Today I had an idea for a website that might be worth monetising. Nothing I could give up my day job for, but something that might bring in a few tens of pounds pocket money from Google Adsense. It would be fun; it might help fund my gadget habit. But:

Despite what you may have read somewhere on the Internet, any income earned from Google Adsense is taxable income. It makes no difference whether you earn £5 or £10,000 – this money must be declared to the Inland Revenue as income derived from self employment. Moreover, you must declare yourself as self employed as soon as you start work (this could be when you begin that new website or insert Google Adsense into a personal blog).

Says Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs:

If you're self-employed on a temporary or part-time basis you must register for business taxes with HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) as soon as you start work. You'll have to complete a Self Assessment tax return and are responsible for paying your own tax and National Insurance contributions on the income you earn.

Even if you don't think you'll earn enough to need to pay tax, you still need to complete a tax return.

Right now I pay my tax on Pay As You Earn, meaning my employer employs a department of people to do all the form filling. I like it that way. I have a very strong aversion to filling in official forms. When forced to do so my heart rate increases, I start to sweat, I hyperventilate, my writing hand cramps up, I have a stong urge to shout and throw things and people around me get nervous. This is partly indignation at being made to do something I do not want to do, partly the unease of spending time doing something that is not pleasant and not what I am skilled at (if I was good at organising paperwork and form filling I would have made different career choices), and partly irrational. And I can never find the damned supporting documents no matter how organised I have tried to be. I could elaborate yet further but thinking about it now is starting to induce symptoms so I must end this paragraph soon. The point is: the rewards would have to be very high to overcome this aversion, or I would have to make enough to pay someone else to do it for me.

A quick google suggests I am not the only one. Even for normal people, the cost, time and effort to fill in a tax return must be high enough to rule out all but the most serious of business ventures.

What is the cost to society of all the little side projects, hobbies and micro-businesses that do not get started because it is not worth the bureaucratic hassle?

Update: I found some tax examples graciously provided by HRMC. I particularly enjoyed the phrase "air of commerciality". No grey areas here, then.

I probably should not do it to myself, but sometimes I can not help but wonder how a large group of seemingly intelligent people can be so wrong about so much. Charlie Stross has written about what might even be somewhat legitimate concerns about Amazon but as ever with him there is an infuriating wrongness floating on the surface and the comments amplify it.

But there is much to learn here about misconceptions about libertarians. Let me start with Charlie's characterisation.

I'm not going to lecture you about Jeff Bezos either, although I do want to note that he came out of a hedge fund and he's ostensibly a libertarian; these aspects of his background make me uneasy, because in my experience they tend to be found in conjunction with a social-darwinist ideology that has no time for social justice, compassion, or charity.

I am a libertarian. I notice that people suffer less when they are richer. I notice that greater freedom leads to greater wealth. My views are formed precisely out of a desire to see greater wellbeing and happiness in the world and this has been translated in the mind of someone who is ostensibly not a moron into a survival of the fittest race to discard those inferior to me to starvation and disease for my own personal benefit.

I need a new advertising agency.

I need to start being explicit about the end goals and work back from there, and always remind people about the goal at every opportunity. It needs to be the first and last thing I say in any debate with a non-libertarian: the aim is to reduce suffering. Now: how do we do that?

Then there is comment 100:

Perhaps you could point to a working libertarian utopia so I could understand how such a wonderful system works? Otherwise, it's no more meaningful than those who complain that they problem with communism is it hasn't been tried properly...

It has not been tried but one can notice without much effort that the places that look more like libertarian utopias, that is to say they have more freedom and smaller governments, tend to be richer than those that look less like libertarian utopias. Richer meaning that there is less starvation and suffering, let us not forget.

In comment 128 Charlie makes the closest thing yet to an interesting point when he accuses us of having a "fundamentally broken model of human behaviour". It is a shame he does not say how the model is broken. The biggest problem I can think of with human nature is the tendency in many humans to want a leader or to want to boss others around. It really would be nice if these people could find each other without involving me. Which brings us to comment 473:

The thing is, libertarians really don't just want to be left alone. You want to impose a libertarian society on us even though the overwhelming majority has made it abundantly clear that they have absolutely no desire for such a change.

If you want to go off on your own and build a libertarian country, go with our blessing. But leave us in peace. If you want to stay, accept that we do not want a libertarian society and let the matter drop.

Oh how much I would love to. Perhaps Jeff Bezos will finally succeed. Until then, good luck getting the International Community to allow it. With that option removed it is probably not worth pointing out to this commenter exactly who is imposing what upon whom. What is really going on is that this person thinks that a more libertarian society would lead to more starvation and disease and of course he does not want that imposed upon him. It is the same marketing problem again.

A post at Climate Lessons reminded my of my own childhood experiences of environmentalist indoctrination at school. It could have been any post - the whole blog is about how children are frightened and mislead by environmentalists in the classroom.

The topic is closer to home now that I have my own two-year-old son, and it cropped up sooner than I expected. Someone bought him a book about Noah's Ark. It is perfectly charming: thick cardboard pages; bright colours; but on the last page:

Noah helped save the animals of the earth hundreds of years ago by building an ark. Now we must help to save them too -- not from floods, but from human beings who are hunting them, and cutting down the forests where they live.

I mean, come on! It is a story book for toddlers. A silly story from the Bible I can handle, but children should not be worried about this nonsense.

At the turn of the nineties I was at secondary school putting up with some of this. Most of it came from geography class. Deforestation was the big one. An area the size of Wales was destroyed every so often, we were told. Apart from all the extinct animals, the rain forests were needed to turn the carbon dioxide into oxygen. They are the lungs of the planet. These days the rain forests still seem to be there and I am fairly sure that, carbon going round in a cycle, the rain forests are only the lungs of the rain forests. The plants that I (and the animals I eat) eat produce enough oxygen for me.

We also learnt about acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer. Both these problems seem to have gone away, arguably as a result of timely state intervention but more likely because the problems were not so bad in the first place and now they have been replaced by more urgent and dire concerns.

Assuming the BBC exam revision guide is a good proxy for what is taught in GCSE geography lessons in schools, acid rain and the ozone layer are gone from the curriculum. Deforestation is still there, and now we have to worry about climate change, pollution and (oh no!) globalisation. If you follow that last link you will learn about Thomas Malthus and Esther Boserup but not Norman Borlaug.

I remember another strange lesson: not geography; possibly personal social health and flim flam studies or whatever it was called. I can not imagine why but we were made to watch a video that included abattoir footage and there was a class discussion in which we were asked whether the video made us want to be vegetarians. Some of the girls became vegetarians on the spot. I wonder what their parents made of it.

GCSE Double Science was a mostly sensible affair involving the Carnot cycle and electrons apart from one odd day when a guest speaker came in to tell us that more oil was used in the last ten years than in the entire history of humanity before that. The lesson was that this was because oil use doubled every ten years (or whatever the number was). I recognise it now as the standard limits-to-growth spiel, but what was it doing in a fourth year science class? Some organisation must have bribed the school or something.

What harm did it do? Here I am after all, not believing a word of any of it. At the time I believed it, but I was more interested in tectonic plates, magnetic fields and playing Elite on my computer. Most of the rest of the class was only interested in who was snogging whom. We were bombarded with doom and gloom but it was boring and irrelevant.

But I bet a lot of it stayed there, in most of the rest of the class, deep down, in a way that causes them not to question it when they see it on the news. They are not interested: they think about it when they are forced to; they give money to charity when they want to look like nice people or feel good about themselves; they moan about the taxes and they forget about it and get on with their lives. They do not write to their MPs or vote and they do not rise up.

The premise of Iain M. Banks's Culture novels sounds good. The Culture is a society with advanced AI and no scarcity and an inclination to liberate less advanced societies from their scarcity. So I am starting from the beginning with Consider Phlebas. I am reading the novel on my Kindle, which means that I get to see other users' highlights. The following passage was highlighted by six users, unusual enough to make me wonder why. This might mean that six people thought "wow, man, that's like, so profound", or it might mean something else.

experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.

It is a thought that occurs to a human member of the Culture, who is thought of as particularly insightful, when considering another society that went exctinct in a war involving fusion bombs, "delivered by transplanetary guided rocket". Perhaps the people who highlighted it though it was clever commentary on nuclear proliferation or something like that.

The trouble is that the word "oneself" refers to billions of individuals. Where does that leave "common sense"?

What is interesting to me is the way that people fall for these sorts of rhetorical tricks. Perhaps we can turn it to our favour. After all, experience and common sense indicate that enslaving and stealing from oneself is not the way to get rich.

Stanley Fish is rightly getting a lot of heat in the internet for his brazen assertion that it is okay to adopt double standards in terms of the kind of language used to describe women so long as the person using such terms holds the "right" views and is, in some more general sense, on the side of the intellectual "good guys".

David Henderson, over at EconBlog, has what I think is the most devastating take-down of this character, all the more devastating for doing so in measured tones. The associated comment thread is well worth reading also.

"Might is right". For heaven's sake.

As already mentioned here from time to time in recent weeks, I have been doing some tidying up. My place was a mess. More politely, it was suffering from severe infrastructure overload, which is that terrible condition that sets in when each new thing that comes in or gets done causes a wave of knock-on chaos out of all proportion to what ought to be its impact. To put this down, I make some space for it by moving this important item, on top of that important item, and then forget where it all is … you get the picture.

If you have never in your life suffered thus, that can only be because you have never done anything. Places where real stuff gets done frequently teeter on the edge of chaos. This is another Parkinson's Law. I recall, in one of his books, contrasting pictures: of the Officers Mess (not a mess at all), and the Orderly Room (not orderly at all). The point being that it was in the latter place that all the work got done.

But there comes a time when consoling yourself with the thought of all those chaos-inducing accomplishments just doesn't do it for you any more. You just have to stop - at the very least interrupt - everything else and turn back the tide, which is what I have forced myself recently to do. This has already the most serious tide resistance I have done since moving in here over two decades ago.

My problem was that although this task had become slowly more important, it had at no point become overwhemlingly urgent. So, how was I to motivate myself to get stuck into it? No externally imposed deadline loomed. No angry associates would punish me if I delayed. It was merely that if I delayed it yet longer, my life would work gradually less and less well.

If you are the sort of person who needs only to know that some task is important in order to start attacking it with enthusiasm, confident that you will conquer it, then this posting is probably not for you. If on the other hand you are like me, easily daunted and tempted hideously to postpone tasks which combine non-urgency, great importance (but only to you) and demoralising hugeness, then maybe skipping this might be an omission of significance. If the question "where do I start?" regularly recurs in your life, then read on. You might discover things of value.

It is of the essence of infrastructure overload that making any sort of start at all to diminish it is very hard. Doing anything is hard. That's why you need, somehow, to declutter the system, so that you can get other things done, besides decluttering. Yet decluttering suffers from just the same problem that accomplishing anything else also suffers from. Where to begin?

At this point, I had in mind one of the better pieces of advice I have ever read concerning this kind of dilemma, which occurs in (I am pretty sure) The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein.

It's decades since I read this book, but as I recall it, someone is trying to contrive a war of Lunar independence, against Earth, and not surprisingly he is overwhelmed with all the problems that such a task confronts him with. At which point, somebody says to him: don't start with urgent stuff, or important stuff, even though there is an abundance of both. Start with something easy. That way, you at least accomplish something. This builds your morale, and while you are doing that easy little something, you can ponder, in a slightly more relaxed way, how to make some real difference to the urgent and important stuff. I can't remember what the easy little thing was that he then started doing, but that is what he did. And it worked. By the time he had finished it, he was mentally ready for the real battle.

I remembered this as I confronted the chaos of my small home. I need, I said, to myself, something easy, that will do some good, no harm (in the form of more crud piled on top of existing crud), and get me started.

Eventually, I contrived the answer, in the form of those boxes. I piled them up in the living room, ripped them up into bits, put the bits into bags and then the contents of the bags into the recycling bins out in the street.

But then I had another thought. I wasn't involved in a war of independence against Earth. Nothing was screamingly urgent, or even, frankly, that important. I just wanted a cleaner and tidying home. What if, instead of merely starting with something easy, and then switching to all that important stuff, I continued with something else easy, and just did that, again and again and again. After I had easily removed all those easy boxes, what remained was still a demoralising mountain of chaos, so the same logic applied, after the latest easy thing had been done, as before.

What else could I do that was also worth doing, and also easy?

Eventually I found my next task. I tidied my desk.

This may sound like an obvious thing to do, always, and of course it is. But my desk has, for reasons far too tedious to explain even in this potentially very tedious posting, very little space on it, and it had for years existed in a permanent state of … infrastructure overload. Which demoralised me. If I couldn't even protect my desk against this affliction, what chance did I have with my entire home? Misery me.

My desk problem was that, for reasons too tedious … (see above), my desk consisted of a small bit of open surface, but then behind that, too very shallow bits of space where, I once intended, computer keyboards would go. One of these shallow bits still works as intended, as a haven for the keyboard when desk space is needed for other things. But in front of the other one, I had to put a new computer screen in front of one of these shallow bits of territory. As I recall, the second bit of shallow space for a keyboard was only created after the first one went out of action. And then what happened is that crap, having accumulated on the desk, would then get shoved into that shallow space, through the small gap that the screen still left. And lost.

It finally occurred to me that what I needed was a shallow open cardboard box, to store all the mess of stuff on my desk in, and to act as a drawer.

One of those cardboard boxes that I was busy chucking out proved perfect for this job, itself being a box in which a keyboard had arrived. (It turns out I possess about seven different computer keyboards, but I heroically resist the temptation to digress.) Suddenly, my desk made sense, and it still does:

This was the point at which the task of conquering the crap in my home went from impossibly demoralising to maybe doable. This was the turning point. Now I could keep my desk tidy,. Therefore I could do the same for everything else.

This moment also convinced me of the value of the easy-thing-after-easy-thing strategy. Since then, I have kept the momentum going and done about four dozen more easy things, pretty much all of which, you will be relieved to learn, I am rapidly forgetting about and have not been photographing. But, it is starting to add up, almost to the point where a regular visitor might recognise an improvement.

Okay, so what? This is Samizdata, not my (presently resting while I tidy up) personal blog. Where is the Universal Message in all this.

Well, it's surely not hard to see how this Urgent/Important/Easy dance applies to the larger project of human emancipation that we are most of us here engaged in, one way or another. The above writing about my home merely says that I am applying to my immediate personal circumstances methods that I have long believed in, and practised, for doing libertarianism.

That earlier posting I did about my photocopier, in addition to being something else about this tidying up process, was all about how that lovely machine had enabled me to turn the task of being a libertarian into a succession of easy little things, in that case easy little publications, "published" only a few easily and cheaply copied copies at a time. When it came to organising meetings, my comrades would sweat blood organising a few big meetings. I preferred to lay on lots of little ones, in my home. (The possibility of laying on some more little meetings in my home being one of the big reasons why I feel the need to be tidying it up now.)

Blogging, of course, follows just the same principle. Each blog posting is relatively and often very easy. But, it adds up.

When I started out as a libertarian, London seemed to be crawling with would-be libertarians all ranting on about what was Urgent and Important, but all the while moaning about the fact that it was all of it Impossible, without money that they did not command and which all got wasted if and when they ever did command it. Forget about all that, I said, help me do this, I said. It's small, it's cheap, it's doable, and look, it's being done. Why not write one of these? It won't transform the world for the better, but it is a few steps in the right direction. But, these demand-everything-but-accomplish-nothing libertarians would wail, what you are doing is not good enough. Give it time, I would reply. Maybe one day, although never good enough for you, it will still be add up to something quite substantial, and meanwhile it is at least something.

A practitioner of far greater grandeur than I, of the small-and-easy-steps-in-the-right-direction-layed-end-to-end method, is Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute. See also this posting here from earlier this week. Since writing that, I have read more of Madsen's book, and very entertaining and informative it is.

The ASI was founded on the principle of breaking down the seemingly gigantic and impossible job of curbing (and maybe even actually cutting back) the power of the state into many tiny little steps, quite a few of which proved or might prove quite easy to take. This task was always important. It is now urgent like never before. The ASI tries to make it, if not easy, then at least that little bit easier.

The ASI has of course taken very naturally to blogging, because it perfectly suits their way of thinking and of working. More recently, as recent postings here have flagged up, Madsen Pirie has started doing small videos, which, having spent much of his life rehearsing such things in his head and in pre-internet-video speechifying, he has found quite easy to do. (Alex Singleton was even kind enough to compare these videos with my photocopied Libertarian Alliance pamphlets of former times.)

It is worth adding that what Madsen Pirie says in these little videos is, in addition to being (for him) quite easy to say, also very important. I warmly recommend that you watch them. You watching them is maybe not overwhelmingly important, nor is it urgent. But it is very easy.

As I commented on previously, David Cameron wants shareholders to vote on directors' pay packages. Another problem with this occurs to me.

Right now I can value a company on its past performance and what I think its future performance will be, and part of this evaluation comes from my opinion of the decision-making abilities of the people in charge. If I know who they are, and am confident that they will hire the right people into the right positions, I might value the company more highly.

If shareholders make decisions I have the problem that the performance of the company depends on who the shareholders are, and I do not know who the other shareholders are.

In the specific case where shareholders can vote on directors' pay, if we assume that the highest pay attracts the best performing directors, then the best performing companies will end up being the ones with the least left-wing shareholders.

The other day I had a pub conversation with a friend that went as rapidly from, "I favour reducing the size of the state" to "but poor people will starve" as any such conversation I've had before. There are certain things, such as roads, schools, health and welfare, that are so strongly connected in people's minds to the state that intelligent thought about them is almost impossible. I wonder how this happens. It means that no shortcuts are possible. To be understood, you have to assume no shared knowledge with your interlocutor and start again from first principles. But this does not work well in a pub conversation or, for that matter, in a TV interview.

At one point I was told, "if you got your way, I would emigrate." My friend was imagining a dystopian hell on Earth, which suggests, among other things, I had not properly made my motives understood. There is a tendency to assume that one's political opponents want to enrich themselves at the expense of others. This may be a good assumption a lot of the time. When a socialist suggests taxing the rich to give to the poor, I might wonder how much he will cream off the top for himself. When I suggest that taxes should be reduced, it is obviously because I do not like paying tax and I am prepared to let poor people starve so that I can buy more gadgets. The universe is a zero-sum game: what else could I possibly mean?

So I need to spell out explicitly what it is that I want, because it turns out that it does not go without saying: everyone to be much richer, so that necessities and most luxuries are almost free; vastly increased life expectancy and improved health; less overall time spent on menial tasks and more time spent doing interesting things; in general more wealth, opportunities and happiness for all.

I know how to get there, too. A smaller state means faster economic growth. Nothing I want breaks the laws of physics, so the technology is just a matter of time and leaving people alone to get on with it.

What I want sounds to me like something that would sell. Maybe we should do what our opponents do and repeat it loudly, often and everywhere, and point out that anyone who opposes it is causing poor people to starve. It is the sort of approach that might work well in a pub conversation or, for that matter, in a TV interview.

Recently some teacher acquaintances on Facebook were discussing the recent public sector strike. Some were annoyed at accusations that they had spent the day shopping. Others said they had enjoyed spending the day shopping. Someone posted a message pointing out that Jeremy Clarkson, who said rude things about the strikers, was more than welcome to do a hard job saving lives or teaching disabled children. It occurred to me that, among other things, not all and probably less than half of public servants do such worthy jobs, and in any case what is relevant is what is really going on, which is that whatever the job, public servants (including (heh) Jeremy Clarkson, according to NickM) get their salaries and pensions from money extorted from others.

I considered getting involved in the conversation. I mentioned it to Michael Jennings. "The problem is that they think we are mad," he said. Not only that, I thought, they will take offence and cast me out of society. "And they have the generally accepted narrative," Michael observed. "How did this happen?"

I have some ideas about that. They are not original, have probably been stated better by someone else, and a more erudite person than I might well be able to summarise this entire post by stating the name of some philosopher or linguist. But here is my train of thought.

The primary purpose of language is cognition. So says The Monster in an epic comment on Eric Raymond's blog.

I believe that communication is not even the primary use of language, despite the common belief that it is. That honor belongs to cognition. We use language to think; we produce names for groups of concretes that share certain properties and thereby achieve computational economy by not having to reason independently about the characteristics of every member of that group anew, as if we'd never seen any other members before.

This was in defence of an article by Eric Raymond in which he had used the same insight to seek to "undo the perversion of language that serves the enemy so well." Clever use of language can manipulate people's ideas. It makes sense: we put things into words to abstract big ideas and reuse them quickly and easily. I am a computer programmer. In software we write some code to, say, sort a list of items into numerical order, we give the code a name (sort) and then we just type 'sort' whenever we want to sort a list. If everything works to plan, we never have to think again about how that sorting code works. We have abstracted it. We might do some sorting of specific kinds of list mixed in with some other algorithm to do something complicated, like display a list of all the teachers in a payroll database whose salaries are greater than x, and give that code a name (GenerateRedundancyCandidates). In this way we build up layers of complexity at increasing levels of abstraction and get to do vastly complicated things with not as much effort as you might think.

