising these days given the avalanche of evidence that falsifies this 'weaker sex' theory (physical strength is not the issue here), but what is rather more remarkable is that the commenters, whilst hardly your typical libertarians, are not entirely out of sympathy with what is, for want of a better phrase, the libertarian meme. This fact is what I find really fascinating. Presumably that is also why they continue to read Samizdata.net in spite of the hostile reception they tend to get from other commenters.

I think Hans-Herman Hoppe, of whom I have written before, is probably operating from similar intellectual instincts. He argues that 'natural' societies will inevitably exert what he might describe euphemistically as 'dis-affinity', and I would describe as racism and bigotry, if only the over-mighty state was not enforcing tolerance for people 'not like us': racial minorities, dopers, punk rockers and homosexuals would, if tolerated at all, be confined to ghettos because when all property is private and property rights are absolute, such 'undesirables' would be unable to live amongst the Volk not because there is a law against it, but because a society unfettered by a state and imbued with absolute property rights (and a complex network of property covenants to prevent social change) would just demand things be that way.

Why? Hoppe would argue that it is because that is the way of human nature, which is of course exactly what our quixotic sexual determinist commenters argue as well: that is just the way we are... or in my view, because that is just the way they are and they are thus convinced that must therefore be the 'natural order' of things.

Presumably our 'nature' obsessed commenters notions are just a variant of this sort of thinking. As I do not know the commenters in question personally, I can only make conjectures as to the reasons they think the things they do. I suspect our extravagantly sexist commenters see the modern state as the cause of what to them seems like widespread aberrational behaviour by millions and millions of women, and this is the fount from which their anti-statism flows... it is not a matter of 'liberty' per se and certainly not a matter of individualism.

No, they make it clear that the good of the society is what matters rather than the individual, presuming, as I do not, that society is more than the sum of its parts. However the root underpinning reasons they see the behaviour of woman who elect to stray from the path of Kinder, Kuche, Kirche as aberrational is a matter more for suited for couches in psychiatrists offices than here... I am more interested in why such people see any value in anti-statism when most people of their views are so profoundly statist.

Kinder, Kuche, Kirche

As previously mentioned I think they are out of favour with the state because they sees it as enforcing, or at least enabling, the 'unnatural' behaviour of women and long for the days when 'women knew their place' and were not just as likely to the person signing their paychecks. In their view, society in its natural state without the distortions of politically correct government would naturally use all the social pressures and opprobriums at its disposal to abominate women who decide they are rational beings with ends of their own rather than baby making factories for a presumed good of society.

In any case, I am all in favour of social bonds and peer pressures as I have no desire to live in either chaos nor in a state-regulated dystopia. The great thing about social pressure is that if it becomes intolerable you can always choose to take the counter-culture route and try to make your own way in life regardless of 'fear or favour of the crowd'. I have nothing against women who submit to social pressure to wear a burqua, just so long as the law of the land does not also prohibit them saying 'go fuck yourself', moving to Venice Beach and putting on a bikini... only when social pressure is replaced by legal force do I start suggesting people start reaching for their rifles and wishing the eventual fate of Taliban Afghanistan on such a place.

But just as the cosmopolitan miscegenated streets of London prove Hoppe hopelessly wrong regarding his view of what millions of people will choose to do in a modern society if given the choice, for the truth is people are given the choice is such matters, similarly in the case of our commenters they are counfounded by the evidence of reality. The very fact so many women across the developed world start businesses, join armies, become policewomen, get high flying careers with or without children, makes the notion that any woman who is not driven by evolutionary psychological programing to hearth and home before all else is not a 'real' woman just as manifestly absurd... because we are not talking about a few testosterone riddled circus freaks here but many millions of people across all Western societies. So much for programing and evolution.

In an era of low infant mortality, long life spans and all manner of alternative child support systems (even, shock horror, stay-at-home dads), the instinctual primitivism of those who call for driving women back into the subservience of old most to be understood for what it is: attempts to justify misogyny. It is such arrant nonsense I am disinclined to waste more pixels on the subject.

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We have written a couple articles recently about the passing of Concorde, but I have just seen yet another twist which, as I am also someone who lives directly under what was that magnificent bird's flight path, brings an incredulous smirk to my lips.

Anti-noise activists in Queens, New York, are claiming that it was their protests against the aircraft that lead to its withdrawal from service. Ok, so let me get this straight... this supersonic aircraft has been flying in and out of the USA for 25 years following the utter defeat of attempts to prevent that in 1977, and against a backdrop of the well known fact that civil aviation has suffered a general reversal in fortune in the aftermath of September 11 , and yet we are to believe¹...

"We lost a few battles, but after 25 years, we finally won the war," said Frans C. Verhagen, the president of a coalition of civic groups in Queens, Sane Aviation for Everyone. "It took 25 years, but a bunch of citizens in Queens stopped the SST from proliferating into the rest of the United States and the world."

I wonder if this is all a result of the irrationalist cult of self-esteem. It reminds me of the comical Greenham Common Women jubilantly dancing and banging drums claiming they had seen off the USA when the missiles were removed from the UK between 1989 and 1991... as if the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed in 1987 with the rapidly collapsing Soviet Union did not have just a little something to do with it. Doh!

It is widespread delusional mindsets like, these with an inability to grasp anything beyond the most rudimentary causal links that sometimes get me muttering things like "the more people I meet, the more I like my cat".

¹ = NY Times link requires free registration.

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This year's hunting trip to the Great American West was (another) success, venturing forth heavily armed into the lovely country in south-central Wyoming, amongst the sagebrush flats and quaking aspen. The view from our line cabin:

Another look at the countryside:

To my eyes, admittedly raised in the flat and arid regions of Texas, this is some of the loveliest land around.

I was hunting on Battle Creek Ranch, along the Colorado/Wyoming border. The ranch family was exactly like most every one I have ever met: taciturn yet friendly, with no hesitation whatsoever to help neighbors and even virtual strangers such as myself. The well at our line cabin was clogged with silt (it has been droughty for a few years), so we were offered (and used) the showers at the ranch house. We stored two deer carcasses in the family's meat locker, which in turn provided the opportunity for a familiar (to me, as someone raised in ranch country) scenario. I knew there was no way that the rancher would charge for this service (as he had every right to do), but I also knew it was incumbent on me to offer to pay. Sure enough, he waved me off, but making the offer allowed mutual recognition of the favor he was doing for me. Civil society in action.

The mule deer hunting was extraordinary. The ranch of over 10,000 acres has 6 hunters for one week a year (although, to be sure, a few more jump the fence), leaving the deer herd unpressured and with a good number of the prized older bucks. In fact, we saw a handful of bucks that were obviously well past their prime, with snow white faces and racks of antlers that were clearly on the decline. Seeing genuinely old deer such as these is quite rare, and a good sign that you are into top quality deer habitat and a well-managed hunting program.

My guide was a fire-breathing hunting nut, who also happened to be a long-haul trucker and a former cook on a nuclear submarine tasked with SEAL team insertion (you meet the most interesting people while hunting). We ate well (crawfish jambalaya, breakfast quiche) and had plenty of entertainment. The rest of the hunting crew ranged from colorful to civil, with one exception who kept mostly to himself after screwing up my first stalk on a mulie by blundering around the mountainside like the big-city lawyer he was.

I tagged a very nice mule deer one evening just as the light was going down and a storm was rolling in. We spotted the deer from our vantage in the sagebrush at the foot of the mountain, just as he was coming out to feed in the evening. He was 650 yards away, requiring that I make up as much ground as I could before we lost the light. This turned out to require about 400 yards of hands-and-knees crawling through the sagebrush, periodically easing up to confirm that he was still about. At one point, I had to crawl past group of cows, who objected to my presence and stood in a half circle around me staring at me in bovine indignation. When I checked the deer, he was looking back in my direction, incidentally giving me a breathtaking view of his headgear, and heading into the woods, leaving me to meditate on the iniquity of cattle, the price of replacing a half-dozen head, and the stupidity of pissing off a man with a high-powered rifle.

My guide assured me the deer wasn't really spooked, so we finished crawling to a point that offered some good cover, and spent the next 40 minutes minutely glassing the treeline. With five minutes of shooting light left, the big boy moseyed back out of the cover and offered up a good shot at 250 yards. My confidence in my shooting was shaken by a miss the evening before at 450 yards (even though I zeroed my rifle, it was shooting 5 inches high), but 250 yards is, literally, point-blank range for the 300 Winchester Magnum that I lug around. And I do mean lug; it weighs just over 12 pounds, but it shoots into less than an inch at 100 yards, so what can I do?

He dropped like a stone, which was a very good thing as we would not have been able to blood trail him in the rain, which started 5 minutes after the shot. The old boy will feed my guide's family this winter, and by March the taxidermist will be done and I will be arguing with my wife about where to hang the mount.

Not to mention planning my next trip.

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Given the appearance of some gloomy prognostications round here today I think it appropriate to shed a little light on what I consider to be a much under-examined issue.