Human language is the same. And therein lies a danger, because humans are not like computers: they are likely to forget that the word stands for something real, or get confused about what it stands for, or change its meaning half way through a sentence.

So, for example, a teacher in a discussion about the strikes can say, "I pay my taxes just like everyone else." And there are layers of abstraction beneath 'taxes' and 'pay'. What is forgotten is that 'tax' ultimately means to take money by force. And the 'payment' in this case is an accounting trick. Each month a teacher gets in the post a piece of paper listing salary and various deductions for 'tax' and 'national insurance', but what is really going on is that the salary comes from the money extorted from others and the deductions are immediately paid back. This is arithmetically no different from being paid the net amount from the fund of extorted money. The confusion arises entirely from the use of the word 'tax' written on a piece of paper. It takes a certain kind of thinking to drill down into the real meaning.

But just try explaining this to someone who has never encountered these ideas before. You soon find yourself painfully unravelling the layers of abstraction in a person's thought processes, all to get past one throw-away comment.

Richard Feynman talks of how his father would explain the difference between the name and the thing. Here he his quoted in his biography, The Beat of a Different Drum:

You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you are finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the world. You'll know about the humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early from my father the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

George Orwell noticed that political writing tended to be vague and wrote Politics and the English Language.

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

Alfred Korzybski invented General Semantics, which is an attempt to train people to be constantly aware of the abstractions they used. For example, he recommended avoiding group words such as 'society' (my example) in favour of a construction like 'person-1, person-2, person-3, etc.' In this way it would be impossible to forget that society is composed of individuals. He originated the phrase, "the map is not the territory" which is a reminder that the thing is separate from the name of the thing.

The rationalists at Less Wrong have a sequence of articles about map and territory. The Simple Truth by Eliezer Yudkowsky is sublime. It is a parable about the nature of truth and the dangers of metaphor, featuring a shepherd who devises a way to keep track of his sheep by putting pebbles in a bucket.

"You tried adding pebbles to create more sheep, and it didn't work?" Mark asks me. "What exactly did you do?"

"I took a handful of dollar bills. Then I hid the dollar bills under a fold of my blanket, one by one; each time I hid another bill, I took another paperclip from a box, making a small heap. I was careful not to keep track in my head, so that all I knew was that there were 'many' dollar bills, and 'many' paperclips. Then when all the bills were hidden under my blanket, I added a single additional paperclip to the heap, the equivalent of tossing an extra pebble into the bucket. Then I started taking dollar bills from under the fold, and putting the paperclips back into the box. When I finished, a single paperclip was left over."

"What does that result mean?" asks Autrey.

"It means the trick didn't work. Once I broke ritual by that single misstep, the power did not linger, but vanished instantly; the heap of paperclips and the pile of dollar bills no longer went empty at the same time."

"You actually tried this?" asks Mark.

"Yes," I say, "I actually performed the experiment, to verify that the outcome matched my theoretical prediction. I have a sentimental fondness for the scientific method, even when it seems absurd. Besides, what if I'd been wrong?"

"If it had worked," says Mark, "you would have been guilty of counterfeiting! Imagine if everyone did that; the economy would collapse! Everyone would have billions of dollars of currency, yet there would be nothing for money to buy!"

"Not at all," I reply. "By that same logic whereby adding another paperclip to the heap creates another dollar bill, creating another dollar bill would create an additional dollar's worth of goods and services."

The same author lists 37 ways that words can be wrong. Ways that a mis-use of the labels for things causes mistakes in reasoning about them. I recommend you go and read all the sequences. See you back here in a month.

All these ideas are related to my point: people are not in the habit of questioning the meaning of words. They believe that words have intrinsic meaning; that being told the name of something answers their question about what it is.

So they fall easily for propaganda, and fail to question every semantic and ludic fallacy they encounter.

When the police talk of stop and search not being an arrest, they do not notice that in important details, the two are the same. When Oxfam talk of net loss of zero to a developing country, they do not notice that money is being moved from private business to government within the same country, so someone is experiencing a net loss.

Furthermore, their thoughts quickly become constrained by language. Everything has to be fit into categories delineated by words already known. Hence ideas such as: "we need taxes to build roads". It is as if a road is by definition built by governments and funded by extortion. No wonder we sound mad when we talk of private roads; it is like talking of square circles.

Why is this? Not enough people have fathers like Feynman's. I suspect that parents want to appear omniscient to their children and end up hand-waving questions they do not know the answers to, with the result that children end up conditioned to accept low quality answers. State education systems are certainly not motivated to teach people to think properly, though individual teachers might try. Most of the good information I have found about critical thinking and rationalism is on the web, where it is found by people who already have an interest in it. It does seem that critical thinking needs to be taught; or at least curious people have to discover it. It does not come naturally: it took until the Enlightenment to really catch on at all.

Like William Gibson, I think I got my own head start from reading science fiction. Says he:

It gave me the idea that you could question anything, that it was possible to question anything at all. You could question religion, you could question your own culture's most basic assumptions. That was just unheard of—where else could I have gotten it? You know, to be thirteen years old and get your brain plugged directly into Philip K. Dick's brain!

That wasn't the way science fiction advertised itself, of course. The self-advertisement was: Technology! The world of the future! Educational! Learn about science! It didn't tell you that it would jack your kid into this weird malcontent urban literary universe and serve as the gateway drug to J.G. Ballard.

And nobody knew. The people at the high school didn't know, your parents didn't know. Nobody knew that I had discovered this window into all kinds of alien ways of thinking that wouldn't have been at all acceptable to the people who ran that little world I lived in.

I propose that if people were in the habit of of questioning the deepest meaning of words, that statism would be much less acceptable. For example, such questioning would yield the realisation that 'property' really means what Julie from Chicago described in a recent Samizdata comment: "One's property is untouchable by others because it is the product of a portion of one's life."

Imagine there were no word for tax, or you disciplined yourself not to use it, much as Korzybski recommends listing individuals rather than using group words. You would be unable to say, "I propose an income tax." Instead, you would have to say, "I propose that for every hour you spend working to provide for your family, we are going to demand that you spend a further hour in servitude to some men you have never met, and if you refuse to do this eventually we will send some other men round to your house who will drag you away from your family and lock you in a cell." It would be a lot harder to advocate certain statist ideas.

I imagine that libertarians are very much in the habit of questioning the deeper meaning of words. It is a necessary prerequisite for questioning the metacontext. And when we encounter those with a mainstream world view, one constructed for them by the mainstream media and politicians with everything in neat categories like 'left' and 'right', they find it very difficult to recalibrate their entire linguistic and cognitive framework in order to understand us. They find it very easy to think: he is mad.

"Auction houses and auction websites make markets out of common objects that would be trash except for a celebrity having owned or used or once touched it. A set of golf clubs or a box of golf balls is worth far more in a pro shop if the brand name “Tiger Woods” is on the label, because by affixing the name of the golf legend the buyer is being told that Tiger Woods had personal input into the quality of the products. Anyone who copies that box of golf balls with the Tiger Woods label on it — without proper authorization — is committing an act of forgery."

J. Neil Schulman.

He certainly has an unusual way of looking at IP. This issue is messing with my head. A few weeks ago, I read Tim Sandefur's lucid take on the matter, and took the view that whatever else can be said about it, it is hard to see how I could make a "natural rights" claim for IP in the same way as some classical liberals can do with physical property. But a few days later, talking to an old friend who is a professional arbitrator, my view swung more favourably to this sort of argument, as presented in favour by the late, great Lysander Spooner.

I fear that with IP, this is going to be one of those "I haven't really made up my mind yet" positions. I suspect I am not alone.

Surely it's time for climate-change deniers to have their opinions forcibly tattooed on their bodies.

Not necessarily on the forehead; I'm a reasonable man. Just something along their arm or across their chest so their grandchildren could say, ''Really? You were one of the ones who tried to stop the world doing something? And why exactly was that, granddad?''

Dear Mr Glover,

I once lived next door to a lady who was tattooed at Auschwitz. I was outraged, as I suppose you intended, by your glib call for people who think differently than you do to be tattooed. But the outrage came from the smug assumptions you made. I bet you feel very "radical chic" after writing your article, a bit like the gay people who wear Che Guevara T-shirts, not realising that he used to enjoy killing people for being gay.

You want to tattoo me for doubting the claims of such people as Michael Mann, the fabricator of the "hockey stick" graph, which among other lies, denied the existence of the European medieval warm period and the mini ice age of the 16th and 17th centuries. I note that the hockey stick has quietly been abandoned as a model by the UN Climate Change campaign's official documents. Does that mean the tattoo could be lasered off when what you think is true today, turns out to be inaccurate or plain wrong? I hope that at the very least you might say sorry and offer to pay for the tattoo's removal. But as they say, Socialism means never having to say 'Sorry.'

David Evans worked for what is now the Australian Department of Climate Change from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010. Should he be persecuted for writing this?

I have changed my mind more than once about what to do about global threats to the environment. I have never taken a payment from an energy company and would welcome viable clean energy, but the carbon dioxide scare is as bogus as propaganda movies that depicted people like my former neighbour as rats spreading the plague across Europe. For one thing, I find it extremely unlikely that fluctuations in the Sun's radiation has less influence on the Earth's climate than humans do. I'm open to persuasion that I'm wrong about sun spots, but not by threats of torture or death.

If your ideology requires the extermination - or at least for now - the branding of all who opposes you, one might wonder just what principles you stand for. It is shameful that a reporter would advocate the terrorising of people based on their opinions. That does not seem compatible with freedom of thought, or of expression.

Once you get your police state, what are the odds that an opinion YOU hold will be deemed thoughtcrime and you get branded for holding "unhelpful" opinions on homosexuality, torturing prisoners, freedom of religion, or abortion rights? And what sort of person thinks that tyranny is fine provided that the "right" people are being tortured and killed? I usually take the view that any call to expand government power should be met with caution, even for causes I might privately support.

My concern is not the profits of oil firms but that environmentalism, as a political ideology, threatens the principle of science as an arena for competing ideas to be tested without prejudice, when its advocates demand the silencing of critics.

One final thought. If anyone attempts to tattoo or brand me or anyone else for their non-conformist opinions, anywhere in the world, I shall hold you personally responsible and to be an accomplice of evil men. If you call for people to be harmed, even in jest, you cannot hide from responsibility when your call gets acted on.

Kind regards,

Antoine Clarke
Neuilly-sur-Seine,
France

Clarke never got round to patenting the idea of a geostationary communications satellite.

Years and years and years ago when it was first reported to me that there were many lascivious moving images on the internet I thought, personally I would prefer to spend hours and hours watching cute furry animals. Maybe, I thought, I could set up a "web site" containing short video excerpts of animals, particularly juveniles, behaving in an appealing manner.

It seems someone else has already done this.

What did you never get round to patenting?

How to give the proper sort of nod towards the Japan earthquake? Not by saying that we are right in some opinion that we already hold that we can somehow hook onto it, that's for sure. A disaster means uncontroversial urgency. To use it to pontificate about mere importance, and controversial importance at that, is to change the subject. Importance is important, but it can wait.

I went to Flickr, to see what "japan earthquake" yielded, and my favourite discovery so far, although I realise that is not quite the proper adjective, is this:

Which I found among these.

That is going to take a lot of sorting out, not least because cranes will be needed, and look what happened to the cranes that were there. Yes, every one of the thousands of deaths (did anyone die in those cranes?) is terrible for all of the dead and for all of their loved ones. But I'm guessing that the typical, as opposed to worst, stories will involve the immense labour of cleaning up all the mess, and the immense derangement done to various plans, business and otherwise.

Because of the shapes involved, and their repetitiousness, this picture reminded me - in a kind of compare-and-contrast way - of pictures like the one I put on my personal blog at the time of Hurricane Katrina, of semi-submerged school buses in New Orleans, when water made a rather more slow motion mess of that city, nearly five years ago. And I see that I had very similar thoughts then to now, although this disaster is far greater.

It's good, I think, when disaster strikes anywhere on earth, that thanks to things like Flickr we can feast our eyes and minds on the wreckage and adopt the appropriate attitude, but without all of us getting in the way.

LATER: Uncontained chaos. I have to admit that when it comes to big time disasters like this one, which is getting bigger by the day, the old school media really do come into their own. I think that's because there are so many facts, and those facts are so very, very photogenic. It also makes a big difference that this particular disaster is massively better to comprehend if a few people (it mustn't be too many) take to the air to photo it, with really expensive cameras.

LATER: Richard Fernandez talks about urgency.

LATER: Maybe the old school media are not doing so well (thank you Michael J):

The whole sequence of events is a ringing endorsement for nuclear power safety. If this – basically nothing – is what happens when decades-old systems are pushed five times and then some beyond their design limits, new plants much safer yet would be able to resist an asteroid strike without problems.

But you wouldn't know that from looking at the mainstream media. Ignorant fools are suggesting on every hand that Japan's problems actually mean fresh obstacles in the way of new nuclear plants here in the UK, Europe and the US.

That can only be true if an unbelievable level of public ignorance of the real facts, born of truly dreadful news reporting over the weekend, is allowed to persist.

So, we're back to contained chaos. And to talking about importance, but in reaction to other importance talk that is importantly wrong.

Says Michael: "The big deal is that Japan has lost as much of 25% of its electricity generation capacity."

I don't know about my fellow Samizdatistas, but I am having a hard time responding to the latest events in Egypt with anything other than a resigned shrug.

My understanding is that this is not one of those enjoyable melodramas where there are Good Guys and Bad Guys, when we here in the comfortable seats (the ones outside Egypt) can all cheer the Good Guys and jeer the Bad Guys. My understanding is that there are the Bad Guys as in the government, the Good Guys as in the people who would just love to be living in a nice civilised country which respects human rights and where there is dignity and freedom and whatever is the Egyptian for apple pie, with a thriving economy for all etc. (with no Jews or Americans screwing everything up) … and then there are the Other Bad Guys, aka the Muslim Brotherhood, who would like nothing better than to see Egypt reduced to ruins, to take charge of the ruins, and then to ruin the ruins a whole hell of a lot more. The Good Guys are now so angry with the first lot of Bad Guys that they either don't realise or don't care that they may be playing right into the hands of the Other Bad Guys.

I would love to be proved wrong. Whether I am proved wrong or not, I would still bet that there are lots of others out here in non-Egypt who now think exactly as I do.

Sometimes it is essential to stop an argument and clarify what a particular word means, if it is being used to mean different things without both parties realising. And sometimes it is essential not to allow an argument about what a word means to derail an argument. Because both of these things are true, many deduce from each truth that the other truth is false. But both are true.

I have tended (following Popper, and probably misunderstanding him) to think that arguments about meaning are pointless, even when they are not. Others err in favour of arguing about meaning, even when they ought not to be arguing about meaning.

Suppose both parties are using the same word in an argument (to describe an important part of what they are arguing about), but are, unknowingly, using this word to mean two different things. (An onlooker may help by pointing this out.) They need to pinpoint this disagreement, and see if, while agreeing to differ about what this word means (or ought to mean) they can agree about the substance of what they are saying. Or not agree. The point is: arguments about meaning can come disguised as something else, and seem more significant than they are. They can seem like arguments of substance. Then, the true nature of the disagreement needs to be identified. If there is no other disagreement, it helps to realise this. Even if there is, ditto.

But if two parties are having an argument, and one party introduces a new word into the argument, clearly meaning by it something that the other person thinks that this word doesn't mean or shouldn't mean. They disagree about the meaning of this new word, and they both know it. In those circumstances, getting sidetracked into a different and duller argument about what that word means or ought to mean can divert them from their original, more interesting and significant argument about something of substance.

Or to put it another way, my thanks to Antoine Clarke for his most diverting party yesterday afternoon and evening, where I found myself working all that out.

And a happy new year to all.

The MD-11, a derivative of the DC-10, first flew in revenue service a mere 20 years ago, making it just middle-aged by aircraft standards. However, KLM's birds are included on this list because they're the only three-engined jets currently operating in scheduled transoceanic passenger service — with the exception of an occasional Qantas A380.

This delightfully catty witticism nicely rounded off an interesting Wired presentation: Fly Away on These 10 Classic Airliners

I always thought the A380 a hideous gargoyle of a plane. And Qantas is a pretty rubbish airline these days. So have at 'em both, I say.

(H/t: Instapundit)

What follows was not written by me but by a friend of mine, Niall Kilmartin. As will be apparent, he has known me since university. - NS

***

At the end of a recent post about lefties making laws for us because they think we're like them, Brian Micklethwait asks what similar errors we make. I think I can answer with examples from his own post.

First, he talks of gun control freaks - people so violent that if they had guns to hand during temper tantrums, they'd murder - and suggests that these people want guns banned because they think we're the same as them. Here he does have a specific, documented, public-domain example of a gun-control advocate with a domestic violence history. But let me offer a rival example.

In the week I first met Natalie Solent, she was sitting in the Oxford University D&D club chatting to two friends of mine whom she'd just met. An accident occurred outside and my friends went to help - thus incidentally establishing their bona fides as caring people to her. That situation resolved, they sat down again and - as my friends have a tendency to do, for some reason - began talking about guns. Natalie then was in some ways not Natalie as we now know her. As she told me later, if that accident hadn't happened, she would have written them off in the unthinking way of many British people: "They like guns, guns are for killing people, so they must like the idea of killing people; I'll not pursue their acquaintance."

Natalie, as she then was, is far more representative of how left-wingers think than Brian's example. No doubt Brian's example is useful in debate: "We're not the only violent ones. In fact, we're not specially violent. In fact, if we can look at some among our opponents for a moment... ". But as regards political fundamentals, that argument is so like the left's tactics, that it's fair to use it only when debating with them. My friends' reaction to the accident persuaded Natalie to change her mind a little. You would have got nowhere with her by saying, "You only think that because you're so violent yourself". It would be very like some accusations against the Tea Party: propaganda failures because it is so obvious to Tea Partiers and their friends that they are not true.

Brian's next illustration is even worse, because he has no public domain example, just speculation about some guy who thinks homosexuality will destroy civilization if tolerated because it would destroy his mental equilibrium if he tolerated it. In a world of ten thousand million (is it?) human beings, this guy may well exist. But in my (far from complete) knowledge of the Anglosphere public domain, past and present, I cannot offhand come up with an example. I can however think of counter-examples.

Before we meet them, however, let's meet a counter-argument. Turn the argument about homophobes being repressed homosexuals around and assert that homosexuals are really repressed gynophobes or androphobes. Here I can think of public domain examples. Women staff at Bletchley Park said that if a woman so much as spoke to Alan Turing when he was not expecting it, he would visibly shrink into himself in alarm. When the gynophobia is in itself so clear, it's a fair diagnosis that the homoerotic symptoms are mere side-effects.

Now look instead at, for example, Noel Coward. If I were willing to argue like a leftie, I could diagnose gynophobia. Think of his joke about the queen of Tonga at the coronation. As the enormous queen and diminutive ambassador from Pakistan passed in their shared carriage, someone asked him who that was with Queen Salote: "Oh, I think that's her lunch." Think of the plot of Blythe Spirit: the two women make the man's life hell quarrelling over him and eventually kill him. A clear diagnosis of gynophobia? Or a clear diagnosis of comic genius? Certainly, if Noel Coward was terrified of women, he handled it very much better than Alan Turing - unless you claim his homosexuality shows his bad handling of it, but then we're into circular reasoning.

In short, a hand-count of examples of people who are or may be assuming that laws should be written to deal with people like themselves does not a true-for-all-cases proof make. Arguing with some supporter of Canada's current laws against hate speech, I'd think it very fair to push Brian's argument. But with anyone more reasonable, I would not pretend to know things I don't know.

But as I said, I can offer counter-examples as well as counter-arguments. Many decades ago, my mother was raised, in humble circumstances, in a very straitlaced small Scottish town, attending the local school, but when she was 13 years old, she knew plenty about homosexuality - because she had a classical education. And there was nothing unusual about this level of classical knowledge even among ordinary people: many of you will know the In Parenthesis anecdote about the WWI Welsh private assigned to latrine duty who defended the utility of his task with the words "Don't you know the army of Artaxerxes was utterly destroyed for lack of sanitation?" (I love this anecdote because it's so easy to say "for lack of sanitation" in an appropriately-Welsh accent.)