Damien Thompson writes in the Telegraph about the triumph of feeling over thinking:

How many people in Britain do you think work as "counsellors" of one sort or another? Ten thousand? Fifty thousand? According to Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, the actual figure may be closer to half a million, though no one can be sure. What we do know is that the number of mental health professionals has more than quadrupled since 1970, and that the ranks of registered psychotherapists were swelled by more than half between 1997 and 1999.

A new priesthood? Arguably, I suppose. But I have yet to be convinced that 'psychotherapy' is anything except institutionalised quackery.

Never before have so many people been dependent on some form of therapy. Night after night, our televisions instruct us to pick up the phone "if you have been affected by any of the issues in this programme": the message is that every difficult experience requires expert help. We must all raise our "awareness" - of stress, low self-esteem or some recently identified personality disorder.

We must all raise of 'awareness' of this worrying trend towards mental and spiritual incontinence...

Government, social workers and charities work tirelessly in this cause. It costs money, of course, since awareness-raising requires special training; and, despite ritual denunciations of underfunding, it is usually forthcoming. In a recent disbursement of National Lottery money earmarked for health, 25 per cent went to advice and counselling schemes; only six per cent was allocated to research charities.

...and the vested interests that actively promote it.

Thanks to media willingness to spread "awareness" of previously undiagnosed emotional illness, prophecies of mental anguish tend to become self-fulfilling. People learn to be stressed (which is not to say that their unhappiness is not real).

The BBC works particularly hard at cultivating therapeutic anxiety. Last Tuesday's Woman's Hour opened with the alarmist statement that "one in five young people rates stress as unbearably high most of the time, and the claim is backed up by a number of organisations".

The thing that BBC supporters seem unable to grasp is that antipathy towards that organisation is driven not just by its lockstep soft-left bias but also by the vanguard role it has arrogated unto itself in disseminating and propogandising this kind of grotesque agenda.

Yet, like the state socialism of the postwar years, the detailed management of emotion requires a formidable apparatus of bureaucratic inspectors. No government can hope to build such a structure on its own: it requires entire professions (such as the police, post-Macpherson, or the BBC) and large sections of the public to submit willingly to ideological control. That is how totalitarianism works.

That is exactly how is has worked. Nor is this class-interest driven programme of gradual infantilisation a transient or trivial matter. It isn't about 'caring' its about controlling and manipulating. It isn't about 'help' its about dependence. It isn't about more humanity its about less humanity. In the final analysis, it is all about the sleep of reason and the sleep of reason will, sooner or later, breed monsters.

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Now this is one American import we could well do without especially as it appears to be selling rather well.

Among the distributors are Simon Jenkins who devotes his latest column in the UK Times to 'The Untimely Death of a Liberal Generation':

Three British liberals have died in the past few days, all before their time. Jim Thompson, Gareth Williams and Hugo Young were still in their sixties. Each was outstanding in his profession, as priest, lawyer and journalist. They cut their political teeth with the rise of the welfare state and sharpened them on the Thatcher era. They lived to see what they regarded as Thatcherism’s denouement in the Labour landslide of 1997. They are gone. Something has died with them.

I certainly hope so because, as the brief obituaries which follow make abundantly clear, these men were not 'liberals' they were socialists.

I don't care if I am ploughing a lonely furrow, I am not going to stop campaigning against this gross distortion of language.

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For the benefit of our student readers, here is a cartoon pointing out some of the ideas being put forward by university anthropology departments.

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For the last 15 years, or so, I've earned my daily bread in and around the arena of Unix programming, whether that has been managing databases, programming in various flavours of shell script, writing technical specifications, or teaching programming. When one is living in 'Unix World', there are certain conventions that one must adhere to, and the central one is wearing sandals.

Fortunately, being a contrary sort of person, I've managed to resist this. I have occasionally succumbed to the continuous 24-hour donning of SuSE Linux polo shirts, the drinking of large quantities of real ale, and the growing of beards (once), but until this year I'd managed to avoid the big one.

But alas, no longer. With the collapse of the database and telecom networking industries in the Thames Valley, where I'd carried out many cosy assignments, I was forced out of my air-conditioned sub-one-hour trips to Abingdon, Camberley, and Reading, and plonked into the sadistic clutches of Thames Trains, Network Rail, and the London Underground, as all the consultancy work contracted into a small hard-core area of central London.

So what's all this got to do with sandals? Well, I'm a cold weather person. I like snow. I like skiing. I like warm fires, and thick blankets, and cocoa round the hearth. What I really can't tolerate is hot humid weather of the sort we've been having this summer in London and its surrounding regions, especially when trapped within a Thames Train cattle-truck where the windows won't open and the air-conditioning has failed, or at any time on the Bakerloo line, where I swear the humidity last week hit 763%. Or at least it felt like it did.

And if you wear ordinary leather shoes, or even Gortex-breathable light walking shoes, and you have ice-cold Norwegian blood in your veins, as I do, what this does to your feet is turn them into squelching steamed sponges. God alone knows how those poor British squaddies are coping in 50 degrees of heat, in Basra, with standard-issue boots, because the MoD is too preoccupied with the Hutton Inquiry to get them proper desert footwear, but in London I found even a measly 30 degrees was too much to cope with.

Until that is I got my first ever adult pair of sandals. And now you couldn't part me from them with a Terminator energy pack.

Now most women already know about open-toed footwear, so I won't trouble them with my novice advice. But for those men who are tempted, but who haven't been able to face the shame, here's the Duncan Fortune 500 guide to buying and wearing sandals:

• First of all, just go and do it. It's not the end of the world. Take a look around you. You'll find many men are already doing it, and some of them aren't even Unix programmers! Some of them also have attractive looking girlfriends on their arms! So it can't all be bad. Be proud. Wear your sandals with confidence.
• Second, don't buy any with locking plastic clips. These break, and you're then down £30 quid or so until you get another pair. Get those with either two Velcro straps, at the front and back, or your more traditional hook-and-buckle arrangements if you enjoy being a little more retro than the average guy.
• If you must wear socks, because you're in some kind of 'civilised' office environment, wear plain ones as close to the colour of your sandals as possible (e.g. beige socks for brown sandals). You are not allowed to wear socks at the weekend, unless they are black, and you also subscribe to poking your nipples through string vests, and pulling knotted handkerchiefs over your head. No Englishmen abroad, please. We're over it.
• Watch out where you put your feet, especially on Tube escalators and train foot-wells. Having 18-stone fat-bodies crimp out your toes with Cuban heels is bad enough with ordinary shoes on. With sandals on, your screams will wake the living dead.
• Avoid cheap sandals. They are the ultimate false economy. Many pairs are designed purely for walking around the garden in. Don't get these, or you'll end up with blisters and red running sores, especially if you do any serious walking, say from Holborn to Paddington in 55 minutes via Newman Passage. If you wouldn't wear your sandals for a whole sunny weekend away on an active walking trip, don't get them. You have been warned.

Remember, be proud, be cool, be attentive to your foot care, and nobody will notice. Skulk, and you'll be laughed at from miles off by small children and pretty women on the arms of cool men wearing day-glo purple flip-flops. These men, in London, will almost certainly be Australian, or at a pinch, from New Zealand or South Africa. Our anti-podean friends got over sandals decades ago.

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Yesterday I had an interesting experience. I watched a lawyer at work. It was David Carr. We were due to dine together but he had some work to finish with some people who were setting up a business. David was crafting a contract that the business would be using. It got complicated. What exactly is meant by this? If so-and-so fails to provide that, who exactly pays? The point was: not the people David was helping.

Afterwards I talked about this with David, and he said, yes, it's the job of a lawyer to look ahead and try to see the pitfalls, and to clarify exactly who is obligated to do what in circumstances which nobody wants beforehand, but which may nevertheless crop up. Lawyers aren't paid to take you to court. They're paid to spare you the horror of ever having to go to court. What if? - What if? - What if? – they ask. What if the world price of marble doubles, and your Malaysian contractor simply can't supply marble at the price he originally and in good faith promised, but upon which the winning design depends for its aesthetic and price superiority? What if there's a hurricane and the factory is wrecked? What if the ship sinks? Who, then, is obligated to do what, and to pay for what?

This reminded me of my late father, who used to behave exactly like this if any of us were going on a journey of any complexity or expense. What if? – the train is late and you miss your connection. What if? – you get ill. What if? – the car breaks down. What if? – a meteorite from outer space lands nearby.

I made that last one up, because of course we used to tease my Dad about this habit of his. We all took a ruggedly entrepreirial attitude to future hazards. Dad, we'll worry about that if it happens, okay? We'll climb over any barriers in our path as and when we get to them, but we won't waste our energy worrying about what we can't possibly hope to anticipate. It's a holiday. Enjoy yourself. Well, he would reply, don't come running to me if that meteorite hits!!! – blah, blah, blah, big family row, just when we were supposed to be having holiday fun.

My Dad, like David, was also a lawyer. But he was a litigator, or barrister as we call that here, and maybe because he therefore did the arguing, and later in his career the judging, when the waste matter had already hit the fan, rather than the duller commercial job of preventing the need for all that, I had never quite connected his pessimism with him being a lawyer. I had just thought that my Dad was simply a pessimist, and that the lawyer bit was coincidence.