My mother, aged 13, imagined that homosexuality was one of those things, like polytheism, human sacrifice and slavery, that had been common in the past but had died out under the beneficent influence of Christianity. Not that anyone told her that - it was a 13-year old's way of understanding what she was taught in the light of where and when she lived. (My mother aged 16 had become aware that "died out" was putting it too strongly.) Until half a century ago there were many people like her - people who were not taught to respect Socrates because he was homosexual, any more than they were taught to respect him because he owned slaves, or worshipped Zeus and Athena. Although they saw homosexuality as a perversion, they were taught to respect Socrates, and to see Athens killing him as a tragedy - not as good riddance to a nasty pervert. They knew exactly what they believed, but they were also taught to know intimately and respect a culture, and people in that culture, who had very different values from theirs.

Now imagine presenting to these past people - who would certainly fail the Haringey council "anti-homophobia" test or similar - the idea that they believed what they did because they thought tolerated homosexuality would destroy civilization. They would have thought of two responses.

- They would have thought of Sparta, where the idea that homosexuality destroyed a civilization is a possible thesis. The Spartans made homosexuality obligatory for their military training, and (uniquely amongst Greeks), had a positive, rather than just contemptuously tolerant, view of female homosexuality. The Spartans suffered a 90% decline in their citizen body during the classical period; eventually it destroyed the old Sparta. The Spartans had customs - marriage-by-capture, willingness to let visiting nobles sleep with their wives - which it's easy to explain by saying that their homosexuality was easier to learn in their teens than unlearn when it was time to procreate. So yes, if it is promoted enough, our ancestors would have argued, homosexuality can indeed destroy a civilization.

- But they would have set this level high, because they would also have thought of Athens. In Athens, philosophers taught that men who desired other men showed better taste than men who desired those inferior creatures, women. (And so women who desired women showed bad taste, but then women were inferior, so they would sometimes show bad taste - no need to get in a tiz about it.) Athens did not suffer a decline in its citizen body. If Athens destroyed itself - as one can argue it did - it was for other reasons. Just as with teenage-Natalie and guns above, so for our ancestors - and, today, for those who reject political correctness - Brain's explanation is simply an irrelevance.

These I think show ways in which we can avoid the vulgarities of left-wing argumentative methods. When you're forced to debate with such people, it may be fair to use their own tactics of pick the (unrepresentative) example or even invent the hypothetical (irrelevant) example. With anyone fairer, understand what they believe and the reasons why they do.

So much for Brian's post. One last reflection: writing this raised a question for me - and gave me my answer. People who defend Canada's anti-free-speech laws say they must because the alternative is the laws of the past. I'm sure that's just another of the lies the left uses to keep us in line. But suppose (God forbid!) they forced me to believe it? Suppose I had to choose between evils: between Canada's laws today and the laws of my mother's youth? Actual sex acts are by their nature private. Free speech is by its nature public - more effectively subject to law. In his first letter on the French revolution, Burke lists requirements for liberty: "... a simple citizen may decently express his sentiments upon public affairs ... even though against a predominant and fashionable opinion...". So I have my answer.

Instapundit linked a while back to a very short blog posting entitled Why are anti-gun activists so violent? This being in connection with a news story about a politician accused of abusing his wife.

The question seems to be rhetorical, but I can think of at least one possible real answer, which you arrive at by reversing the question. Why are violent people inclined to be anti-gun activists?

If you are yourself of an unusually violent disposition, and if you yourself sometimes believe that, had a gun been handy for you, you might have been tempted to kill your wife with it during a domestic disagreement, and you simply add in that one crucial extra assumption so often added, so wrongly, in so many situations, to the effect that most others are just like you, then it would make sense to say that you and your fellow men-on-the-verge-of-a-murderous-tantrum ought to be denied the means of committing murder. Arming the majority, in your eyes, is no answer, because the majority shares your own tendencies. That would only make things far worse.

In my opinion, an amazing number of mysteriously vehement, evidence-defying opinions can be better understood once you understand that the expresser of such opinions is unthinkingly assuming that most others are, in some particular respect, just like him.

Consider another quite common figure in our world: the repressed homosexual, who assumes that most "heterosexuals" are, like him, homosexuals who manage to suppress their natural homosexual urges. Such a person quite logically believes that homosexuality constantly threatens to overwhelm society (merely because it actually only threatens to overwhelm him) and to bring child-rearing and with it civilisation itself to an abrupt end.

Another consequence of the unexamined assumption that everyone is like me is that society becomes quite easy to plan from the top, because we all have the same tastes, preferences, ambitions, beliefs, and ways of going about things, don't we? Us deciding about how to satisfy other people's wishes does no great harm, because we effortlessly know what these wishes are. They are just like ours!

I first collided heavily with this everyone's-like-me notion not in political discourse, but in the course of doing, of all things, career counselling. A client who thinks that everyone else wants what he wants is caste down into unnecessary pessimism about his own chances of a happy life. He desperately wants to be a hotel manager. But so does everyone else! Brain surgeons, motor mechanics, professional sportsmen, hairdressers, estate agents, popular novelists - all these unfortunates are merely frustrated hotel managers. So what chance can he possibly have to buck this universal trend? The same inevitable fate awaits him. He is doomed to eke out his living by becoming a movie star (who occasionally gets to play a hotel manager), or some such hideous and soul-destroying compromise. Shining a torch on such everyone's-like-me assumptions can provoke lasting happiness. Hey, I might get what I want after all! There are far fewer people in the race I'm trying to do well in than I thought!

In what way does my sometimes vehement libertarianism result from assumptions that I make about others mostly being like me? What do libertarians generally assume to be true of people generally, which actually isn't?

Archbishop Rowen Williams has never heard of me and he never will. However, I now believe I have done him an injustice in various thoughts and comments. I am fully aware that most people on Samizdata are atheists - but you do not claim to be Christians, and I am saying that I have been unjust by assuming a man who said he was a Christian was lying (i.e. was a fraud).

Archbishop Williams is a social gospel man and I have assumed that, like most such folk, he is a disguised atheist - someone who when they use the word "God" really means "society" or "the people" (or whatever code word for the state). However, this was an assumption on my part - I never bothered to do any background research (exactly the sort of failure I attack in others - when they make statements about the "moderate" Barack Obama, or whatever, without spending five minutes doing any research).

Recently I came upon an exchange between Bishop Spong and Archbishop Williams which leads me to the opinion that I have been unjust to Rowen Williams. Although the source is Wikipedia I have spent enough time reading this thing to have a good sense of when articles are false and when they are true.

Bishop Spong is the "Save the bible from fundamentalism" person (a favourite of certain liberal people I know in York) - and by "fundamentalist" he really means this word in its original sense, i.e. the "fundamentals" of Christianity such as the empty tomb (although, of course, he would be happy if innocent minded people just thought he meant stupid-southern-redneck-preacher by "fundamentalist", which is the impression the media love to give). In any case Bishop Spong assumes that, being a social gospel person like himself, Rowen Williams also does not believe in the basic doctrines of Christianity (i.e. that, like Bishop Spong himself, he is using religion as a cover for the service of the collectivist cause).

So Bishop Spong was rather taken aback by Rowen Williams teaching the doctrine of the empty tomb, so shocked that he stated that of course Williams can not really believe in such doctrines (he must just be pretending in order to get along with the ignorant scum who make up most church goers) - but it is Rowen Williams' reply that interests me.

Archbishop Williams replies that he is not pretending to believe in things in order to get along with ordinary people - he actually does believe in these doctrines, "I do not know how to convince him [Spong] that I do, but I do".

Of course Kim Philby taught a course on anti-socialism in the service (i.e. what people say need not be what they believe) - but I believe what Williams says here (it rings true).

The importance of the "empty tomb" doctrine is a basic one.

Was Jesus just a great "philosopher" or a "teacher" - or was he supernatural?

Actually if one takes what Jesus says as applying to this world as a way of life then not only is he not "great", his words make no sense. If one removes the religious (the supernatural) interpretation from such things as they toil not, neither do they spin - then one just has an arsehole (not too strong a word) advising people not to bother either working or planning for the future. Actually (or so Christians believe) Jesus is speaking theologically - i.e. that death is not the end and there is a future state (which we do not create - but will experience, due to the intervention of God). He is NOT saying do not work and do not plan for the future - he is saying that this world is not all there is. Much like the line of the rich man and eye of the needle is saying "you can not take it with you - remember that" (as a camel had to be unloaded before it could squeeze through the eye of the needle gate in the city of J.), not "rich men are EVIL because they are rich" (which is the sort of thing Bishop S. would want us to take from the line).

Now Jesus' claim about a future state of existence may be false (from the atheist point of view it clearly is), but it is an understandable claim. Whereas if we do not see Jesus as speaking of heaven (my Kingdom is not of this world), but rather as laying out how people should live on Earth - well then his words are senseless and absurd.

That is the "interpretation" that "Jesus as great moral teacher" or "Jesus as philosopher" leads to - God or fool, Jesus is one or the other (NOT a "great moral teacher" or "philosopher").

This is why such things as the empty tomb are so important (as Bishop S. knows well).

If the body of Jesus physically vanished (without being, for example, carried away by followers - or whatever) that is pointing us in the religious direction, rather than in the direction of "teacher", "philosopher", "hippie cult leader" and so on.

What I have done is make the same mistake (in reverse) as Bishop Spong.

I assumed that because Rowen Williams takes a certain political line (the "beardy lefty" line, as he said himself) he must be a fraud - he must be a fake Christian. Cong hiding behind a dog collar, trying to deceive people into taking the left hand path (in more ways that one).

I now believe that I was wrong - and because my judgement was based on prejudice (see above), not research, I was guilty of an injustice.

Some days ago I went via Instapundit to an article about how the surge of Pentecostalism in Africa may help America in the War on Terror, and from there to this Pew Forum article on the global rise of Christianity, especially in Africa. Very much especially in Africa.

It may even be beating Islam.

I would guess I am a lot happier about Africa's emerging Age of Faith (in its Christian variety at least; I fear Islam) than most of you reading this post. Yet I cannot repress a sense of disquiet when I remember that there are more people in Africa who think the freeing of Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga a bad thing than think it a good thing. If there is a similar case next year the margin will probably be larger; and eventually that will change what happens. Western pressure will no longer work. Indeed, the boot may be on the other foot: the Pew article also says that there are already something like 2,000 Christian missionaries from Asia and Africa at work in Great Britain. Hard work at the moment, but that could change. Most people in the West assume that religion must inevitably decline as the world becomes richer and better educated. I tend to assume, gloomily, that its decline proceeds as the world embraces state welfare. But even the tide on Dover beach turns some day.

I do rejoice for my African brothers and sisters and my political fears may not come to pass. A fervent Christianity can be and has been a force for political freedom. Vile, cruel and hypocritical as the history of the United States is, it is slightly less vile, cruel and hypocritical than that of most nations - they never quite forgot that the Pilgrim Fathers on the Mayflower were Puritans fleeing persecution rather than instituting it.

Even the teetering balance between Christianity and Islam might do for Africa what the teetering balance between Protestantism and Catholicism did for Europe: let secularism sneak in as the second best option for all sides.

Or we might do a great deal worse. The other rising tide in the world is that of the global progressive elite, the Tranzis. For the first time in human history there is no technological obstacle to a world government. That I have long feared but now a new fear joins it. Barefoot religion meets the bureaucratic, unitary state, how does that work?

Perhaps, led by Africa, we are moving towards something like the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace.

Mental hospitals in this case.

I sometimes get stick on Samizdata for pointing out that the demands of practical politics in a media democracy mean that it is pointless to try the public statements of politiicans against an ideological touchstone, and unreasonable to believe that they believe everything they say from day to day. But I do greatly resent two consequences of populist pandering: first, the willingness to distort the facts to flatter or inflame public delusions and foster moral panics; second, the blithe adoption of policy that is logically or strategically utterly incoherent, suggesting they have no understanding whatsoever of what they are doing. Today brings an example of the latter:

The Conservatives' planning system would remove potential obstacles to the development of new schools by curtailing the power of local authorities in this area, according to the document.

The leaked planning policy says "for the [education] policy to be successful it is essential that unnecessary bureaucracy is not permitted to stifle the creation of new community schools".

Fine. Perfectly sensible. Get the monopoly producer interest out of the way. That is entirely consistent with an implicit aim of Tory education policy (definitely not publicly advertised as such) of permitting competition between schools. But..

Under the policy, as well as planning decisions on new schools being taken by the secretary of state for children, schools and families, anyone would be able to turn an existing building into a school without the need for planning permission.

Which might be good, but the madness is starting to creep in. If any building can be converted into a school ad lib (excellent), then what "planning decisions" could there be for the Secretary of State to take? And how does that accord with a general claim to be in favour of decentralisation?

And when an existing school closed, that land would not be allowed to be used for any other purpose without the agreement of the schools secretary.

Straightjacket for Mr Neill, please. That is just crazy.

"Let us establish a ratchet/racket whereby the proportion of land and other property occupied by schools is calculated to increase, regardless of demand. Let us destroy much of the advantage of the freeing up of planning, by making it clear to investors that they may be stuck with the change of use. Let us put future Secretaries of State in the position where they are directly politically responsible for the closure of any school, and therefore likely to be under pressure to resist it from concentrated interest groups, and constantly preoccupied with campaigns over particular cases. Cottage Hospitals, you say? What are they?"

Today's Guardian leader, purportedly on social class, is worth reading. It is utter rubbish. But it is worth reading because it is utter rubbish.

It is an informative compression of the muddled thinking of the reflex left: non sequitur piled on fallacy, piled on miscomprehension of both theory and real people, piled on all-or-nothing thinking, piled on misprision of fact, bonded together only with a sticky, sighing outrage. Read it out loud and you may find yourself using that furious-sobbing-child tone and plonking emphasis affected by professional radical activists—especially women—to convey how strongly they feel about the world. As is universally acknowledged, strength of feeling is the same as strength of argument.

I say 'the reflex left' because the alternative, 'the conventional left', though it offers the pleasure of mocking the unoriginality of the radical, suggests a developed coherence in what is usually just attitudinal stamp-collecting reinforced by mutual approval (libertarians beware). Considering that the reflex left is obsessed with economics and sociology, and professes to derive its policy from them, the arrant ignorance of either, even as they are invoked, is an unending wonder. (Libertarians beware, bis.) That is on fabulous display here in a jazz hands incursion into social mobility, offering numbers that are not numbers ("But a child born 20 years later who is a successful professional now would probably come from the top quarter...") and that lead to no detectable conclusions, which can only have been included for emotional colour. Impersonal social forces are held to dominate, but paradoxically regarded as tools of the wicked if they do not do what is wanted.

There is another way that 'reflex' is appropriate: this is reflexive discourse. It preaches to the converted. It says, "Look! We were right all along." And assumes therefore that nothing need be said to engage the unconvinced (and again, beware). It is offered within code.

The best non sequitur in the piece is an epitome of an epitome. I considered offering it as a quote of the day. It has everything: it erupts into the discussion from nowhere, is complete nonsense, is nowhere meaningfully followed up, involves an appeal to shared attitudes and beliefs in the reader as reinforcement, and contains an implied accusation of wicked motives in others:

Politicians want us to believe that it is possible to make better-off people richer without making poor people poorer.

The Guardian leader-writer thinks we already do believe that it is impossible. Not even unlikely. Impossible. If we object that sometimes people have got rich by enslaving and impoverishing others, but that mostly both rich people and poor people have got richer together, though at different rates, then we must be wrong. The rich are richer ergo the poor are everywhere poorer. If the Prince of Wales is running his Aston Martin on spare wine and skiing every winter, it can only be at the direct expense of the Duchy of Cornwall's serfs - who are now starving in greater numbers than in 1337. The politicians stand accused of denying such an inconvenient truth

No wonder the people think they are out of touch.

... people are beginning to be afraid of the state – but they are also afraid to be without the state

- Chris Mounsey

But I think, in fact, it is worse than that. There are many people - and you can often tell them by their fierce, defiant pronouncements that they have nothing to hide, they have done nothing wrong - who are in a dependant, abusive relationship with the state. They feel the bullying and their fear itself as evidence they are wanted and have a place in the world. Being pecked is reassurance that you are somewhere in the pecking-order. Seeing people who are outside the hierarchy of subjection as evil, a threat, and pleading one's own inoffensiveness at every turn is a way of legitimising one's own pigeonhole.

It is a nasty tendency. The feeble people who are trying to hide in the mainstream make up the lynchmob. And it is entirely equivalent to the morality of the prison-house, where violent gangsters are at the top and sex offenders are brutalised at the bottom, of an alternative chain of being. "You may think I'm scum, but at least I'm not one of them."

(Hat-tip: Iain Dale, even if he was only advertising his magazine)

Why do so many libertarians like insurance models, when they hate regulation and the precautionary state?

Insurance companies are at least as risk averse as public bureaucrats, and more minute judges of behaviour, since they have a direct interest. If we let insurance companies decide road speed limits, the man with a red flag walking in front of every motor vehicle would be back after 110 years' retirement.

Surely the Second Coming is at hand!

The way to absolute power is to dress up empty cruelty as public virtue, and have the organs of propaganda promulgate it for 'carers' to inflict on children. Finally they have an excuse to take Teddy Bears from toddlers.

Which is why you can't trust nature. Anatole Kaletsky is worried about stagflation. Can this be the same Anatole Kaletsky who only six month ago called for government to "punish savers"?

As I wrote at that time,

[Unsubbed original:] The purpose of banks used to be to make a profit by using the deposits in their care productively at second-hand. That is why they pay interest: to bring in funds to be lent. If they don't do either then they are no longer banks but state-sponsored rentiers.

Far from encouraging productive capital, Mr Kaletsky's prescription would have us reverting to a pre-capitalist economy where those with savings dare not recycle them. Their personal cash will end up converted to valuables, hoarded, and hidden to keep them safe from predatory tax farmers. Printing money is also a well-tested means of encouraging the same sort of behaviour.

For a recovery we need capitalism and the market to do their work. However painful, that is better than reversion to the Dark Ages because governments and their advisors want to be seen to be doing *something*. Doing nothing may be the best alternative.

Mr Kaletsky has got what he asked for and now finds he does not want it. Human, all too human.

I had to read the headline twice. Then I read the article twice. I still don't get it.

What I first thought it said was,

International development minister urges firms to pool HIV patients

Weird, obscure line, but no weirder than a lot of things that come out of the international development department, and potentially a lot more sensible. I suppose it might make sense for the big southern African companies, especially, to combine their employee health programmes. But if it were more effective, wouldn't they already be doing it? Wouldn't the South African government, in any case (now they have got rid of that barking health minister), be the one doing the urging?

What it actually said was,

International development minister urges firms to pool HIV patents

Now that makes a lot less sense. It is quite up to the standard we have come to expect from DFID, a real candidate for economic illiteracy of the day.

[Mike Foster MP] wants companies to contribute to a "patent pool", which the international drug-purchasing facility, Unitaid – set up by a number of donor countries, including the UK – is trying to establish.

"While it is absolutely vital that we work to reduce the human cost of HIV by focusing our efforts on preventing new infections, we must also face up to the stark reality of the treatment challenge we face. The pharmaceutical industry has an opportunity to act now to help prevent future human catastrophe. It is time for them to state their clear commitment to make new HIV medicines affordable to those who need them most."

According to the all-party report, if HIV patents are put in a pool, generics companies – which make the cheap combinations now used in Africa – will be permitted to make low-cost copies of newer drugs and devise new combinations in a single pill, which is important for people living in poverty.

What can this possibly mean? There's no real explanation here of how a 'patent pool' might work. It sounds like pharmaceuticals companies are being offered to the opportunity to swap an unstable legal monopoly for an internationally approved cartel, and to pose as humanitarians while doing so. Would that really lower the cost of HIV medication, and improve its effectiveness in general? It is far from obvious why that should be the case. Would medicines that are both cheaper and more effective be permitted to flow back to Western countries? I doubt it.

Which points up the weirdness of the whole exercise. In order to be economic in Western countries, HIV medicines have to be very expensive to buy there. That is not just because they are expensive to develop, but because the absolute numbers of people who need them are small. In the West, just as in poorer parts of the world almost no individual can afford to pay for their own treatment. So there's a different sort of cartel effect maintaining the oligopolistic market. Government protects the patentees; and government subsidies end up paying for the consequences.

You don't have to be a believer in the efficacy of beetroot and garlic as anti-virals to notice that the difference between the scale of the epidemic in parts of Africa and the richest parts of the world is not a consequence of the availabilty of drugs - or at least not the availabilty of anti-retrovirals. We have fewer people getting the disease in the first place. But we have fewer people with all sorts of infectious diseases. Malaria and dengue are not more treatable than they were when they were endemic in Europe, and the US, less than a century ago. The difference is better living conditions that everyone will work for if they have the chance.