But lawyers, I was reminded, after watching David at work yesterday are paid to be gloomy. They are paid to see bad things coming, and to concoct complicated documents to take care of everything beforehand. And although my Dad may not have spent his life writing such documents, he did spend his life looking at them, and noting which ones solved the problem he was trying to deal with, and which ones didn't.

Like David, my Dad was a devotee of the precautionary principle, and my Dad was a moralist and David is a moralist, and I don't just mean in their Sunday best pronouncements about World Affairs, but in their daily lives. You must (moral issue) look ahead, and see bad things coming, and have a plan ready. Letting bad stuff hit you when you aren't ready but could and should (moral issue) have prepared for it is bad (moral issue). David yesterday, and my Dad always, was trying to do the right (moral issue) thing. Neither of them were just sneaky lawyers who wanted to tie people up in legal chewing gum for the mere sneaky sake of it, just for the profit and the pleasure of it. And I don't believe that most other lawyers are any more deliberately wicked than David or my Dad.

It is widely noted that (a) legislatures and parliaments everywhere are crawling with lawyers, and that (b) laws and regulations of ever increasing volume and complexity are piling up like there's no tomorrow, to the point where for millions of people there aren't going to be any tomorrows of remotely the kind they were hoping for. What's going on? What are all the lawyers doing wrong, and why?

The usual answers are that lawyers are crooks, and that lawyers have a vested interest in all those laws piling up because then they get lovely well-paid jobs unscrambling the very mess that they themselves have created. Both these explanations depend on us believing that lawyers are, in general, morally worse than the rest of us, and maybe they are at that. Maybe mixing with all those criminals gives them ideas. Maybe the power they have over us because they understand quite large piles of this crap while the rest of us understand hardly any of it has gone to their heads, and they go bad because they find that they can. If they weren't that to start with, they become, to quote the title of that Al Pacino/Keanu Reeves movie, Devil's Advocates.

But I'm never satisfied with explanations of human catastrophe – and the legislative and regulatory pandemic that has swept across the world in the last few decades is a huge catastrophe – that depend only on mere wickedness. For something to get seriously bad, good people, for what they regard as good reasons, must help the bad people to intensify the mess.

And I think that it may be the desperately well-meaning pessimism and the passionately morals-drive precautionary nature of lawyers that is part of why they are now causing such havoc all over the world.

All that is required to turn the sort of lawyer who does the stuff I watched David doing yesterday into a major public enemy is a job in the public sector – it could be in as an elected politician, but being someone who just manufactures laws without actually passing them is quite sufficient – and an inability to understand as well as he might the difference between a contract, and a regulation or a law. That's all it takes. All the lawyers need to do to perpetrate a huge catastrophe is to bring to the job of lawmaking the skill of contract writing, and the unexamined belief that future disaster can be averted if only you contrive the right document with the right things written on it and give it the force of law.

Is there a danger that toys will poison children? That a building might fall down? That a train might crash? That a newly invented or discovered biological process might escape from the laboratory and run amuck? That the weather might change for the worse in ten, fifty or a hundred years' time? That young boys are spending too much time playing with their computer games consoles and are getting too fat? That young girls are still smoking too much?

Don't just sit there waiting for disaster to strike, says the lawyer. Think about it beforehand. Take precautions beforehand, with the magic of paper, that can clarify, now, what needs to be done, now, thereby preventing catastrophe in the future. So what if most people don't read it? The people directly instructed to behave themselves better, in such a way that catastrophe is averted – they'll read it. That's sufficient.

As you can see, this involves going beyond merely foreseeing disaster, to actually preventing it.

But isn't that what you would do if you spent your whole life imagining future catastrophes and trying to fix it so that if catastrophe did strike your clients would at least keep their skins in one piece? Wouldn't you, if you got a job where you were now expected to look at the bigger picture, then ask: well, can't we contrive more and better paper that would actually prevent these disasters?

So the laws and the regulations pile up, and the people agitating for them and writing them and voting for them all truly believe that they are doing us all a favour. That's what makes it all so dangerous. Bad people are relatively easy to stop. It's the good people you have to really look out for, if only because they are so much more numerous, and so much more persuasive. (When did an old fashioned bank robber last even try to persuade you that robbing people is good?)

To put it another way, the lawyers have been promoted - and have promoted themselves - beyond their level of competence (foreseeing catastrophe for their clients) to their level of incompetence (preventing catastrophe for all of us). Their very success at the first job has filled them with misplaced confidence in their ability to do the second job also.