Patent pooling, it seems to me, is no better than patent farming, in that it seeks to exploit artifical restrictions on innovation that just happen to be there for the benefit of a restricted interest group. It is an exercise in dinosaur husbandry, with little real relevance to improving the lives of us mammals. A reconfiguration of corporarate welfare, with its concentration on subsidising treatment of a particular disease, and bureaucrats swapping targets with bureaucrats, is a distraction from the less collectively 'manageable' task of avoiding the spread of infection, which is the invisible part of the virtuous circle of the people who are not sick getting better general health and more comfortable lives. That isn't going to come from government drug programmes. I suspect it might come from "people living in poverty" having a bit more access to the non-patent and never-patent - but still restricted - technologies of choosing their own priorities and exploiting their own comparative advantages.

There has been endless fuss about MPs expenses. Most of it is either with a tone of envy, or focussed on the apparent dishonesty of some claims. I'd like to suggest thet there has been a much more malign effect in the massive inflation of the parliamentary allowances system in the last 20 years.

Career politicians with no outside interests have been effectively exempted from the tax system as it applies to everyone else. Their tax returns are even dealt with by a special office. (For a while the Revenue has produced a special suplementary return form for parliamentarians. I saw one in the early 90s when helping an MP with his bookkeeping.)

This makes it easy for them to tighten the screws: raise rates and rake-offs, increase the tax-collector's powers, without caring to comprehend the consequences. It also gives them the idea that everyone else must be milking the system: that rich people have got rich by postitional parasitism, since that's how you get rich either as an MP, or as one of the providers of government services that they deal with among the quangocracy and PFI tsars.

The Prime Minister's reaction to this: to try to isolate MPs further, by 'naming ang shaming' those who make money honestly in the outside world, and do therefore have some idea what things are like for the rest of us.

I couldn't give a damn about peculation. It is the isolation of politicians, particularly, but not exclusively, politicians of the present ruling party, as cushioned servants of the state that is fundamentally corrupting. The theory of parliament, the root of its legitimacy, is that it stands between us and the rapacity of the crown, and holds taxes to what are fair and reasonable and are applied in the interests of the kingdom as a whole. That was the ground for the Great Rebellion and the Glorious Revolution. It was the ground on which de Montfort set up the first parliament, attempting to settle an earlier revolution.

Once parliament was filled with the independent rich, well-heeled professionals, and the sponsored, among the latter the old Labour members whose unions or philanthropy paid for them to live in Westminster. They had interests, they had views, but they were self-chosen, not neatly alligned with one another, not bound by a party machine, not tied to the public purse-strings or the rehearsal of instrumental populism.

That is what has been corrupted away almost completely. MPs have been reduced to gold-edged agents of the state, and have prospered the more, the less resistance they have offered the executive. Ministers are often closer to mouthpieces for their departments than their masters. They don't control the state for us, because the state devotes our resources to keep them in a distanced shadow-world, immune to the effects of what they do at its motion.

I can't wait for Mr Brown to publish what he thinks are damning details of member's outside interests. We have had quite enough of inside interests. It will be an excellent guide who to vote for.

Mike Oliver (who blogs as 'Mr. Integrity'... currently off-line) spotted an interesting article over on National Review that for once does not try to give Rand a kicking.

BB&T - and its open defence of rational/individualist/objectivist philosophy, a credo that runs counter to 2000 years of Judea/Christian/subjectivist/marxist ethics and deeper subjectivist planks that link those categories. Explicit defense of reason - I say!

Yes, such businessmen do exist, they are not merely the stuff of a well-known novel. As opposed to at least a large plurality of "business leaders" who seek always to cultivate government/business linkages, contracts, and of course regulations that "rationalize" their sectors (with such government rules used to ossify the industry with them - the privileged businessmen- commanding a degree of non-market control over that business sector). In history classes the U.S. trends now massively underway was how Fascism was defined.

But modern lovers of the State seem to have conveniently blanked that out. Anyway BB&T stands out from the crowd. What is most curious on a meta-level about this online article is that it comes from NationalReviewOnline.

National Review has been and until now at least was always the most outspoken and spewing opponent of Rand & Objectivism. Denouncing Rand's rational philosophical base. NR has always been at its core, and explicity so - Buckley's first book was titled God and Man at Yale) a subjectivist, religiously-planked political credo, arguing that God and a belief therein is the basis of capitalism and individual rights, etc. No wonder over the decades so many young potentially-bright students have mistakenly linked (as their professors would have them do) capitalism, or such that we have had in the U.S. that is labeled "capitalism." with a religous or non-rational philosophical base.

Many of those students, not realizing the subjectivist, A-is-not-A base of Marxism, therefore sized-up the two choices - of an ethical code based on mysticism (the Buckley-type defence of "capitalism"... or Marxism... which to so many seemed a "scientific" or otherwise rational view of the world. And tended to opt for the later - either Marxism or many of its falsely-"humanist" variants.

Anyway, National Review was on the side of mysticism and held that banner high while viciously attacking Rand and her atheism - almost foaming in their attacks over the years. Well, perhaps even that changes with new blood at National Review? No, it's probably just the failure of one of their higher editors to notice that one of their writers slipped this article onto their online site. Well, in any case it is an interesting article about the current times and the role of ideas: ideas taken from reality then applied back to issues of dealing with reality.

I think this is great, from regular commenter here NickM of Counting Cats:

The tale science tells about how we got here (and got to the point where we could ask such questions) is not just truer than the bronze-age claptrap of The Bible (or Qu'ran or stories about Marduk or whatever …) but more compelling. We are DNA on the right-handed scroll and it has taken four billion years to make us. We are that amazing. Isn't that more compelling than some old shit about talking snakes and a job done in six days? Is it not a truly grand narrative? The truth is so much more beautiful than the lie. It is also the truth and that also goes a long way on it's own.

Ah, c'mon folks … I have heard enough from creationists about how if we're merely risen slime we're still slime and that in some unspecified way we are therefore still tainted by the slime. But what slime! This piece of slime can be moved to tears by the music of Palestrina, this piece of slime can be amused by the plays of William Shakespeare, this piece of slime can parse HTML and FORTRAN. This piece of slime can factorize quadratics, do integration by parts and hold an opinion on the Copenhagen Interpretation. This is one hell of a piece of slime and so, dear reader, are you.

I am proud to be slime with post-graduate qualifications. I am stardust (so are you) created in the forge of supernovae (is that not cool?). I am atoms in motion (so are you). I am victory (so are you). I am almost everything you are and you are almost everything I am. We share half of our DNA with cabbages after all.

I entirely agree with all this, but I do not stick it up here to insist that all of you do. I know that all of you do not, which is fine by me. Especially if, from what you do believe instead, you draw political conclusions with which I strongly do agree. I stick it up here because it puts a particular point (call it the "glory of slime" argument) in answer to a common objection to Darwinian atheism (the "sliminess of slime" argument) with exuberant eloquence. Even many of those who think it tosh will at least agree that it is very well written.

The Cat Counter acknowledges the sliminess of slime, but then trumps it with the grandeur. But I bet, when he wrote his bit, that he had, rattling about somewhere in his head, this, which acknowledges the grandeur but then trumps it with slime, or in this case with dust:

What piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

While Hamlet emphasises also what fine and beautiful athletes we are, NickM concentrates only our mental glories. An interesting omission, maybe? There are all kinds of memes floating about now to the effect that although many of us dirt-bags are clever, we are not that beautiful, a blot on the world even, compared to many other more exotic looking animals, who now seem to us much more express and admirable in form and moving. Maybe this is something to do with how we have evolved to admire how we look only when young, yet are clever enough now to have contrived for millions upon millions of us to be shuffling on unattractively into old age instead of reverting to actual dirt at forty and being replaced by younger and prettier dirt-bags.

Once I was born a British citizen, and enjoyed the suzerainty of a long-standing liberal democracy. I knew my liberties as they were embedded in common law and understood the rights and privileges which were my birthright. This was a common culture that was shared in many forms by my fellow pupils at school, by my family and by those who desired to make this country their home.

In 1997 I was still a citizen. Now I am a subject: not a subject of the Crown but the subject of a new beast, one that stretches from Whitehall to Brussels. Roger Scruton has defined a subject as follows:

Subjection is the relation between the state and the individual that arises when the state need not account to the individual, when the rights and duties of the individual are undefined or defined only partially and defeasibly, and where there is no rule of law that stands higher than the state that enforces it.

This is a contentious argument, but our rights are overdetermined and overdefined on paper, arbitrary in exertion, incompetent in execution. Moreover, the European Union under the Treaty of Lisbon confers the authority of a bureaucratic state based upon a law no higher than itself, which can annul and strike out all rights, as power overrides law.

In practice, bureaucratic accretions, quangos and the vomit of regulation have encouraged a culture of subjection. This may have roots prior to New Labour but it acquired its final flowering under this pestilent regime, and discarded the final brakes upon its power: demanding that we are subject to them, civil servants in name, masters in form. ID cards, databases, surveillance and dependency.

The final transition can never be dated. It is not in the interests of the Tories to row back on such change, as they will lose the power that they have looked upon so enviously for a decade. So, when I vote in 2010, I will know that we are each capable of acting responsibly as a citizen, but we are now viewed as subjects, to be feared and controlled.

In my posting here yesterday about what is being inelegantly called "Smeargate" (aren't you sick of this "gate" stuff?) I tried my best to keep up with events as they were already happening. I have a lunch date today, but just about have time to fling down some rather link-lacking thoughts (and done in ignorance of Philip Chaston's previous posting) about what might happen next. (Later on today, I might just get to go through this and pepper it with links, but: I promise nothing. Meanwhile, sorry for all the typos and grammar screw-ups.)

I have long regarded Guido Fawkes as a genius, ever since he wrote this gorgeous pamphlet for the Libertarian Alliance. The thing about Guido is that he doesn't just believe in liberty in an abstract this-is-the-best-system sort of way, although he certainly does believe that as well; he really loves liberty, his own liberty. His throwaway remark yesterday to the effect that he started his blog "on a whim" captures this quality very well. Tactically, this makes Guido worth about ten ordinary Guidos, because of the ten things he just might do tomorrow morning to make you wish you'd never been born, you just don't know which one he'll pick, if any of them. (He might just stay in bed.) Why don't you know? Because he doesn't know himself. Oh, he has schemes afoot. "Plots have I laid", as Richard says at the beginning of Richard III before he acquired his numeral. But just when the knife will go in, just which applecart will be upset, which bandwaggon will have its wheels ripped off, which establishment forehead will disintegrate in the face of an oncoming sniper bullet, you never really know. I would hate to have him as an enemy.

Lots of people still woefully underestimate Guido. Perhaps they do this because he is not a "team player", as indeed he is not. About every two or three weeks, I get an angry phone call from my friend Tim Evans, the joint head honcho of the Libertarian Alliance, and general think-tanker on the up-and-up, about the latest Guido betrayal. (More to the point, Tim Evans is an expert think tank fund-raiser. Not many think-tankers are even adequate fund-raisers.) The latest phone call was a classic of the genre. Guido, said Evans, is "impossible to work with", a complaint that assumes that Guido is part of a team which includes Tim Evans, which he is, in an ideological sense, but is actually, in the meantime, not, as Tim Evans well knows in his less distracted moments.

The particular problem Tim Evans has with Guido is that Guido is very suspicious of free market think tanks and their relationship with big business. As far as Guido's concerned, that is just another applecart that needs to have its wheels bashed off. So now, the Institute of Economic Affairs is - get this - is in favour of "monetary easing". Why? Who knows? Don't they bloody read their own output? If the IEA doesn't stick up for Austrian Economics, who the hell will? So, about every three weeks, Guido shoves a well-deserved cricket bat into the spokes of the IEA's wheels. This enrages the likes of Tim Evans. This is not "helpful". This is not "useful". (Yeah, Tim, but it is, as you angrily say yourself in some of your private moments, true, isn't it?) The long game that the Tim Evanses of this world are playing is to build and build things like the IEA until they rule the entire known universe, and in the meantime try to stop them being trashed in gossip blogs when they talk trash. Guido "doesn't see the big picture". Guido is "biting the hand that feeds him" (???), blah blah. But I think that telling the IEA to damn well talk sense about economics, whenever it doesn't, is doing it a huge favour in the long run. That, in my book, is feeding the hand that feeds you, and absolutely understanding the biggest of big pictures, which is that "monetary easing" is a catastrophe, and having been for it could, in not many years at all, be the end of an otherwise highly effective think tank.

Closely related to Guido's non-team-playerness is his suicide bomb (wrong - see comments 1 and 2 - make that Errol Flynn) nature, which Tim Evans understands extremely well, because Tim Evans is the one who, more than anybody else, has explained this to me. How can I put this? Well, I once was acquainted with another Errol Flynn type, who used to say it this way. I want, he used to say, to die with blood in my mouth. Guido loves the taste of his own blood, maybe not in a literal way but in the sense that he wants to live, and in due course die, in a blaze of glory, not quietly plodding away in some damned team. He doesn't want to die. He loves his life, and his wife, and his baby. But, the fact that, right now, he just might get stabbed with an umbrella on a bridge - his commenters are now queueing up to tell him to "be careful" and "watch your back" - is, for him, all part of the joy of being Guido. You never live more completely than when death might be just seconds away.

This also makes him mega-formidable, because Guido doesn't react to threats in the normal way. Most of us, when threatened by people who, according to the official rules of who is powerful and who is not (job titles and salaries and who they know and what they know basically), back off in fear. Not Guido. He greets threats with genuine pleasure. What did you just say, mate? Yeah that's what I thought you said. I love it! And the creature who did the threatening has accomplished a minus quantity because now Guido is seriously interested, and the creature has just told Guido to his face exactly what kind of a creature he really is and what he really does for a living. Factor in that with who the creature works for and reports to, and the creature has just told Guido that his boss is a similar creature also, and probably his boss is as well. Interesting. Very interesting. Threaten Guido, and you are liable not to win small, but to lose big.

Guido's adopted persona as an anti-establishment desperado who ended up (a) trying to blow up Parliament and (b) as a result getting executed, but as a consequence then (c) never being forgotten is no mere random pose. It goes to the heart of Guido's view of himself and of the world, and of his place and purpose in the world.

There are about three dozen things that I might now put as following from the above cogitations, but here are two. First, this McBride resignation could be but the first of a row of dominoes waiting to fall. Does anyone now doubt that, in a deniable I-knew-nothing-of-these-emails way this particular story goes right up to Gordon Brown himself, and beyond him to the entire Labour Party who let him take over in Number Ten, unopposed? He is the engine at the heart of all this smear-mongering nastiness, and the Labour Party stands condemned of having known all about this for a decade, but of having let him get a top job, and keep it, and keep it, and then get the top job, and keep it, and keep it ...

Yesterday I passed on the widespread gossip to the effect that a government minister by the name of Tom Watson could be the next domino. Another name to look out for is Charlie Whelan (I know, links, links – try googling the news), who has been Brown's rumour-monger and muckspreader-in-chief for over a decade. He is in the loop with these emails, and no less a personage than Alastair Campbell has just fingered him as culpable. Campbell and Whelan are old enemies in the same kind of dysfunctional way that their bosses, Blair and Brown are enemies. I know, ferrets in the sack. And my point is: why should this stop until Brown himself, and the very Labour Party itself, is thoroughly trashed? The smart thing for Labour would be to do now what they should have done to Gordon Brown in about 1972, namely take him out into the yard and drown him like a superfluous kitten. That way, Labour at least minimises the damage that Brown is doing to them, as much as it now can. But they probably aren't enough of a team to do that. The nightmare scenario for Labour is far worse than that, far worse. Brown fights the next election campaign with "Smeargate" having worked itself methodically up his chain of command, and with the same exact sense of timing that caused Guido to break these emails during the Easter break, the denials being far more damaging (as they always are in these things) than the original trivialities that started it all, and with the journos asking Brown when he first knew whatever piece of shit they know he knows but which he still says he doesn't know, while his party stares electoral doom in the face like an enormous gang of rabbits trapped in a huge World War 2 searchlight.

But then, as I said in my similarly hasty ramble yesterday, it gets truly interesting. Because then, Guido settles down to rescue the forthcoming Conservative government from its own likely folly, the folly of just steadying Britain as she goes down the plug-hole of history, into a life of perpetual debt for us all. Then, Guido sets to work on them, and on who is paying them to go on doing such things. Just which bankers prefer ruining Britain for ever to ruining themselves? Which supposedly free market think tanks are keeping the faith, and which are merely putting their faith up for sale?

Don't make the mistake of thinking that because Guido doesn't believe in the same things you believe in, to do with being a normal person, that he believes in nothing except being abnormal. He is a libertarian, but not just for Guido. He believes in a world as little deranged by scumbag politicians as he or anyone else can possibly contrive. He does his "they're all at it" stuff for a reason beyond the reason of it being fun to wipe the smirk off these people's faces. He does it because the meta-message, the meta-context, as our own Dear Leader would put it, is that these people should not be running our lives. Look at them. Is this the world you want, the world you get when these people, all of these people, whatever label they stick on themselves, are deciding everything. You want the government to regulate everything? So, you want Derek bloody Draper telling you how to run your life, do you? Do you? Because that is what you are saying. Some lady cabinet minister recently said (again sorry about the missing link) that Guido is a "nihilist". Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is all part of how these people, in his words, "don't get it". Just because Guido doesn't believe in what they believe in, which is them being in charge of everything, that doesn't mean he believes in nothing else beyond stopping them being in charge of everything. Guido is not just hacking away at the world as it is. He wants a massively better one in place of the world we have now. As I say, the important stuff starts after the next election.

Or, if they're stupid enough and angry enough and sufficiently agreed about it (as well they might become) they might kill him, or try to. They might make, or try to make, a martyr out of him. Which, for Guido, sort of, would be the ultimate Mission Accomplished, the ultimate tribute paid by the scumbags to him. In which case it will be up to us normals never to forget Guido, and to use the myth of Guido to help us accomplish approximately what the fact of Guido might have done. Not least because the threat to do all this, and in the meantime talking like this about him, might just help to keep him alive. I know, I know. Crazy talk. There's "no question" of any such thing happening. Too fevered. Tinfoil hat, conspiracy lunacy.

But sort of fun, don't you think? Or, to put it another way: let's all hope not. I'm late for lunch.

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

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

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

It is said that pragmatism trumps ideology in a crisis. What actually happens in a crisis, certainly in this one, is that the ruling party gets to rechristen its ideology as pragmatism.

- Christopher Caldwell

He is talking about the Democrat's addiction to protectionism. But it is happening all over, and not just with ruling parties, but with would-be ruling ones. The wicked world is disintegrating, and it is all the fault of an evil which whatever commentator you are reading especially hates, and offers a superb opportunity for the bees in his bonnet to rebuild the social honeycomb so that mankind can buzz happily in unison ever after.

I am reminded of the Trotskyist red-greens I met in the 80s, who had the merit of putting it very clearly. Unlike the merely conservation-minded, or deep-green nature-worshippers, they welcomed a predicted ecological collapse: chaos and mass-starvation would turn people to The Revolution out of desperation. A lot of those purveying their own patent medicines for the depression seem to be unconscious that they are engaged in the moral terrorism of the transitional demand.

Are you optimistic about the future? Several months ago I was not, but I am now. From what I can see, governments are walking down the path of their complete moral and financial bankruptcy far more quickly than I ever imagined they would. I thought that it would take our overmighty governments several slow, demoralising decades of decline and eventual collapse to completely discredit their authority and control in the eyes of the people. However, our governments appear to be going supernova right now and I suspect they will burn themselves out over a few painful and tumultuous years - destroying a great deal of wealth in the process, no doubt. However, as worrying as that prospect is, it was always going to be that way. And in spite of that, I feel particularly upbeat about the longer term future. Those who know nothing more (and expect nothing less) than widespread government authority and control over all aspects of our lives will have their imbecile - sorry, umbilical - cords to the State cut sooner than expected, thanks to the overwhelmingly reckless (but entirely predictable) government response to the current financial crisis. I really do believe that future historians will pinpoint this crisis as marking the beginning of the end of the big-government era.

Do you agree?

Reading Johnathan's piece on 'the precautionary principle' below, I was struck by the way both it and the comments fail to come to grip with the fact that people who support precaution simply do not share the attitudes and values that those arguments take for granted. Both sides are unintelligible to the other. All sides, in fact, because there are more than two.

I am thoroughly persuaded by the distinction made by cultural theorists between two sorts of precaution promoters, the heirarchists and the egalitarians. The interaction between those two types in a media democracy very well explains how we get to the regulation of virtual risk. Egalitarians expect difference and change to be threatening; heirarchists value order and system, and hate absence of rules. Regulation promises egalitarians safety, that is - the minimisation and control of change and choice - in return for granting heirarchists power and order. Collective nightmares and regulatory bedtime stories are both the stuff of news.

The people advocating the precautionary principle adopt it because it is a neat encapsualtion of the preconception that all change is danger, or because it is a procedural pretext for change to be subject to approval so that it not be permitted to disrupt social order. That is how it is a principle so completely incapable of application. It is not intended as an axiom of rational construction for policy but to legitimate an approach.

The commentator who compared it to Pascal's Wager had it precisely wrong. It is an inversion of Pascal's Wager, an anti-rational argument for refusing to make any bets.

From time to time people get distressed by what they read on blogs. And there is much to be disturbed about when swimming in the sea of opinions, frustrations and outpourings as anyone who's gone wondering on the intertubes can attest.

But I digress. William Heath has had a rough moment online - he came across something that bugged him.

We love the blogosphere; it’s full of great ideas, insights and humour. The boring bits are dull, of course. But there’s a distinct part of it that bugs me. I think I call it the “Blogosphere of Hate”.

[...] This crystallised in my mind when I got drawn (via the Spy Blog I think) to someone called “Not a Sheep” who’d written a post about New Labour and immigration. The post turns into a laundry list of people and things that non-sheep hates.

That’s it. That’s what bugs me. I’m not interested in the things people hate, and I dont think we have much to learn from people who are motivated by hate.

A commendable sentiment and perhaps I would be a better person if I could say the same about my feelings about some issues and people. I must admit my blogging started out of frustration and overwhelming hatred of what I have seen happening in politics. As the venerable Instapundit says about blogging: It beats shouting at TV.

There were no lofty visions of learning from or educating others. At the very start, it was simply a pressure valve, a pub rant (or cafe debate if you are a continental) spilling out into the cyberspace. Of course, I would like to think that things have evolved since then but for the purposes of this post, blogging certainly was not great busyness (to unkindly bastardise the Quaker principle William quotes in his post).

So let me count the ways... there are (types of) people I hate, not just institutions - for start all the communists, also those who consider socialism anything but a collectivist life-and-soul-destroying dystopia, I hate people who wear t-shirts with pictures of mass murderers such as Che or with symbols of evil a la red star or hammer & sickle. Oh and I hate most politicians as a self-selected group of people who routinely encroach on everyone's autonomy and mess things up along the way.

Yes, hate is a strong word and I should use it with caution. However, I insist that there are times when it is appropriate.

Finally, I do not see the blogosphere as a place ('bookosphere', 'emailosphere' anyone?), it is people talking, communicating, publishing, distributing, lazying about, wasting time, creating, connecting, saying great things etc. Just like most human activity, it can be seemingly or genuinely wasteful. Out of that, blobs of real value float up to the top. Occasionally.

That reminds me, I especially hate people, and there is plenty of them around, who try to impose their order or standards on all this, wanting to 'keep' just the good bits, and 'protect' us from the bad ones. It just don't work like that.

There are many reasons for my decline in Samizdata productivity during the last year or two. The feeling that I had said a lot of what I had to say, and the feeling that, me having said it, the world seemed disinclined to listen very carefully to it are but two that spring to mind. And then there is the fact – no mere feeling – that professional journalists have become rather less snooty about blogging than they were (they could not have become any more snooty), and that some of them have now got quite good at it. Other bloggers who started out as amateurs have become professional journalists. All of the above makes difficulties for amateurs like me, sapping my will to blog, at any rate about 'issues'.

But just lately, another very different distraction has entered my life. My mother is now a very old lady. And suddenly, it has become all too clear that she will, quite soon now, die.

A few short months ago, Mum could still look after herself, with only occasional visits from my eldest brother and more recently, daily phone calls from my sister. Luckily for us all, brother Toby lives a short car ride from the family home that we all shared half a century ago and where Mum still lives. But just recently things took a turn for the worse, and now one of us must be present in the morning and in the evening (soon it will be round-the-clock), in person, for our duties to be performed properly. Also rather luckily, my sister is a retired doctor. She was what we call in Britain a GP, a general practitioner. Actually she is a retired GP who now lives on the west coast of Wales, but such are the wonders of email and cheap phone calls these days that her wisdom is a daily boon to the rest of us. She is now the captain of the ship, so to speak, even when not physically present.

Do not pity any of us. My mother has lead a full life, having been part of a generation and a country and a class which did great things, but had many contemporaries who were cut off in their prime by war, including in her case her elder brother John, killed in 1940, during a naval target practice. Pity her for that, but not me and my siblings for our mother's impending death, aged 94 - more if she lives until May 2009, as well she might. Her death, when it arrives, will be an entirely different event to those horrors when someone is cut off in their prime as Uncle John was, or as a lady friend of mine with a daughter still at the toddling stage nearly was by untimely and sudden illness a few months back. I also still recall the clear-blue-sky shock when an aunt, who lived quite near to us, died in her mid-fifties after routine but bungled surgery. Untimely death is something else entirely to what my brothers, my sister and I are now experiencing, at just the one remove.

But timely death has a flavour and an atmosphere all its own, not the least of its features being that all concerned know that it is inevitably going to arrive soon. Being intimately involved with such a death, I am now starting to realise, means that you enter one of those large clubs of strangers that give melancholy shape, but also wisdom, to human society.

There was, for instance, that famous club consisting of all the men who had endured but survived life in the trenches of the First World War. Members of that melancholy club could apparently all recognise one another immediately, because of the particular haunted look that they all had.

By no means all but many of that unhappy fraternity were members of another and bigger club, the club of those who have killed.

And what of that particularly unfortunate segment of humanity who have killed another person or persons by mistake, through serious negligence, a moment of carelessness or just by being the instrument of a malign fate? What of the doctors who, it was rumoured at the time, killed that unfortunate aunt? What of the sailor or sailors who killed Uncle John? Pity them. I do. I recall a driving blunder I committed in my twenties which could all too easily have got me into this club, and I have surely committed many other forgotten follies that might similarly have killed someone (perhaps me), and thereby utterly changed (or ended) my life.

Happier, with regrettable exceptions, are those great majority clubs of Big Boys and Grown-Up Girls who have had sex with one another. And although not myself a father, I have recently got to know that in addition to the great and obvious Sisterhood of Mothers, there is the great Brotherhood of Fathers, whose constant cry is: “What they don't ever tell you is ...!”

Clearly I will not be a full member of the Terminal Carers Club until the terminus is arrived at. (One of the features of TCC membership, I am learning, is jokes of various sorts about death, often involving euphemisms a lot more inventive than that one.) And equally clearly, there is a big difference between being a lone carer, and being, as I am, part of a caring team and a junior one at that. But already I am sampling some of the privileges of membership, such as the recollections of other more senior members of the club. My eldest brother, for instance, spoke on Christmas day of the final, cancer-ravaged and acutely painful hours suffered by his much loved mother-in-law, and of the knowing looks exchanged with doctors as the final dose of morphine was duly delivered. That was not a story I had heard before.

In general, I suppose that most TCC members have given some thought to the euthanasia debate, even as they arrive at very different answers. None of my opinions on this debate look like changing very much now. I wish my mother could be allowed to make her exit at a time of her choosing, but fear that she (and many others with her sort of highly developed sense of duty) might feel obligated to die, in order not to be a nuisance. I understand why most politicians want to steer clear of legislating about this. The right to end life is hard to contrive without the right to go on living of others also being put under severe strain.

There are of course dozens of facts and feelings and discoveries associated with doing terminal care for the first time that I could write about. I will end this by mentioning one that has surprised me. One of the odder things that I have felt so far concerns what happens in a house which was until recently within the control of the soon-to-be-deceased. I have of course been in this house many times, and not just when I lived in it as a child. But now I and my siblings occupy it in a new and rather unsettling way. Personally I feel a little as the Visigoths may have felt when they occupied Rome, rootling around amongst the possessions of their former rulers, no longer needing permission and with no one to tell them to stop. I did a posting about a discovery I recently made, in what used to be my Dad's room but which is now the room I am occupying. Mother, who until so very recently was in firm charge of her house, even as she depended more and more on others to help her look after it, now confines herself to the far half of the top landing. So, the rest of upstairs and all of downstairs is, well, ours.

Of course I knew that it would all become ours, sooner or later, come ... terminus time. But what I didn't see coming was that this process would begin while the journey was still in progress.

I think I know best, too, of course. But what I know best is that the world is too complicated for me or anyone else to rule. Other people are generally better placed than I am to decide what is good for them. Even when they are not, nothing gives me in particular the right to impose my ideas.

Gordon Brown is one of the elect (not just the elected) who knows no such restraint.

The Prime Minister: The first point of recapitalisation was to save banks that would otherwise have collapsed. We not only saved the world— [Laughter . ]—saved the banks and led the way— [ Interruption. ] We not only saved the banks— [ Interruption. ]

Mr. Speaker: Order.

The Prime Minister: Not only did we work with other countries to save the world’s banking— [ Interruption. ] Not only did we work with other countries to save the world’s banking system, but not one depositor actually lost any money in Britain.* That is the first thing.

Having contented himself that he only saved world banking, Mr Brown has now set out to work on the rest of the job. He has started on a mission to create peace between Pakistan and India - two countries that have not had a war since 1971. Such is his supreme diplomatic tact that his approach after the Mumbai massacre is to visit the region in order to announce that “Three quarters of the most serious plots investigated by the British authorities have links to al-Qaeda in Pakistan.” A claim that is both occult (full in equal measure of secret authority and meaninglessness), and calculated to make people in India more hostile to Pakistan.

Maybe this is not a record breaking sprint to megalomania for a British Prime Minister. Perhaps it is that Mr Brown's nostalgia for the 1970s knows no bounds. Having destroyed the British economy in order to become its saviour, he is trying the same trick on the global village.

*[This is a lie: I know personally several depositors who between them lost many millions in Britain when Mr Brown decided to expropriate the Icelandic banks. Even those among them whom the Treasury has made a vague promise to compensate have yet to see a penny, and have had the huge cost, which is unlikely to be refunded, of arranging indefinite bridging finance in near-impossible borrowing conditions.]

I am deeply concerned about the sort of world we will bequeath to our children and I promise you, the minute I get back from my holiday I will write a letter to my MP demanding that they do whatever it is you want them to do. But please, for the time being, fuck off bastard hippies.

- A fictional character articulating the sane human response to PlaneStupid, courtesy of the Daily Mash.

I fear that for a lot of campaigners, being a nuisance is an end in itself, and other people's annoyance is taken to signify how stupid and morally worthless ordinary people are - and thus as reinforcement by comparison of the overweening self-esteem of the campaigners themselves. Something similar is found in the shock-jockery of the blogosphere. I frequently spot the attitude in some NO2ID-ers but I do try to counteract it. People are entitled to want to get on with their lives in a way that is meaningful to them. If you want to persuade them, then give them a reason to care and listen, don't bully and excoriate them. In the words of Dale Carnegie: "You can't win an argument."

What would you choose for your epitaph?

Many of you will remember that back before the Democratic primary I was one of those who argued for a term of Hillary to help the Republicans understand that small government, liberty minded people won't vote for the lesser of two evils indefinitely. My goal was and is always long term and I think four years of Hillary would have been a Carteresque setup for a popular swing in the direction of personal liberty and small government.

Three factors I didn't anticipate have changed the dynamic since then. Any one of them would be an argument against that plan but, taken together, they add up to a veto.

First: Obama is not Hillary. Not by a long shot. Hillary is a fairly typical opportunist politician who thinks socialist programs have a place in a free society. She is badly mistaken but not a serious threat to America itself. I think she is at the core an American citizen before she is a 'Citizen of the World'. She tests the winds of American public opinion and that public could survive and learn from a Hillary Clinton presidency.

Obama is a cipher. He is like a Russian matryoshka doll. Nobody except perhaps his closest associates know what is at the core. The best estimate is to look at his friends and mentors and what their values are. That topic has been thoroughly discussed and some reasonable people place him solidly in a group of hard core totalitarians. If we ignore his promises shifting like smoke on the wind, his closest core group seems to be fired by hatred and revenge against America in general and the US Constitution in particular. Certainly that is what his confidants and advisers (and wife) say in public.

Second: Palin is not Romney or Giuliani or any of the other candidates that looked likely to be on the ticket with McCain. She is the most recognizably small-government, libertarian leaning candidate on a major party ticket certainly since Reagan, I think since Goldwater. She has proven her credibility with the trail of bodies in her wake. I have no doubt that she was offered any amount of inducements to turn a blind eye toward corrupt associates. She is an articulate defender of federalism and seems to be the only person outside of a few legal scholars that understands the nature and history of the role the Vice President of the United States has as the President of the Senate. I suspect that, as corrupt as this Senate unquestionably is, she may go into history as the one who took that role back to its constitutional purpose. Would that she leaves a similar trail of bodies in the Senate; it is certainly a target rich environment. Just for the record, the last President pro tempore was Alaska Senator Ted Stevens and the current President pro tempore is Senator Robert 'King of Pork' Byrd. If elected V.P. she will have the Constitutional authority to take over that role. If she does and leaves as big of an imprint on the Senate as they have, we're in for a good time; buy popcorn. Don't for a minute underestimate her potential to seriously upset the apple cart pork barrel.

Regarding the emotionally charged 'libertarians' attacking Palin, anybody who is holding out for a vehement hard core atheist, isolationist, big "L" Libertarian to be in the top spot is detached from reality in other ways too. I am amazed by all of these alleged libertarians attacking Palin for her personal beliefs while ignoring her political principles. They quite obviously don't hold to even the basic first principle of individual liberty. Even the advocates for small government and personal liberty who are more tolerant of alternative lifestyle choices (like religion) must realize that a candidate for Vice President who is a moderate, small "L" libertarian is absolutely the best we can do as a first step.

Third: The clincher. The economic turmoil boiling right now is not unprecedented. The last time it happened on this scale, the crash started on a Republican president's watch and resulted in the New Deal, schemes for packing the Supreme Court to better destroy Constitutional restraints and, ultimately, in an invitation to fascist and communist governments to have a go at world dominance. Roosevelt needed an amendment to change the court system. Obama doesn't. Also remember, after four years of the worst of the depression's misery, FDR was reelected by a landslide. Why should it be any different with Obama? This crash, which is an inevitable and substantial correction of regulatory market tampering, is coming right at the most critical phase of an election cycle. It could have come earlier or later, but with the Schumeresque assistance of the MSM it is timed perfectly to trigger an anti free market landslide. It places (Republican) President Bush in the role of (Republican) President Hoover. Under an Obama presidency, it is certain not only that the crash will be far worse than it has to be, but that it will be blamed entirely on 'the free market policies of President Bush'. This is absurd in so many ways, but do any of you doubt it? Electing Obama will be taken as a clear message that Hoover/Bush Republican 'free market' policies are at fault and forever discredited. Electing FDR/Obama (with potentially a super majority in congress) could do for free markets what the Hindenburg did for airships. How apropos that the Hindenburg was destroyed by the incendiary paint job but for decades the blame was wrongly placed on the technology that did the actual lifting. Obama, the Democrats in Congress and the MSM arm of the Democratic party would lock in the perception that free markets caused all of this. At least McCain won't deliberately try to make things worse so that he can blame Bush, the Republicans and free trade.

Another reason that didn't make my top three is that already 43% of American 'tax payers' pay no taxes. We are getting dangerously close to the point where the people who net more off of government outnumber the people who pay more into it. If we cross that threshold of voters taking versus voters paying, it is a point of no return. It appears certain that we will pass that point early in an Obama administration. Probably before mid-terms. Two years could be too long. It may not matter if the RNC learns its lesson.

Someone asked me what I was going to be doing on November 4th. I said I will most likely watch television, probably Battlestar Galactica or a re-run of Firefly. I may well go to dinner with my inamorata at some point and after that I may indulge my intermittent MMO habit and get a fix of virtual violence.

Gawd knows there is nothing else that I give a damn about happening on that day.

Snow in London last night. The BBC news report I just watched (having come home past the BBC's television studios which were covered in the white stuff) mentioned it on the East coast of England, but no mention of it in London.

For those not familiar with London weather, the last time I can find when snow was even claimed here this early in the autumn was 1974. One eyewitness suggested it was really hailstones. I don't remember. All I know is that today, October 28 2008 is the earliest proper winter that I can record.

Now here's where it gets interesting. Only a few weeks ago, we were hearing that South Africa had snow, and not just that, but of the very late variety (South of the Equator, this time of year should be warming). But don't worry, we must have a flexible view of reality: when it gets hot, it's warming; when it gets cold, it's warming; and when it seems to stay the same, it's warming twice as fast.

Does global warming predict the weather right now? Only in the sense that Nostradamus predicted the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in the 1985 edition, and the fall of the Shah of Iran in the 1980 edition.

What does predict the weather we're having is the sunspot cycle and we can now add some idea of what reduced solar wind does. [Hat tip, Instapundit]

Here's a somewhat better forecast of the end of 2008's weather than anything cooked up by the "capitalism causes tsunamis" crowd. Farmer's Almanac? Maybe astrology is more scientific than the ecofascists.

Government consistently works to undermine trust in other institutions in order to build its power. That is calculated to increase anxiety, and dependency on the state. It is a sort of reverse confidence trick. The ordinary con-man creates a false relationship of trust, and lets you believe he has something you actually want. The key political trick is, to create false suspicion in order to make you seek a "safety" you never really needed.

Now governments that have spent a decade or more telling the public to be very, very afraid, that it is helpless and needs more powerful government to save it, are very ill-adapted to deal with a loss of confidence in the financial markets. They seem to grasp dimly that stopping a panic ought to be the aim, but their approach to stopping a panic is to appear on television for emergency announcements that the situation is uniquely grave and unpredictable and so government is now going to be doing big arbitrary things inconsistently and without warning.

If they wanted calm resolution from others, then demonstrating it themselves might be a good way to start. But they don't know how.

I find myself wondering if Britain is a Communist country.

"If the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland were a Communist country you would not be allowed to ask that question."

I think I might be. If Britain was under Marxist rule (which is what is normally meant by "a Communist country") I think the rulers might allow me to ask how long we were going to be under socialism before we reached the end state of advanced communist equality - they might even give me a date when the new society would be achieved. The Soviet rulers did this from time to time - normally many decades in the future.

"The means of production, distribution and exchange are not under public control - so we have not even reached the socialist stage yet".

That would be a better reply. However, almost half of the economy is taken by government spending alone (if one takes account of Mr Brown's smoke and mirrors), and the rest of the economy is so controlled by endless regulations that it is at least close to be under "public" (if by this we mean state) control.

But it is really the near universal propaganda that got me wondering if was living under Communist rule.

This site is not called 'samizdata' without reason. In Britain there are many sources of information - books, magazines, newspapers, television and radio broadcasters. But on many matter they all say the same thing.

Take the example of the bailout/takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the United States.

In America Fox News, so denounced as statists by so many libertarians, had many critical voices on Monday September 8th. On Neil Cavuto's "Your World" show both M. Malkin and Bob Barr (who are very different from each other on so many political issues) both laid in to the corrupt statism. And Mr Cavuto also did so. The next day (Tuesday 9th September) Ron Paul was on the show - continuing the attack. Later on the 8th of September the Brit Hume show (although Mr Hume himself was away) Ed Crane of the Cato Institute was on denouncing the bailout/takeover. There were, of course, other voices and perhaps to let Fannie and Freddie go bankrupt would have been even worse than what the government did - but this is not my point.

My point is that there was no dissent in Britain - from any media source. The BBC did not even report in its main news shows that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created by the government and run by political cronies. The leftist Independent newspaper gloatingly declared that President Bush had "torn up years of lassez faire polices". The claim that there has ever even been a "lassez faire" policy in the United States under President wild spending Bush is such a blatant bit of agitprop that it is hard to know how to respond to it.

And the so-called 'Conservative' newspapers? No dissent anywhere - at least none I could find. In fact the Daily Mail was demanding something similar for Britain.

It must be remembered that in Britain 'Conservative' means 'Conservative party', it does not mean conservative in any philosophical sense.

And it is not true that in Communist countries there was only one legal party - often there were several political parties (organized into a 'front'), as long as they all supported the regime.

But it is not just this one example.

Take another incident on Monday September 8th - the Fox News refutation of "the Americans killed lots of innocent kids" lie that was going round the world.

Fox News had reporters actually on the raid in question, who had filmed the raid and openly denounced the "killed these kids" claims as lies.

This would simply not happen in Britain. Even if a British television crew had been on a raid with special forces - it would never call the crying and screaming "relatives of the murdered children" (who can cry and scream on que whenever they are told to - and can produce pictures of dead bodies) liars.

"We are libertarians, we are anti-war" - I am saying be "pro-war" (perhaps the Afghan war is all wrong), I am saying tell the truth. Something that does not happen here - on any television or radio station. If you were with someone and know they did not kill kids then it is your duty to say so. And, if dead kids are produced, to ask who really killed them. That would not be done by any British network.