I don't offer this way of thinking as the complete answer to the world's woes. Clearly there are other people in the world in the grip of negativity about the future besides lawyers. Think of the environmental movement. They aren't lawyers, hardly at all. And there are other things that cause bad things in the future other than being pessimistic about the future.

But lawyers equals pessimism equals the precautionary principle equals a different kind of misery that is even worse than you were worrying about strikes me as a powerful syndrome.

Not all lawyers, not even all pessimistic lawyers, conform to this pattern. Think of David himself, who has turned pessimism into a Samizdata art form. He has gone a stage further. Instead of being pessimistic about disaster, he has become pessimistic about all the precautions being taken against disaster. That's his disaster, and I agree with him. Thus overwhelmed by a pessimism to make the average lawyer seem like Mary Poppins, he dazzles us with doom, delights us with disaster. He goes so far over the top with his forebodings that they are like Royal Ballet dance routines. Nevertheless, a lot of the time, he's right.

Oh dear, now I've made myself gloomy. David, say something to cheer me up.

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You know, some days I wake up and I despair. Samizdata is filled with a waterfall of stories because we're living in one of the most dangerous hate-filled ages of humanity, festooned with statists, hatists and ecologists.

The world is awash with these idiots, fools, and destroyers of the human spirit.

But then...

But then on other days I know, I feel it in my bones, from the smile on my son's face, that we will emerge triumphant from this gathering gateway of horror.

Oh I pray, I pray to the atheistic God I worship, that a saviour will come to free us from this tyranny.

And then I realise that we don't need a God, and we don't need a saviour.

The spirit is within us all. This is the spirit of freedom, the spirit of adventure, and the spirit of hope.

It has sustained us since we crawled out of Africa one hundred thousand years ago, the product of four billion years of evolution. It has sustained us through four thousand bitter years of recorded history, and it has sustained us throughout that most terrible of centuries, the twentieth century of socialism, fascism, and communism.

We will not let these people destroy us; we will not let these people crush us underfoot. We will defeat them. We will free them from the horror which wraps their minds.

Yes, the past and the present belong to them, my friends, and may belong to them for a few more years yet.

But.

The future? The future, be assured. The future belongs to us.

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My good friend Alex Singleton's liberty loving credentials are impeccable... he was the founder and driving force behind the St. Andrews Liberty Club blog in fact. Thus I never dismiss his views out hand and I certainly understand the points he makes in his most recent article on Samizdata.net.

I would of course be delighted to see the major political parties start being influenced by libertarian ideas. However the basic thrust of Alex's views must be predicated on the notion that some sort of Perestroika with the system of party politics under which we are governed is actually possible, which is to say, the system can reform itself and kick the habit of tax addicted encroaching regulatory gradualism and ever more force mandated political interaction replacing the very notion there is something called civil society and non-force mandated social interaction. I do not think any such Perestroika is possible from within the system. As a result, I pin much of my hope of the trend across much of the western world of decreasing voting numbers and think it is indeed possible in the long run to delegitimise the whole notion of democratically sanctified kleptomania and its corrosive effects on civil society. I am, in short, anti-political.

Does that mean I am indifferent to Party Politics completely? Alas no... I too have to live in the here and now world and certainly we do not have the luxury of just standing by when dire things are happening. Matters such as the war against Ba'athist Iraq and events like the current power grab by the €uro-political tranzi elite force folks like me to take an interest in the foetid waters establish politics... but I try to never loose sight of the fact party politics is inherently corrupting. It does not matter how much you are in the side of the Angels, to become truly successful in democratic party politics requires you to become a whore-for-hire and to constantly feed the vast kleptocratic machine or be devoured by it.

So if you want to join a party and try to nudge them in the direction of respecting individual liberty, well God bless you. I wish you well and will certainly count you as a fellow traveller of mine even if I do worry that you may be legitimising the very process which is the root of the problem. However I will never embrace or respect any political party myself and I sure as hell will never join one. My object is get as many people as possible to, as Apple Computers likes to say, "Think Different".

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The section of Libertarian Alliance pamphlets I find most interesting is Tactical Notes. One of the most important questions for Libertarian strategists should be: how close to party politics is it advantageous to be?

I spent my four years at University distant from the Conservative group. The group was, most of the time, largely worthless. Sometimes they were wet, other times just offensive. I remember the time when one Tory president went into a chip shop and exclaimed loudly, "I think it's great that I buy from the common people here! It keeps them in a job."

The Liberty Club, which is non-partisan and interested in ideas, was much more successful, with more members, a higher budget and a higher profile. One of the Tory presidents declined our invitation to join saying that the Liberty Club seemed "extreme". I replied: "Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." Being independent of a political party was very useful because we could express ideas seen as being slightly on the fringe.