But it goes a lot further than this. For example, today I went round the bookshops in my home town of Kettering Northamptonshire - a typical British town if there ever was one. In every shop there were Senator Obama's books, and so there should be - he may be elected to a very powerful position, so what he has to say is of interest.

But in no shop was there any book that was critical of Senator Obama.

No "Obama Nation", or "The Case Against Barack Obama", or "Audacity of Deceit" or "Obama Unmasked".

Perhaps these books are useless (although the first two are best sellers in the United States), but why were they not on the shelves?

"Because they would not sell" - how does anyone know, if they are not put on the shelves?

And why are the same leftist propaganda books on the shelves for ever - even though people do not buy them?

For example, in the local "W.H. Smith" there is copy of "What's wrong with America?" (what is wrong with America seems to be that it is not yet sufficiently Marxist) - and it has been the same copy for at least two years (I know that because there is a bend in the cover).

Does this sound like commercial behaviour by a profit maximising private company? American libertarians often complain that the United States is capitalist in name, but semi-socialist in reality.

Actually that is rather more true of Britain.

On a spring day in Beijing almost a decade ago, tens of thousands of people gathered on the pavement surrounding the high-walled Zhongnanhai compound, the Chinese equivalent of the Kremlin. They were protesting, but there was barely a murmur to be heard from the enormous crowd. There were no banners, no megaphones noisily chanting demands, no unruly behaviour. It was not a typical demonstration – the participants were seated and meditating. They stayed for around twelve hours. These people were members of the rapidly expanding Falun Gong sect, and they were asking for recognition, legitimacy and an end to perceived mistreatment from the Chinese central government. The then-Chinese premier met with the group’s leaders, following which they all left as quietly as they had arrived.

Shortly after this protest, the Chinese government declared the sect a dire ideological threat to the People’s Republic of China, and a huge and rigorous nationwide crackdown followed. Practitioners in powerful positions saw their careers ended abruptly. Thousands were 're-educated'. Several, according to numerous human rights advocates, did not survive their enlightenment at the hands of the Chinese state. The sect's leader was demonised, its teachings subjected to the harshest denunciations. In response, many Falun Gong practitioners held silent protests all over China. A few caught the world's attention by self-immolating in Tiananmen Square, which explains why each of the numerous military personnel guarding the square have a fire extinguisher placed within arm's length of their positions.

Unsurprisingly, these protests failed. Falun Gong in mainland China is a massively diminished, illegal underground movement. It is still an extremely politically sensitive topic in China. It is carefully referred to as 'FG' when written about on-line, in the (probably vain) hope that such abbreviations will avoid the notice of China's vigilant internet police (who probably do not care all that much about 99% of these references, but the fact that Chinese internet users go to such lengths is revealing in itself). The government has successfully and widely propagated the idea that Falun Gong is a degenerate cult.

However, being a senior central government figure in China isn't all stomping on pesky wayward meditation sects. The Chinese leadership is still basking in the glow of the international acclaim won from most efficiently hosting the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Not everyone is so chuffed. Several months before the impeccably presented opening ceremony unfolded, Chinese Olympics officials proudly declared that all events were sold out. Hundreds of thousands of disappointed Chinese fans packed up their overnight camps outside the Bank of China branches where tickets were fleetingly available. Countless others cursed their luck as they came up short in the on-line ticket lottery. Never mind, at least they could catch the action on television. However, they were dismayed to see numerous supposedly sold out events with almost no spectators in the stands. There were so few bums on seats in some venues that the camera had to keep taking close-ups of the same group of people when it shot the crowd. How could this be? It is most likely that the tickets disappeared, quite deliberately, down a black hole.The fact is that the Chinese government abhors a crowd or movement that they don’t feel in control of, and it will go to great lengths to prevent the formation of these. If they are too late, ruthlessly quashing anything that does manage to coalesce may become necessary. There are one or two other events in modern Chinese history that support this assertion.

As you are reading this, a well-off American couple in their 60s are most likely to be working in the not-for-profit community centre that they have established in a satellite city not too far east of Beijing. Locals are welcome to make use of the centre's table tennis equipment and other recreational facilities. The foreign volunteers also run several classes a week, however one must be a bit discreet about these, as they are illegal bible classes. Still, this is China and it is a given that the ever-persuadable local authorities (the same kind you will find all over the country) are well aware of what else is going on at the 'community centre', apart from the ping pong tournaments and English corner lessons.

Time to come clean; a colleague of mine's parents are the well-off American couple. Almost everyone who they have hired to work at their centre – from the office managers to the humble ayis (cleaners) – have embraced Christianity, and many of these people have gone home and converted their villages. That's right, villages. It is an enormously successful missionary operation. Illegal, of course, but it is operating outside the direct jurisdiction of the central government and sheltered by local authorities who are more than happy to accept the 'rates' it pays them. There are many thousands like it all over China.

Christianity is exploding in this country. It is impossible to ascertain how many tens – or possibly hundreds – of millions who have converted over the last few years, as the government is certainly not keeping score at this point, and many would not admit the fact, anyway. However, talk to someone spreading the gospel in China and they will tell you that this is Christianity’s most fertile frontier. I work in a perfectly legal enterprise in China, and something like half a dozen of the Westerners I have worked with thus far are either proselytising in their spare time or have a close relative or friend who is doing so. On two occasions, I have overheard newly arrived missionaries discussing their upcoming missions on the airport shuttle bus. These are of course criminal activities, and, if caught, missionaries are flung out of the country indefinitely. There are plenty of replacements, though.

Many who have worked in China would contend that the country could do with a good dose of Christian values, and I do not disagree, despite not being a believer myself. The central authorities currently have an uneasy truce with the practising of Christianity here. There are churches in China; those that only foreigners are allowed to attend – a foreign passport must be shown upon entry – and those for the small number of officially registered Chinese Christians. The overwhelming majority of Chinese Christians attend illegal home chapels and there are undoubtedly many hundreds of thousands of these dotted all over the country. I believe this rapidly escalating social phenomenon - that the always-paranoid central government has almost no control over – will signify a decisive fork in the road for the direction of the country’s development.

The way the Chinese government responds to the growth of Christianity represents a harbinger of what we can expect China’s future government to look like. Will it relent and accept that there are large elements within Chinese society beyond its control? This would represent a massive shift towards a liberal stance which would probably have far-reaching consequences for the efficiently repressive Chinese state. Or will it retreat back into its familiar insistence of hyper control like it did with the Falun Gong affair, going to enormous lengths to extinguish the home chapels and forcing the Chinese Christian movement deep underground?

Suppressing Falun Gong was an easy decision to make for the Chinese government, as accommodating them was clearly not necessary. Their bargaining position was weak. They had no powerful friends. There were few negative consequences in ignoring their demands and wiping them out instead. I guarantee that there is not one Chinese leader who has lost a single second's sleep over an Amnesty International report. However, a Falun Gong solution to arrest the unnerving growth of Christianity has infinitely more downsides. Christianity is the dominant religion in the Western democracies, which will, for the foreseeable future, have the ability (at enormous cost to themselves, of course) to halt China’s integration with the global market and reverse its recent economic gains. If the Chinese government started persecuting Christians en masse, the West, led by the USA, would almost certainly move to isolate China. The process of globalisation would grind to a halt.

Of course, this would spell economic catastrophe for all parties concerned. Many would assert that the Chinese government has no choice but to accommodate Christianity, if the other alternative is the utter destruction of the modern Chinese economy, along with all the political fallout that would entail. I disagree – to assume this is the only option would be to misinterpret what primarily motivates China’s rulers. Thirty years ago, the Chinese leadership did not embrace aspects of the market economy for the purpose of making the lives of their citizens better by enriching them – they did it because they realised the continued application of catastrophic Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought throughout society would see them thrown up against the wall, probably sooner rather than later. Stodgy communist doctrines no longer provided legitimacy to rule. The people wanted better lives and the communists promised them that via the market, which has been effective. The communists abandoned their purportedly cherished ideology to stay in power, and considering the ferocity with which they have dealt with perceived threats to their authority in the recent past, there is no reason to believe that they would behave very differently now. Therein lies the ultimate goal of China’s leaders – not upholding Mao's dubious wisdom, not a commitment to the global market economy – but maintaining their power. If viewed through that rubric, the decision to either accommodate Christianity (and relinquish a sizeable amount of control, yet maintain prosperity) or to drive it out of China (and consolidate control at the expense of recent economic gains) becomes much less predictable.

Some might argue that if the government chose the latter, the Chinese people would blame them for ruining the economy and their lives, and rise up in response. I think the Chinese government could easily appeal to the widespread nationalist sentiment that exists in the Chinese community to deflect responsibility away from them. They would simply shut down as much contact with the outside world as possible, declare that Christianity is a subversive force which will destroy the country if left unchecked, and provide some plausible but manufactured evidence to underscore its assertions – pretty much exactly what it did with Falun Gong. Enough people would probably believe this to maintain the government’s grip on power. As a further distraction, they could also claim that the 'Christian USA' is preparing to invade in response to 'the Chinese nation’s self-defence', or something along those lines. Constructing a propaganda alibi to get the Chinese government off the hook politically would not necessarily be all that difficult.

I should make it clear that I think there is a good chance that the Chinese government will decide to learn to live with the large, largely unmanageable and growing Christian population within its borders. If it does this, I think we have some reason to be optimistic about the rise of a more liberal Chinese government in the future. Nevertheless, we should not assume that the current Chinese leadership will loosen their grip on power to safeguard their country’s prosperity. In the West, it is mistakenly believed that "may you live in interesting times" is an ancient Chinese curse. In fact, no such curse exists. Nevertheless, we do live in interesting times, and the rise of Christianity amongst the masses of China will be an interesting test of the Chinese government’s priorities.

The former head of the Cabinet Office Anti-Drug Co-ordination Unit, Julian Critchley, has come out for full legalisation. Interesting, but not very interesting. What is more interesting is what he told the BBC later in the interview:

... the "overwhelming majority of professionals" he met, including those from the police, the health service, government and voluntary sectors, held the same view.

"Yet publicly, all those intelligent, knowledgeable people were forced to repeat the nonsensical mantra that the government would be 'tough on drugs', even though they all knew that the government's policy was actually causing harm."

There is something wrong with our political system, don't you think, when policy is determined by people who know that it is wrong, and know that their colleagues also know that it is wrong, but all are compelled by personal interest to rehearse the same orthodoxies? The propaganda of received wisdom has its own momentum, and no one person changing their mind will have much effect. Critchley will be ignored. His colleagues will be silent. And next autumn we will have a new moral panic about some drug-related social phenomenon, real or imaginary, justifying some extended power.

There have of course been other systems that worked this way. But the official Marxism-Lenninism of the Soviet Communist Party or the irrelevant doctrinal minutiae of theocracies had or have at least a clear purpose in maintaining the power of institutions. In our mediated ochlocracy policy is a peacock's tail in which random illusions of public opinion power political and bureaucratic machines, that then feedback more of the same, regardless of reason or utility.

What, if anything, can be done?

I rather like this observation from Simon Hoggart:

But it's not just the bigots who confidently announce what's on the deity's mind. Often on Thought For The Day on Radio 4 (the equivalent on Radio 2, at around 9.20 on the Terry Wogan show, is usually less embarrassing) someone declares solemnly that God believes this, or God wants that. Usually God turns out to have the same views as a north London bien pensant, who wishes the best for everyone, within certain limits.

He's completely right. The Most Reverend, the Most Fluffy, Archbishop Rowan Williams is, in his determined niceness, on precisely as solid ground as is his scarey African co-churchman whom I just heard pronounce on Radio 4 that The Bible says the punishment for homosexuals is death and we are not entitled to disagree with God's word. The ground is precisely as solid because it really amounts to 'Because I say so. This is what scripture means because this is what I wish it did mean. It accords with the sort of society I want to live in, and therefore it is correct.'

At the risk of waking the throbbing-veined antimussulmen among the commentariat, the same is true of all proponents - and almost all interpreters - of a religious world-view. Those who say cosily with Tony Blair that Islamist terrorists are engaged in a "dreadful perversion of the true faith of Islam" are on precisely as strong a ground as both the followers of ibn Qutb and their countersupporters in western fearfandom, who say that that is what Islam 'really' is. Tapdancing in a vacuum.

The assertion of 'truth' is meaningless without the possibility of falsehood. The oxymoron 'true faith' invariably means the model of a religion, his own or someone else's, that the speaker prefers, the one that gives him the most explicable, grippable, world.

They all say, without any real self-doubt, and without the glorious dramatic irony of Alf Garnett: "It stands to reason." No it doesn't. It is the opposite of reason. All of it.

In one of the most beautiful avenues of Budapest, Andrássy Road, is a museum dedicated to the two 20th century horrors, Nazism and Communism. House of Terror (Terror Háza) does not differentiate between the two toxic ideologies. After all, they are the same thing with different packaging – one in black, the other in red. That they hate and fought each other is not evidence to the contrary, merely evidence of territorial in-fighting.

In winter of 1944, when the Hungarian Nazis came to power, hundreds of people were tortured in the basement of the house in 60 Andrássy street. In 1945 Hungary was occupied by the Soviet Army. One of the first tasks of the Hungarian communists arriving with the Soviet tanks was to take possession of the location. The building was occupied by their secret police, the PRO, which was later renamed ÁVO, subsequently ÁVH (names for political police). The entire country came to dread the terrorist organisation. The ÁVH officers serving at 60 Andrássy Road were the masters of life and death. Detainees were horribly tortured or killed. The walls of the cellars beneath the buildings were broken down and transformed into a prison.

After the end of communism in Hungary, 60 Andrássy Road has become a shrine, the effigy of terror and the victims' memorial. At least in Hungary they recognised that the 'past must be acknowledged'. The exhibition is a visual feast, both in the artefacts displayed and in the symbolism of their arrangement. The rooms have themes and objects in them are meant to create an atmosphere as well as communicate facts. Alas, the visual beauty conjures an image of a retro nightmare - distant and unreal it masks the brutality and dull reality of communist terror.

There is an exquisitely designed hall dedicated to Soviet forced-labour and slave camps. There are reminiscences, photographs and the display cases contain relics, the original paraphernalia used by the people detained by the Soviets and taken to gulags. And yet, it does not squeeze your heart and make you sick to your stomach. The muted light and the droning voice of the audio guide fail to convey the tragedy. By trying to describe the suffering of many thousands, they miss the opportunity to make us feel the suffering of one, to put ourselves in their place, imagine our lives being arbitrarily and brutally torn apart. And to remember that this did not happen in some kind of parallel universe, that this is history next door.

I wanted to know the people whose meagre possessions I was looking at in the display cases. Their names, stories, family, circumstances, fates. I believe that the best and only way to understand Communism and Nazism is through the lives of individuals who were affected by it not through a historical methodology or chronological exposition.

And so we need to be told about their neighbours reporting and spying on them, children betraying parents, we need to hear the tales of endurance, mercy and resistance that no historical narrative can capture. We document history in such impersonal terms and yet there is nothing more powerful then actions of a man. We look for overarching explanations but historical causality without human beings and their behaviour leaves the patterns of history indistinct, lacking in colour and texture.

Everyday life is as important to understanding of what happens as are historical milestones. It might help people realise how little it takes for the society to find itself in a grasp of a toxic ideology and how gradual the decline can be, how unnoticed the erosion of freedom, dignity and moral strength.

If I had the time and resources, I would gather the human details about communism, not just the historical facts, and create a place where others can 're-live' the individual tales. I would try to explain what it took to survive and resist. I would address the connection between totalitarianism and bureaucracy - why is it that an already unhinged and all powerful regime is so obsessed with record-taking, papers and stamps, correct documentation...? I would point at the need inherent in any totalitarian ideology for an external enemy, and by extension its internal allies. I would expose the mundane and ridiculous reasons for which people were sent to prison, torture and death. I would throw light on the 'little helpers' without whom no authoritarian regime can succeed – the nosy neighbour, ambitious boss, jealous colleague, petty family member... and at the 'silent majority' who by 'minding their business' and 'just getting on with their lives' lend credence to the ravings of the power-mad ruling class. I would examine propaganda, not through the posters, broadcasts and mass demonstrations but through the eyes of children growing up under the barrage of idiotic but effective brainwashing.

And finally, I would bring up the horrors of arrest, detention, interrogations, beatings and torture, imprisonment and executions, hiding in history's basement and cellars. Both the victims and the interrogators. Who were the people who carried out the daily atrocities? What and how did they believe? Where are they now? Did they go back home to their families at the end of the day, having broken a few more bodies and spirits? Did they do this out of fear? Or were they merely sadists gravitating to the communism sanctioned violence towards their fellow human beings? I would name them and publicly decry their deeds, spell out their participation. The Nazis got that treatment but when will such judgement be upon the Communists? Why is the hammer and sickle not abhorred the same way the swastika is? After all, it has brought evil to many more people...

Failing that, here are the pictures from the House of Terror in Budapest. The museum is an excellent reminder of what happened in just one dreaded house. And to think that there were many more.

The photos were taken despite the ban on photography in the museum. I did play along and kept my camera away until I came across a quote that sums up the deranged mindset of a communist ideologue. I wanted to make a note of it to look it up later and the fastest way was taking a photo. After the first furtive but successful attempt, it was impossible to resist taking more pictures.

Here is the quote* that goes to the heart of implementation of communism - and any other totalitarian ideology. It eradicated any notion of individual responsibility and therefore freedom, autonomy, rights and justice. And that is the essence of terror.

We do not look for evidence, we do not attempt to uncover acts or agitation against the Soviets. The first question we ask is: where are you from, how were you raised, what was your profession? These questions determine the fate of the defendant. This is the essence of the red terror. - M.J. Lacisz, Chief of ÁVO, the Hungarian political police.

*Credit for the translation goes to Zoltán Módly. The Hungarian version: "Nem keresünk bizonyítékokat, tanúkat, nem akarunk szovjetellenes tetteket vagy agitációt leleplezni. Az első kérdés, ami minket érdekel: honnan származol, milyen volt a neveltetésed, mi volt a foglalkozásod? Ezek a kérdések döntenek a vádlott sorsáról. Ez a vörös terror lényege."

Over at ConservativeHome there's a survey suggesting the social conservatives are doing the Guardian's work for it by trying to make one's position on abortion a party-political issue in Britain. The next generation of Conservative MPs support a lower time limit for abortions says an email questionnaire to 225 candidates, answered by just under half. I'm as irritated by this sort of spinning of some very doubtful evidence as I am by the contrary stuff - to the same effect - from the Guardian, which has recently started to suggest (as a measure of its desperation) that no-one who favours abortion choice should vote Conservative.

What really winds me up, though, is the mendacious presentation of their position by the proponents of this staged debate. The legal position of abortion in Britain is the sort of muddy compromise people with a clear ideas about the question are quite right to resent. But the approach of many abortion-banners (as they actually are) is anything but frank, and reminiscent of the step-by-step strategy of the anti-smoking lobby. For every principled (usually religiously principled) pro-lifer, there is someone who secretly shares their conviction, but makes the case for just a little cut in the time-limit now "because science tells us that babies of that age can now survive outside the womb".

It's nonsense. Without a lot of help a two-year-old can't survive outside the womb. And the prospect of those few born at the limit of current paediatric technology surviving uncrippled to live a normal life is tiny even with a massive input of medical and nursing resources. But worse, it is mendacious nonsense - they don't care about "viability" in the slightest. What they want is a plausible excuse to cut the availability of abortion just a bit.

So I have a test to flush them out. It is provided by that ghastly muddy compromise. Britain doesn't in law permit women to choose abortion, unlike most rich countries. It is an extraordinary construct of bureaucratic paternalism.

What British (mainland) law does is to permit pregnant women to petition doctors to give them permission to abort on the grounds that it will be bad for their well-being to carry the baby to term. With two doctors assenting to this opinion in writing (that is, as the doctors' professional opinion - the woman's view doesn't matter in law), you may have an abortion. Where the 'time-limit' comes in is that those two doctors can only approve an abortion to preserving the patient's social or mental well-being before a certain point. After that terminations may only occur where there is a substantial risk to life or health, or in cases of severe foetal abnormality.

So in practice, in the UK you have a choice only if you approach the right doctor armed with the right argument. A naive or poorly educated, woman who seeks help from her GP when the GP happens to oppose abortion, or who mistakenly calls a pro-life charity canvassing itself as offering help to the unexpectedly pregnant (as opposed to one of the pro-choice groups who do the same thing) may never find out how to get an abortion, or at least not until it is too late. The late abortions themselves aren't occuring as a lifestyle choice - which is another mendacious narrative element in the pseudo-debate.

My test is this: Next time anyone says they want the time-limit for abortion cut to because "science shows" the baby can survive outside the womb after X weeks. Say, "And of course you support changing the law to allow abortion on demand before that date, don't you?" Then watch them flounder.

I am out of tune with the spirit of the age. My first reaction was to laugh out loud:

The grandson of prominent anti-gun campaigner Pat Regan has been arrested on suspicion of stabbing her to death.
- Yahoo/ITN News

It is not just the paradox. It is the way such an incident - horrific in reality though it no doubt is - puts the lie to all such sentimental campaigns.

Children are not angels corrupted by contact with mundane implements; they are social animals, small brutes that will grow into large brutes unless civilized. A civilized man ought to be able to carry a gun without offering to shoot anyone under any provocation short of violence offered. A brute will assault you with whatever comes to hand if he feels slighted, and the last thing society needs is for him to have is greater self-esteem. [(1) - (2)] Fetishising mere tools just further exculpates violent people in their own minds.

Am I too cynical, or too idealistic?

In a piece of character assassination on Cherie Blair in the Observer (one so comprehensive that she would almost certainly describe it as 'misogynistic', if it came from a male writer), Catherine Bennett makes at least one palpable hit. Forget the inane boastfulness and obsessive self-justification against every suggestion of venality:

She complains how the Daily Mail 'ratcheted up its attacks on me', demanding to know - though Mr Blair could have answered just as well - if Leo had had the MMR. Doctors were also keen for the Blairs to help subdue a scare which threatened public health. Now she discloses that Leo had, indeed, been vaccinated, though she would not save lives at the time if it gave 'the press chapter and verse'.

I wonder, though, whether it is not even worse than that. It is possible that the Blairs might have withheld the information, not out of genuine concern for their family's privacy (effectively discounted by the present revelation, as Bennett points out), nor out of pique at the press, as in Cherie Blair's current account, but for political reasons: that they preferred to keep silent, and thereby to encourage the spread of dangerous infectious diseases against which they had quite properly protected their own infant, in order not to cross the noisy anti-vaccination lobby.

Since we saw them use family events to political purpose at much the same time, it would be entirely consistent with their known behaviour. The Blairs have never avoided telling other people what to think when they stood to get a tactical political gain, or when they believed it necessary for their great projects for the world. But concealing an actual belief in vaccination looks like sacrificing other people's children to calculation of the most self-regarding kind.

Libby Purves writes in The Times about an astonishing piece of micromanagement in the British state education system (to which over 90% of children are subjected from 5 to 16). She rightly picks on the most horrific element.

... Michael Gove, the Shadow Education Secretary, instead of tossing his hat in the air and singing “Let my people go!”, proved that he is well in training to be a modern minister (aka an annoying, bossy pest) by criticising the decision to abandon the compulsory 30-song list. “This Government,” he thundered, “is so paralysed by political correctness and terminally afflicted by dithering that it cannot even decide on a simple thing like the songs children should learn.”

There's a lot of this. Shadow ministers continually criticise the government for "not doing enough" on this or that, or for insufficiently oppressive use of its draconian legislation, rather than offering an alternative policy involving some presumption in favour of liberty.

Unlike some of my colleagues, I do not mistake the public utterances of politicians as a direct expression of their personal beliefs. They are doing this in order to foster the impression that the Government is incompetent in the mind of the public, not as an adumbration of any particular policy of their own. The real horror is that the opposition has done expensive research and hard intellectual work to come up with this approach. They do not offer the public freedom, and not just because the public no longer finds liberty attractive. They know the message would not get through. In fact, for most people in Britain - and a very average most-person is the undecided voter a democratic politician must address - liberty is no longer intelligible.

Does the word "liberty" appear in the national curriculum, I wonder? ...

Not here. But ... a Google site: search at www.curriculumonline.gov.uk brings up just two items.

The first is, a rather icky, PC, citizenship teacher's guide to the internet:

This unique and invaluable resource is a guide to the best of a huge collection of Citizenship resources available on the Internet. Fifty nine sites are included and each site is evaluated in terms of its content, usefulness, links and suitability. Sites included: ActionAid Schools and youth groups anti-slavery Central Bureau for International Education and Training Council for Education in World Citizenship Global Citizenship Global Dimension The Institute for Citizenship Montage Plus QCA Subjects Citizenship Hampshire Citizenship Project United Nations Home Page Knowledge and understanding about becoming informed citizens Campaign for Freedom of Information European Citizens' Rights The Citizenship Foundation Commonwealth Secretariat Council of Europe Education in Human Rights Network Europarl Explore Parliament The Hansard Society ippr Local Government Information Unit Local Government Association WEB SITE: Oxfam's Cool Planet Save the Children's Fund Scottish Human Rights Trust Department for International Development Understanding Global Issues Developing Skills of Enquire and Communication The Bar Human Rights Committee The Commission for Racial Equality : The Council of Europe Portal The British Institute of Human Rights The Runnymede Trust PICT Developing Skills of Participation and Responsible Action Amnesty International UK The Anne Frank Educational Trust UK The British Youth Council The Centre for Alleviating Social Problems Trough Values Education CEDC Community Education and Development Centre Community Learning Scotland Development Education Association Democracy 88 The Global Caf?? Age Concern Centre for Citizenship Studies in Education Human Rights Unit The Institute for Global Ethics NSPCC Kid's Zone : Liberty Peace Child Schools Council The Howard League The Human Rights Centre of The University of Essex Changemakers Windows on the World Worldaware This book comes with a disk that you can run through you web browser so that you just have to point and click to be connected to sites without having to type the address (you will need Internet access on your computer)

Not a huge variety of viewpoint there, though at least the "Liberty" referred to is the organisation of that name, which (in its soft-left way) definitely understands the meaning of the term.

The second is rather more sinister - a published standard lesson product, entitled "Why Obey the State":

Product Details
Description: Information about obedience to the state, with activities, for KS3 and KS4.
Publisher: Pearson Publishing (Publication date-15th Nov 2002)
Covers: Lesson
Teaching subject: Citizenship
Key Stage: Key stage 3 [11-14], Key stage 4 [14-16]
[...] Resource Information
Product type: Drill and practice
[...] Education Information
Covers: Lesson
Who is the resource for? Learner
General keywords: state, obey, democracy, intervention, liberty
National curriculum keywords: Citizenship and PSHE (Responsibilities - general information)

I wish I were making this up.

For those who want us all to live in terror, is that would-be terrorists are seldom very competent, and that doing any very big damage is difficult. An illustration just how difficult has just turned up. The Guardian luridly reports:

Terry Jupp, a scientist with the Ministry of Defence, was engulfed in flames during a joint Anglo-American counter-terrorism project intended to discover more about al-Qaida's bomb-making capacities.

There has been no inquest into his death, as the coroner has been waiting for the MoD to disclose information about the incident. An attempt to prosecute the scientist's manager for manslaughter ended when prosecutors said they were withdrawing the charge, but said the case was too "sensitive" to explain that decision in open court.

The Guardian has established that Jupp was a member of a small team of British and US scientists making bombs from ingredients of the sort that terrorists could obtain. There is also evidence pointing to experiments to discover more about radiological dispersal devices - so-called dirty bombs - which use conventional explosives to scatter radioactive material.

A properly skeptical report probably would not use the magic word "al-Qaida", rather than referring to terrorists in general. Nor would there be the superstitious mention of "radioactive material".

However the salient facts are informative: An expert; no difficulty obtaining the materials and knowing what was wanted; proper care and attention - and he still managed to go horribly wrong. The task is a very difficult one.

Could it be the reason the average would-be terrorist doesn't blow himself up prematurely (as used to happen quite often to old-style IRA/Fatah, etc., bombers equipped with commercial/military explosives), is because he lacks the knowledge to make an explosion at all? The idea that even a real expert could disperse suitably weaponised chemical/radioactive agents, or biological ones using low-explosive paint-tin bombs is just a bit ludicrous. The idea that an inexperienced religious nutter/power fantasist using recipes off the internet could do so is wholly absurd.

Terrorists in Britain are a threat to life comparable with police car-chases. Terror of terrorists is the threat to civilization.

No chance of the government, media, security services, just suggesting we all calm down, I suppose? Nope.

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

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

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

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

The downfall of Eliot Spitzer has recently been celebrated on this blog, and rightly so. However, I believe the major casualty of the affair will prove to be Hillary Clinton, rather than Spitzer. This juicy scandal will deliver the Democratic nomination to Obama. You could almost - almost - feel sorry for Clinton; the press was only just starting to crack the shiny Obama veneer, when this had to go and happen. Who will pay any attention to Rezko and co. with this circus unfolding over the next few weeks? It will suck the oxygen right out of Hillary's campaign at the critical juncture - just when it was catching fire.

Not that Obama as the Democratic candidate will necessarily be a bad thing for the Republicans; the more I see and read of him, his views and his actions, the more I am convinced that Obama08 is John McCain's smoothest path to the White House.

You are on death row awaiting execution. What would you order for your last meal?

I'm not generally proud to be British. It strikes me as absurd either to claim some sort of credit for an accident of birth, or to assume that the culture one is brought up in is ipso facto the best available to anyone. Nation is usually alien. I've said it before and I'll say it again: when someone says "we", I feel like a "them".

However, I must say I get great pleasure from the fact that nobody does self-parody like 'we' do. There is a great British tradition of highly competent people doing extremely serious things unencumbered by wild eccentricity or a very silly-sounding name. It is therefore a matter of considerable joy to me that 'our' defence forces are led by Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup GCB AFC ADC DSc FRAeS FCMI RAF.

Is capital punishment an acceptable legal sanction?

I have written before of the nationalisation of politics in Great Britain. In short, I think Peter Oborne's thesis in the the Political Class is almost right, but back to front. We are much closer to the authoritarian "no-party state" advocated by Brian Crozier, realised, however by Djilas' New Class sucking up consumerism and the New Left rather than through caudillo-corporatism. But I did not realise it had gone so far: how much the constitution has changed in that particular respect the last decade; how much in public discourse the government and the governing party are now identified.

Peter Hain MP is in trouble. His inexplicably luxuriantly financed campaign for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, turns out not to have counted over £100,000 in donations. It is all over the newspaper and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, and the Electoral Commission are both investigating. I'm sorry? Apparently the failure to account is a criminal offence. It what?

Now maybe it couldn't happen to a nicer bloke, Mr Hain (an African by birth) having moved from being the leader of the Anti-Apartheid Campaign in the UK in his twenties to one of the leading advocates of a new pass-law system for his adopted country. But I am outraged on his behalf in this case.

Someone has to be. All Mr Hain has done is to say he was too busy to notice the alleged offences being carried out in his name, not challenge, as the younger man would have done, the ludicrousness of the context. All the media has done is have vapours about the wickedness of using money to send leaflets and not reporting it to officials, and ridicule the poor man's "orange" complexion in a way they would think disgusting and itself borderline criminal if he were an ethnically darker African.

Maybe I have not been paying enough attention, but I have not read anywhere yet the obvious point. ...

This was a Labour Party election. It should be a private matter for that organisation. If Mr Hain has broken his own party's rules then let his own party penalise him in accordance with those rules. It is no business of parliament. It is no business of the official parliament has crazily set over its members' conduct as parliamentarians. It is no business of the Electoral Commission, whose only plausible excuse for existing is to oversee elections to public office.

Deputy Leader of the Labour Party is an office without significant power and responsibility even in the Labour Party; it has no legislative or executive or judicial function in any other British institution. If members of the Labour Party want to decide their leadership by lot, by bribery, or by a contest to see who can piss into Kier Hardy's cap from the greatest distance, then it is nobody else's business. Whether the Labour Party is in government—it is, Rip van Winkel& #0151how it gets there, and what it does there, are matters of public importance for public debate and ought to be governed by constitutional law. How the Labour Party is organised might be interesting (though it isn't), might be contingently important to the conduct of a Labour Government (though as far as I can see it isn't), but the Labour Party is a voluntary organisation. Until joining the Labour Party is compulsory, or Labour connections give preferential treatment in life outside politics (and that it is not itself regarded as improper), then non-members have no legitimate say in the affairs of the Labour Party.

Mr Hain appears to me to have been an effective and loyal member of a consistently vile administration. It is for that he should be condemned, particularly when his antecedents would lead one to expect at least some civil libertarian principle. We have every right to despise and vilify him on those grounds. (But no state official has.) If the voters of Neath think Mr Hain's conduct or character makes him an inadequate representative, then they are sovreign at the ballot-box to remove him, if necessary with a dead dog wearing a red rosette. Welsh voters and local parties aren't passive clients of the party, even though it often treats them like that. Until he commits a real crime, or those voters chuck him out, though, Mr Hain gets my reluctant support in keeping his seat and his office.

He is no more morally guilty than when he was tried for armed robbery. It is vexatiously mistaken identity, with the power of the state prayed in aid of someone-else's fight. The aye-witless demand for security provided by the state even against a the rough and tumble of a private game is the agent provocateur this time, not an eye-witness procured by a foreign Bureau of State Security.

I was talking to a friend this evening who noted that a bank had sent him a letter promoting a loan; confounding the pessimists who think that the days of easy credit are completely dead. He observed that the letter contained the phrase "The mill that produced this paper supports sustainable forestation".

It is hard to believe that the bank really cared that much about the source of their paper, but banks, being creatures of the market, are sensitive to their customers, and make efforts to please them. The small but noisy minority of 'environmentally friendly' customers that would have approved of the bank's effort to be eco-friendly would be appeased, and the rest of the client base would care not a jot.

But we are seeing more and more of these nods to the environment being enforced with the power of national governments. It is rather like what happened to ancient Rome in the Fourth Century. The first Christian Emperor, Constantine the Great, lifted restrictions on Christianity in 312, and Christianity backed by the power of the state made slow but steady gains at the expense of the old pagan faiths before the Vestal Virgins were disbanded by Imperial order in 394.

I am not sure what will really qualify as comparable milestones in the rise of environmentalism as the official faith of the West, but for those of us of a skeptical nature, I think it does rather have a feel of being like a Pagan in 4th Century Rome.

Sometimes it is worth plagiarising yourself.

I was asked in a pre-interview chat the other day, about 30 seconds from live TV, "Why is the government doing this? 'Terrorism' doesn't seem to make sense; there has to be something more to it." It's hard to be snappy on the point even without crazy pressure, so mumbled something about my interlocutor going to Google and typing "Transformational Government". I do recommend it, but I have a fairly neat explanation for why Transformational Government too. Just not quite neat enough to recall and pitch in 30 seconds on a GMTV sofa at 6:30 in the morning.

I actually wrote it about 3 years ago, in the days when I had time to think, as a comment on Phil Booth's (whatever happened to him) blog, the Infinite Ideas Machine:

My answer arises from a pub conversation a while back with the post-Marxist commentator Joe Kaplinsky. He maintains "they" don't know what they want the information for, they are just collecting it just in case it should ever come in useful, because that's what bureaucrats do. There is much in that, but I think there's slightly more.

The slightly more is a glimpse of bureaucratic fundamentalism to rival the more explicit fundamentalisms of religious and political fanatics. The administrative class ("class" in the cultural not economic sense) in Britain, but also in Europe more generally - and from which New Labour is almost exclusively drawn - holds it as self evident that the life and personality of an individual is a unitary object capable of being better managed if only there is enough information collected and enough "best practice" followed.

It is a fundamentalist faith in that if the world is out of line with the model, the world is wrong; that written rules and established methods are unquestionable from outside the tradition; and that forcing people to live within the categories determined by the faith is justifiable for a general and individual good that is evident to the elect.

It's not that control is sought for its own sake, more that they yearn for the best well-ordered and coherent society, and believe this can be determined and imposed given sufficient expertise and information. Hence joined up government. They really do believe that efficiency is achieved by connecting everything to everything else in a giant bureaucratic system. It is the Soviet illusion, dressed up in "new technology" and market-friendly initiatives that co-opt corporate bureaucracies into the dream rather than setting them up as enemies.

The same people who claimed to have absorbed Hayek's explanation of why 5-year plans can't work during their turn away from Old Labour are too dull (or too intoxicated by the vision of the power to make a good society) to see that replacing some of the clerks with machines and the telegraph with the internet makes no difference to the basic proposition.

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose free will.

- Rush.

It is my birthday, so a little personal reminiscence is in order. The man who introduced me to Rush, 29 years ago, subsequently turned down physics fellowships at both Oxford and Cambridge to become a Baptist missionary. I guess he took his instructions from the first part of the verse.

I am a hawk, no doubt about it. If I am going to be taxed by the state, I would much rather my hard earned money be spent dropping bombs on the lackeys of Slobodan Milosevic (Bill Clinton's finest hour, without a doubt) and Saddam Hussain, than on corrosive domestic 'entitlements' and ever more kleptocratic regulatory statism.

So then along comes Ron Paul, the first US presidential candidate since Ronald Regan with any notion whatsoever that the state is way way way too big. Moreover here comes a person who thinks the only way liberty can be preserved is to take a radical axe to Leviathan's tentacles and re-establish constitutional limited government. Cool. Very cool, in fact. So do I really really like Ron Paul? Well I like him but less than you might think as some of his remarks are borderline delusional 'troofer' stuff and that does him no credit at all. Is he actually going to win? Probably not but that is not what this article is about (commenters please note). Do I even want him to win? Well that is what this article is about.

He wants a return to constitutional limited government. What's not to like about that? But then my eye falls on that picture of Murray Rothbard in Ron Paul's office. I am not a fan of Rothbard even though there is indeed much good stuff in The Ethics of Liberty. Although I think he was correct about a great many things, I also think he was often as intellectually dishonest as Karl Marx and Noam Chomsky and perfectly fits Adriana Lukas' definition of a barking moonbat: "someone who sacrifices sanity for the sake of consistency". For Rothbard to have argued that the cold war was a delusion and that the Soviet Union was not really a clear and present danger is so preposterous on so many levels that I am not even going to elaborate why. If you can not figure out that one yourself then this article is not addressed to you. In fact, please stop reading and get lost.

Otherwise, read on...

If this was 1980 and I was going to vote in a US election with a choice not between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter (whom I regard as one of the worst Presidents in US history), but rather between Jimmy Carter and anyone with a picture of Murray Rothbard on his wall, then with heavy heart I would have voted for Jimmy Carter. To have allowed someone who was a transposed version of Ron Paul into the White House circa 1980 would probably have resulted in me writing this article in 2007 from some bunker amidst the post-apocalyptic radioactive ruins of our civilisation.

But it is not 1980 and we did indeed win the Cold War without blowing the planet up in the process. Despite the Mussolini-esque antics of Vladimir Putin, Russia is and will remain a busted flush. Its corrupt and self-destructive political culture and the regrettable views of most Russians make that fact as close to historical inevitability as you will ever find in this uncertain world of ours. We won and there is not going to be a re-match.

So what would happen if Ron Paul really did win the White House in 2008? Well in my opinion, domestically speaking the United States would experience the greatest growth of liberty and (consequently) prosperity since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Monstrous tumours on the American body politic like the abuse of eminent domain, the RICO statutes and the absurdly named Patriot Act would go into the garbage heap of history where the corpses of slavery and the Jim Crow laws rot away. Absurdities like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, something that has done more to export US jobs and capital than almost anything else in the last few years, would vanish like the morning mist. That magnificent pinnacle of the European Enlightenment called the US Bill of Rights would once again be worth the paper it is written on. If these things came to pass it would, in my not so humble opinion, be a very very good thing indeed.

But then how would Ron Paul deal with the two and a half major global security threats that face the world? By this I mean China, Islamic Fundamentalism and Russia (the later being the 'half-a-threat').

He has made no bones about the fact he is a non-interventionist overseas as well as at home. Decode the verbiage and the answer to how he would deal with those security issues is "he would pretty much just ignore them" unless they were trying to march down Pennsylvania Avenue. The United States military would be mostly withdrawn to the continental US and reduced in size. The complex tangle of international security relations in which the USA plays such a leading role would be unravelled. Is this what I personally want to see? No, it is not.

But like I said before, this is not 1980.

Russia is a threat. To whom? To all the states that once made up the former Soviet Union and who are now independent. Yet just how much of a long term threat is a nation with catastrophic demographics and the longest indefensible borders in the world to worry about themselves? "Oh but what about their oil revenues?" Yeah, and even with all of that, their GDP is not quite the size of...Italy. Moreover most of the former Warsaw Pact are now batting for the other side so even the cheese-eating surrender monkeys of the EU ($13.1 trillion GDP) can contain Russia ($1.7 trillion GDP) whilst spending chump change on their military. The USA is simply not needed any more.

China is a threat. To whom? To the USA? No. To Japan, India, Taiwan, South Korea (and in the long run, Russia)? Oh yes. But then look at those countries. Japan, Taiwan and South Korea are highly sophisticated and very wealthy technological societies. India, with its huge population, large military and rapidly growing economy is a formidable nation in its own right. Russia? Well in the short run they see China as a military ally, more fool them.