But I do think it harmful when libertarians completely remove themselves from mainstream party politics. The creation of a Libertarian Party in the US has been wholly unhelpful because it allowed the religious right much more influence over the Republican Party. It has taken away the influence of libertarian ideas. Giving centre-right parties a libertarian hook does seem to me to be worthwhile.

Yes, I know all of you on this blog disagree with me. So I'll shut up now, and promise not to write on this subject again.

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Social individualists of the world unite!
You have nothing to lose but your chains
and a whole world to win!

Although intended as a humorous meme-hack, the statement is also quite clearly true. The irony is that for individuals to preserve their individuality, they must unite with others to fight the collectivist political pressures that would deny that we are moral free agents and make us so much less than we are: to fight involuntary collectivism we must voluntarily act collectively.

And so that is why I set up Samizdata.net and lured others to dive into the blogosphere with me head first.

It was my attempt to give a platform to shout out to the world for like-minded individuals who rejected the intrusive force backed collectivist view of the world. We are not really trying to 'convert' people, though that would be nice, rather we are trying to change people's meta-context and let the ideology take care of itself. That is our 'mission statement' if you like.

A meta-context is a person's frames of reference through which they interpret the world around them. It is not an ideology or a political 'ism' or even a philosophy... it is 'just' a series of axioms and 'givens' that colour and flavour how you think about things and come to understand them via a set of critical or emotional preferences and underlying assumptions. We all have a personal meta-context.

For example, it is one of the reasons that although I have written many articles on Samizdata.net about the issue of private ownership of firearms in the USA, I very rarely discuss the Second Amendment. Why? Because an individualist meta-context does not have rights as something which are dependent on The State.

The Second Amendment of the US Bill of Rights is a legal artifice, but it is not the source or reason that people should be able to own weapons as a matter not of privilege but by right. In fact, no state and its laws is the source of any right whatsoever: rights are objectively yours to begin with and are not given to you by anyone. Thus I will never argue an American has the right to own a gun because 'it says so in the Second Amendment' because they would have a right to do so even if it said nothing of the sort.

Yet that is not to say I think the Second Amendment is a bad idea, just that it is nothing more than a useful profane tool to secure an objective right, not a source of rights. To me as an individualist, I see do not see the state as central to my life or quite frankly to civil society... as I am not a fully convinced anarchist I do see some role for limited government in securing the rights of individuals, but just as an adjunct to far more important the networks that are primarily social rather than political.

And so if we are trying to change people's meta-context to include more individualist and less collectivist frames of reference, then it behoves us to use phrases which assist in this process rather than those which are loaded with 'trigger words' that may well get our views unhelpfully pigeonholed in places that does not really reflect where we are coming from. Now I certainly regard myself as a libertarian of the minarchist flavour... what is sometimes called a 'Classical Liberal'. However the term 'libertarian' is increasingly loaded with meanings that generate more heat than light, and thus I have started using the term 'social individualist' rather than 'libertarian in Samizdata.net's introduction in the sidebar. We have not changed... certainly I have not... and I intend to continue arguing that the term 'libertarian' can only be used correctly to describe people who promote the individual liberty to chose how you interact with the world via social interaction rather than force backed political interaction. Just as Living Marxism changed its name to Spiked in order to shed the 'baggage' of the term 'Marxism' without actually changing a thing ideologically, we started life as 'Libertarian Samizdata' back in our early days on-line and then just became Samizdata.net in order to better reach beyond the worthy true believers. We are no longer Libertarian Samizdata but our thinking is really no different to when we started.

Yet if the term 'libertarian' gets in the way of what we are trying to do, it is time to start de-emphasising it. I am still a member of the executive committee of the London based Libertarian Alliance and I still regard myself as a pukka libertarian. But a more accurate description of my views than just the broad church of 'libertarianism' would be that I reject collectivist views of the world as utterly falsified, but at the same time I do not regard individuals as atomised objects existing in splendid isolation. Unless you live alone in a log cabin in the middle of Canada subsisting on nuts and moose meat, you are an individual within a social environment: a civil society. And it is the extent to which you can freely act within civil society as an individual pursuing self-defined ends by right, without political coercion or permission, that is the measure of whether you are free or not.

Additionally, I have long regarded socialism as the most ironic use of language in the history of mankind, given that it means to replace social interaction with entirely political interaction. It is time to reclaim the word social and reject the newspeak inversion of it into meaninglessness.

And it is addressing those issues that make this a social individualist weblog.

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I am writing this more to understand what I feel than to tell anyone else anything. A few weeks ago I was in Belgrade and saw several good friends that I had not seen for a while. Yet most of them were people who, when the war came to what used to be Yugoslavia, had got out and moved in with friends in Hungary or Austria or Italy. Gradually during the war years we reestablished contact with telephone calls across those borders which were not sealed. We often met up to exchange gossip or seek information about missing friends over a coffee or a brandy in Budapest or Graz or Vienna or Ljubliana, neutral ground so to speak. Now most of them are back in Serbia as the Demon is gone and it is now possible to travel there with ease. And so our friendships continue, not quite as before, but they continue. But there are quite a few people who I lost contact with on those terrible days and weeks in 1991 as nightmare came upon us all, never to hear from them again or learn what happened to them, and for reasons I only half-understand myself, I have made no attempt to find them...and that is especially true of one person in particular.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to a New Years party in Vienna by an old friend of mine, a lovely Croatian woman married to a wonderful Austrian man. As we have many friends in common, I asked who else would be there and she told me. She mentioned many acquaintances and a few fine friends, but at the sound of one name, I almost dropped the phone. I had to wait a few moments before I could even speak. I wanted to ask her what she knew about him, where he had been, was he married? Where did he live now? What does he do for a living? Were his parents still alive? But I did not ask her any of those things. After just a moment I just told her I would come and that was that. I would meet Him again.

And so I went to that New Years party in Vienna, driving up from Croatia in my baby Mercedes and not telling my parents exactly who would be there. As I expected, the party was a charming extravagance, well attended, lively and disdainfully elegant in a manner in which the Austrians have no equal. Although I was quite unsettled at the idea of meeting Him, I was also determined to be cool and not over-think the situation. For a while I wondered if he would even recognised me: I was blonde then, my hair is black now. Silliness of course. I was looking around for him, trying not to look overly preoccupied and wondering if I should slap him or kiss him or laugh or cry. Maybe I would hug him and wish him well... or more likely curse him for disappearing that terrible morning when strange trucks appeared in my little town and the first crackle of Kalashnikovs from nearby told me that life as I had known it was ending, right here and right now. I rehearsed a few things in my mind, and then changed my mind, many many times.

And then I saw him and he saw me. It was a strange and electric moment. So I just smiled and said hello. And I realised that ten years and the jumble of events had produced such a confusing static of thoughts and emotions, that all that was left was the breath quickening spark of attraction. And so we talked about everything and nothing. He touched my dark hair, making me shiver, and I touched his face, running my finger along an unfamiliar scar. We drank and we danced and we chatted to mutual friends and once the old year had died, we left together. As we walked down the cold Viennese streets to where I was staying, we stopped talking but held onto each other as if afraid the other might disappear like mist. We did not say much at all for the rest of the night, but as daylight came I must have finally fallen asleep with him, time somehow telescoping ten years into a few hours.

Then as morning, or rather early afternoon came, I woke as he got up to dress. We exchanged a few words, smiling and laughing. He grinned when he could not find his undershirt and I realised how little and how much we have both changed. And finally more words, sweet lovely words that neither of us really believed as I felt him touch me again.. and then he was gone, just so many echoing footsteps as he trotted down that stone stairway outside. And if it was not for his tee shirt that I still held under the sheets, smelling of him, I would have said it was a dream, an echo like those footsteps.

I have never forgiven him for choosing an accident of birth over me when I needed him most, and I know for sure now that I never will. But I also know it does not matter. The past is the past and He is just a ghost heading eastwards, an echo of another time and another life, as I am to Him. In a few days I will drive to Milan. I am glad I came here and I am glad I am leaving. Vienna is full of ghosts.

[Editor's note: this started out as a private e-mail to me from Natalija that I convinced her to make into a blog article]

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I see on excellent blog Inappropriate Response some very appropriate response to peevish Egyptian press claims that Muslims have not been hostile towards any particular trends in Christianity, so why all this Western hostility to some trends in Islam? Moira Breen replies

He's right. I don't know any Muslims who object to any particular trend in Christianity or Judaism. There are of course some Muslim governments that object to Christianity and/or Judaism period.

But hey, when Jehovah's Witnesses or Unitarians, or our resident Christian criminal nutbars, start hijacking your planes and trashing your cities, we'll attend to any objections you've got against our non-mainstream types, OK?

Yes, it is a funny thing but we do tend to get a little grumpy when people try to kill us. Obviously a flaw in Western Christian civilisation. But maybe it is something in the water in some western countries because there are Muslims who live in Britain seem to see things that way too because they are also grumpy about the whole annoying mass murder thing.