But my point is I think those nations are perfectly capable of containing China militarily without the USA being involved in any way whatsoever. All they need is the political will to do so.

And that leaves us with Islamic Fundamentalism. A threat? Yes. To whom? Damn near everyone on the planet who is not a Muslim. Yet it is a materially different sort of threat than vast China or sclerotic Russia. There are no huge Islamic armies and in the modern era the ones that do exist have generally proven to be embarrassingly inept. They are dependent on technology their own societies are incapable of producing themselves and they are economically unsophisticated. Culturally the Fundamentalists are primitive and unappealing to people from non-Muslim societies.

So the threat does not primarily come from Islamic states, but rather from supra-national groups of Muslims dispersed around the world. However just because no Muslim horde is ever going to roll through the Balkans and arrive at the Gates of Vienna with tanks and artillery, that does not mean there is no threat. 9/11 was just the most spectacular of a long line of attacks on targets in the USA (not to mention others in Europe, Africa and Asia).

But is the global military involvement of the USA an indispensable element in the fight against Islamic fundamentalism? And by 'indispensable' I mean "is the global victory of Islamic Fundamentalism assured if the USA is not heavily engaged in this fight?" Well personally I am very happy (as in delighted) to see the USA involved in the fight but that was not the question I am asking. No I do not think the USA is indispensable. Would the world be a better place if the Taliban were still in control of Kabul and running Afghanistan? No, there is no upside to that but but it would not be the end of the world, either. Would Iraq and the world generally be better off if Saddam Hussain and his psychopathic sons were still running the show in Baghdad as some absurdly misfiled 'libertarians' claim? No, I do not think so, but again, it would not bring the edifice of global security crashing down either.

As Brian Micklethwait once said regarding non-interventionist foreign policies, just as many risks come from doing nothing as doing something, it will just be different set of risks. If the USA does nothing but line up its army along its borders and pulls up the drawbridge, it will not run many of the same risks it does today. It will run a whole series of different risks.

Will that make for a safer world? Probably not. Will it make for a safer USA? Probably not. Am I sure about that? No, but I think I am right which is why I am a hawk. But as I keep saying, it is not 1980. The downside of me being right and Ron Paul being wrong is nowhere near what it was given the same choices during the Cold War. China is a regional threat, Russia is a dead man walking and Islamic Fundamentalism is more akin to a very dangerous disease. The downside of Ron Paul being wrong could be serious but it is not going to result in a global thermonuclear war.

And that, quite simply, is why I hope he wins.

John Louis Swaine wrote in with an interesting piece about his own 'road to Damascus'. "It took approximately 8 years to move from being a Labourite teenager to a Libertarian at the age of 23. I used to blog quite a lot so I felt the urge to write something about it. Since the Samizdata weblog has been one of the most important contributing factors for this change, I thought I would submit it to you."

Most people have a "Summer of '69" they can relate to; a magic period of youthful exuberance, tempered by important life experiences and left to bake softly in the warmth of the July sun. Mine was in 2001, I was 16 and beginning to ask the bigger questions about society and life.

I had opinions, I suddenly cared about issues. Like virtually every young person I came to the conclusion that equality was of paramount importance and that the only means by which to achieve it was through the prescription of schemes and initiatives by Government. After all, is that not what my generation had been taught? The importance of civil duty, of taking part in the organs of governance and through them making life better for your fellow man?

I dutifully signed up to the Observer brigade. Things could change, things could be fixed and crucially, the fix was always within the grasp of Government.

I did have the benefit of a decent grounding in knowledge of markets. I rather suspect you cannot have spent a significant amount of time growing up in Hong Kong without absorbing it - capitalism and free markets are in the air there, mixed in amongst the toxic levels of pollutants and exhaust fumes. Your chances of developing lung cancer or respiratory disorders may be high but you will also assimilate at least some understanding of how a financial system works.

Tony Blair's governing ideology therefore seemed intoxicating - using the state to care for one's fellow man whilst reforming the public sector and embracing free markets. Everything fitted nicely into place.

The first cracks in my political viewpoint began to appear on the 11th of September, 2001...

Following the terrorist attacks in New York and subsequent UNSC Resolutions authorizing the use of force to depose the Taliban in Afghanistan, I read daily in my newspapers of the horrors of warfare in Afghanistan. The US, it seems, were doomed. If the might of the Soviet Empire could not conquer the nation, then surely the US would be bogged down into a quagmire of small arms fire and disappearing assailants.

Within a month of beginning their assault the US had demolished the Taliban's standing army, on November 12th the Taliban fled Kabul and a military victory was imminent. The emperor had no clothes.

I read the Observer and the Guardian less and less and instead migrated to the Times. However I retained my same staunch belief in the struggle for an egalitarian society through Government. I wrote a political blog and had quite a bit of traffic. I moved to London to read Law and joined the Labour party. I was ultimately quite satisfied with the way in which the United Kingdom was being run and governed.

During my study for my degree I took a particular interest in Constitutional Law and received a 1st for the module, my lecturer asked me to perform some extra research for one of his upcoming books on Civil Liberties and I happily accepted. The history of the British 'constitution' was enthralling and I began to get a real sense for what it meant to be British.

We were a people who lived under the Magna Carta, whose parliament established the ground rules for modern day governance, and who time and time again, took up arms in defence of liberty. We had little time for despots, deposing one and then giving up on the other's ridiculous dictatorship the moment he passed on. Through all of this, a current of individual liberty ran strong. The Common Law is a marvellous thing and leafing through its enormity was like gazing up at the shadowed spires of a Cathedral from the inside.

I watched the Labour party's reforms shudder to a halt. Where there were steps taken towards decentralization in Foundation Hospitals, the Government took several back in other areas of public life. Government began to balloon. I grimaced as grown men and women on the Labour back benches complained that businessmen from the private healthcare sector had been given posts within the NHS - heavens forbid those who have proven themselves in competitive healthcare markets should be given the reigns of a Hospital.

I had the good fortune of attending a Grammar school for two years after passing the 11+. As a young adult, the 'debate' surrounding Grammars disgusted me. My school (Colchester Grammar) had certainly not been a haven for rich boys whose family could afford "tutors". Amongst all my classmates I was unquestionably the most affluent, being the son of a successful barrister. My friends were almost universally drawn from the working class, with one or two hailing from the lower middle classes. I do not think I knew of one boy at that school who was 'privileged'.

What people objected to, it seems, was not that this 'free' schooling system existed, but rather that it meant someone, somewhere out there was getting a better education than someone else. This was not a cry for equality of opportunity, this was a demand that no child aspire to or achieve better than anyone else his age. The gifted should remain amongst the rest, to be held back to ensure that they did not get too far ahead or somehow to drag their classmates towards better academic achievement. Anyone who has attended a school in which they have exceeded the academic capability of their classmates knows that this is a patent fallacy. Roald Dahl's "Matilda" has special significance for those of us who have, we know what it feels like to be kept in a system for arbitrary reasons, which limits your liberty and traps you within the confines of what is deemed to be 'average'.

I drifted towards the centre of the political spectrum and no longer called myself "centre-left" or "Blairite". However it was not until about 3 weeks ago that I came to my final realization. The writers with whom I agree most tacitly: Hemlock, Glenn Reynolds, the contributors to Samizdata are libertarian to a man.

They are not simulacra of Ebineezer Scrooge, they all believe that society should be fair, they just disagree vehemently with the notion that such a task should be left to the state, or indeed that the state is in any way capable of achieving this goal. Charities and NGOs perform consistently better than public initiatives designed to carry out analogous tasks.

It was this realization that was the final catalyst: caring about your fellow man and opposing the works of the state in achieving that goal are NOT mutually exclusive political creeds.

I've lived in a society in which there is no capital gains tax, no tax on dividends, an extremely low income rate (16%) and a streamlined civil service under the full protection of British Jurisprudence. Guess what? It was a great society! Crime was low, the streets were well kept and the tasks, which Government is necessary to perform were carried out perfectly adequately. The Government did not need to pick up Inland Revenue like a dust-buster and hoover up half my money each year to achieve it! It had followed a Laissez-Faire industrial policy for generations and had been a free-market economy since its creation.

I speak of Hong Kong pre-1997 and I can not believe it took so long for me to see how competent such a system was.

Sure it had an ID card system, but it was across the border from a billion people doing their damnedest to escape a barbaric communist dictatorship and had an immigration crisis on its hands. The card is now tied into the Drivers License so it's not an arbitrary extra bit of identification you need to carry around and works as a passport for HK immigration. Most importantly since the state is not hell-bent on interfering with every single facet of your life, it generally does not seem so odious.

One of the arguments made for ID cards in the United Kingdom is that the state is not some malign force as in other countries so it can be trusted with an extra means of keeping tabs on its populace but this is akin to saying that the pit bull about to ravage your arm is not in fact a carrier of rabies like the one across the street, so it's all right to put down your handgun. If the state wants an ID card from me, it can bloody well start behaving a lot more like its former colonial charge.

Why, when all the evidence available points to the same facts - Free Markets perform better than regulated ones, US States with more lax gun control laws have lower rates of violent crime that ones which do not, Charities and NGOs are more efficient than public sector bodies etc - do we insist on following the ideas which have proven, in the past 100 years, to be complete and utter hogwash?

Banal though it may be, I remember playing SimCity 2000 as a teenager on my computer. Every time I tried to set up a high-tax, high-service economy within my city, my economy, followed by the city itself, stagnated. The answers have been staring me in the face for years.

Yesterday I cut up my Labour party membership card and cancelled my standing order to the party. When asked about my political affiliation a few days ago, I answered "libertarian" and somehow the world made a great deal more sense.

As I pondered this matter and resolved to write this piece, I concluded that I had taken far too long to realize what was in front of my nose, yet the sobering reality is that this left-to-liberty transition is typically played out over the course of a lifetime. How many 40 year old Labourites are there still in this world? I believe I've been remarkably fortunate, I have the means to concentrate my personal wealth under a low tax regime and now have the intention of doing so. I can still make the world a better place like my 16 year old self wanted and more importantly I can do it without stuffing the paycheck of 40 inefficient public sector bureaucrats. All that at age 23? I have got a bright future to look forward to and perhaps with the growth of libertarianism, my children will too.

Today is 17th November, the day when the Velvet Revolution began 18 years ago. Since then there have been years when I did not 'commemorate' the event and there were years when I did. A couple of weeks ago I was visiting Eastern Europe and despite the trickle of bandwidth available where I was staying, I found myself watching old clips from the communist era on YouTube. The most surreal was not the absurdity of their content, the ridiculous gravitas of the communist propaganda but the memory of this rubbish being taken seriously and accepted as the norm.

I have written about 17th November 1989 already and what it meant to me. This year I prefer to share some images, which as usual, speak a thousand words. To those, let me add music and words of Karel Kryl whose songs used to be a constant companion in the years before the revolution. I was old enough to understand his bitter humour and lyrical cynicism. There is nothing soft or simple about Kryl's songs, they are hard hitting, harsh and without hope.

When armies of Warsaw Pact occupied Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968 to suppress the democratization movement of Prague Spring, Karel Kryl released album Bratříčku zavírej vrátka (Close the Gate, Little Brother), full of songs describing his disgust over the occupation, life under the communist rule, and rude inhumanity and stupidity of the regime. The album was released in early 1969 and was banned and removed from shelves shortly thereafter. This work became an icon of the anti-communist movement for years to come — when he returned from exile in 1989 during the Velvet Revolution, almost every little child in Czechoslovakia knew the lyrics of these songs by heart.

One of his most famous songs has been superimposed on video clips of the two historical events in Czechoslovakia - August 1968 and November 1989.

1968

1989

[Quick and dirty translation]
Little brother, don't sob, it is not a banshee
Don't be frightened, it is only soldiers,
Who arrived in sharp-edged metal caravans

Through tears caught on eyelashes we look at each other
Come with me little brother, I fear for you
On the uneven roads, little brother, in children's shoes

It rains and it is getting dark
This night will not be short
The wolf has a yen for the lamb
Little brother, have you closed the gate?

Little brother, please do not sob
Do not waste your tears
Hold back the curses and save your strength
You mustn't blame me if we do not make it

Learn the song, it is not so hard
Lean on me, little brother, the road is rough
We will stumble forth, we cannot turn back

It rains and it is getting dark
This night will not be short
The wolf has a yen for the lamb
Little brother, do close the gate!
Please close the gate!

Good luck, Mr Dodge. Andrew's recent diagnosis has reminded me - I am 41 - to get a health check done once a year and catch these gremlins early (I have been remarkably lucky with my health, but no point in taking it for granted).

What a way to mark Guy Fawke's night.

A rant warning! Last night Hugh and I were talking, amongst other things, about hierarchies and their impact on individual's autonomy, or sovereignty as he calls it. And, predictably, how the internet has changed what has been long accepted as the balance of power between the individual and institutions. These things never far from my mind, a few thoughts struck me as I watched a couple of episodes of the series Rome.

• Vorenus, the prefect of 13th legion runs into Pompey Magnus who is fleeing with his family to Egypt. He decides to let him go after Pompey begs for mercy for his wife and children. Upon return to the camp, he explains to Caesar that he didn't feel the need to apprehend Pompey as he was abandoned, weak and dirty and bring him to punishment. Caesar gets angry and says "Remember I am the only one who dispenses mercy around here".

• Pompey Magnus is treacherously assassinated by a Roman soldier who serves an Egyptian master as he moors on the Egyptian beach and his head offered to Caesar as a welcoming gift. To the Egyptian's shock, Caesar is appalled and storms out in anger at their barbarism and Pompey undignified death. (Talk about cultural clash.) When they protest: But he was your enemy? He angrily replies: He was a consul of Rome!

• Vorenus is instructed by Caesar to find and free Cleopatra. He takes the opportunity to apologise for his 'lapse of judgement' regarding capturing Pompey. He says, if only I did my duty...

These are examples of how power, rules and resulting hierarchies create environments where individuals have no real autonomy by default. In the first one, Vorenus has his ability to make moral decisions (i.e. based on what he considers right and wrong) denied to him. In the second, Caesar's outrage at the death of his enemy is not about Pompey but about the disrespect to the office that lent this particular wretch significance above other human beings.

The third is about duty. Duty is important, often deeply embedded in people to follow a particular rule that usually makes sense on some level - either evolutionary or social. It is however designed to protect the system, rarely the individual. I am not attacking the sense of duty that comes from individuals themselves but the kind of duty often invoked to subdue them, namely duty to follow orders. Without autonomy, that kind of 'virtue' is just another tool in the tyrant's toolbox. It took a collectivist horror for the European societies to realise that it is morally inadmissible even for the armed forces to follow orders, abrogating humanity.

Hierarchical systems and institutions take over people and hollow out anything that is individual to replace it with their own trinkets - position, status, power, money, influence, resources. People are defined by what position they hold, by the family they are born into, by people with greater power than them and finally, if they are lucky, by their decisions. Such systems with centralised or unchecked power attract people who wield it enthusiastically and ruthlessly. Using that power, in exchange for perpetuating the system, they shape others to its rules. Nasty things become possible in the name of the system… It’s one of the ways power corrupts.

Institutions and systems go through life cycles, often imploding by themselves or getting overthrown by new, more eager ones. If they survive it is by striking a precarious balance, by giving people just enough freedom to prevent rebellion. Judging from history, it doesn't seem that much is needed. Fortunately, there are always individuals who push for more autonomy and so the struggle continues.

Top down hierarchies are mechanisms for implementing centralised power. Their rules are a shorthand for the power structure and a substitute for knowledge of how things work, understanding of consequences of people's actions and impact of their decisions. How many times have you heard - well, if I let you do this, then everyone would want to do that and where would that lead? This is an admission of suppressed individuality. It is disguised as respect for others, when it fact it is merely 'respect' for the ways things are within the system.

When people exercise their autonomy more freely they start seeing consequences of their actions and/or indifference to them. In centralised power systems, you cannot have an action without the system being involved. The action has to be assessed and judged to see if it follows or breaks the existing rules. And an appropriate action as mandated by those rules is then taken.

In a distributed environment that is not possible. Or desirable. A network is such an environment. What is so wonderful about the internet, amongst other things, is that it is demonstrating how a greater autonomy, freedom and fewer restrictions on individuals lead to a more connected and increasingly social place. The old collectivist chestnut that with greater emphasis on the individual comes atomisation of society is just that. It certainly does not stand comparison with the explosion of connectivity, innovation and creativity fuelled by individuals having access to technology and tools that were until recently in the domain of businesses and governments.

And for the likes of me Chris Locke's memorable outburst from 1995 still reverberates:

And I sit here and some of what I’m hearing is how to work in the system. Well I say fuck the system — it’s dead it’s stupid it’s non-responsive it’s counter productive it’s fucking socially evil and if we put any more of our goddamn time into propping up these dead-ass morons we deserve what we fucking get.... We’re not going to work in the system because THE SYSTEM DOES NOT WANT US.

cross-posted from Media Influencer

It looks like those advising and supporting Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, are determined to blackguard his prospective Tory opponent Boris Johnson by any means necessary.

First we had Doreen Lawrence (who has been cultivated by race-activists over the last decade to the point of co-option) wheeled out in The Guardian, to wave her son's shroud and say:

Boris Johnson is not an appropriate person to run a multi-cultural city like London. Think of London, the richness of London, and having someone like him as mayor would destroy the city's unity. He is definitely not the right person to even be thinking to put his name forward.

Those people that think he is a lovable rogue need to take a good look at themselves, and look at him. I just find his remarks very offensive. I think once people read his views, there is no way he is going to get the support of any people in the black community.

A classic piece of noughties argumentation: a champion victim finds him offensive. He should not be considered. But note also the visual metaphor: "look at themselves... look at him".

This morning The Voice carried the news that: "London's mayor Ken Livingstone will next week issue a formal apology for his city's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade".

When devils will the blackest sins put on,
They do suggest at first with heavenly shows,

It may just be coincidence, but I prophesy that Ken will not be shy of inviting other mayoral candidates to do the same, hinting that they if they will not, it is because they are racists who secretly approve of slavery. We know where Boris stands. In the logical, historical, position. Nonetheless, officials from such organisations as Blink (the 1990 trust), and Operation Black Vote (which is supposed to be a non-partisan organisation encouraging electoral participation), have already described him as "a hardcore racist" and "bigoted".

I suppose that we should not expect much better of professional agitators and their stooges. Boris is presented as a cartoon racist - using racial and class stereotypes. "Look! he's blond, blue-eyed, with an Etonian accent" they are saying. "He's cavalier about things right-on people feel strongly about, wickedly western, rational and white."

That is a narrative calculated to appeal to their fellow quangocrats and positive-discriminators, beneficiaries of the Crimson Newt's largesse, and to buttress them in their self-righteousness. But it also projects contemptuously low expectations of London's black people in general, treating them as an ignorant client class who will lap up the most shameless propaganda. It is to be hoped London's general public, black and white, will take the man as they find him, not as he is painted by an overt attempt to organise 'racial loyalty' at the polls worthy of the BNP.

If Londoners are urged vote for Boris or against him on the basis of the colour of their skins rather than their individual consciences, it isn't Boris dividing London on racial grounds, it is those doing the urging. I do not know if they are, but the thought that a significant number Londoners might be sufficiently ghettoised to follow the call is thoroughly depressing.

Fresh from his humbling at the hands of Hillary Clinton and following on from a statement indicating his willingness to invade Pakistan, Barack Obama ladles on credence to the increasingly ubiquitous assertion that he's inexperienced:

I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance...involving civilians. Let me scratch that. There's been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That's not on the table.

Desperately wrong answer to (what should be) a deal-breaking question, Mr Obama. Sure, waving the threat of one's nuclear weapons capacity around like a pair of chopsticks in a cheap Chinese restaurant is not sensible, because it ultimately reduces that capacity's deterrent value - which is the only practical reason why a sane nation would field a nuclear arsenal in this world of other nations who also possess The Bomb. A wise leader does not even refer to his country's nuclear weapons capacity, because the widespread knowledge of that capacity speaks for itself more effectively than any politician could ever hope to.

Conversely, it is sheer lunacy for a US President (or hopeful) to declare that he will never press the button, because such statements completely undermine the deterrent value of these weapons. Mr Obama, if you are not running on a platform of nuclear disarmament, you never take the nuclear option off the table. Ever. You made a most elementary strategic blunder - you are not a suitable candidate for the role of U.S. Commander-in-Chief.

For those here determined to hate the BBC and all its works, here is a reminder that it does do some useful things. That it isn't quite in the mould of the fawning state broadcaster found almost everywhere in the world. Along with a reminder that some would like it to be.

This week File on 4 did the first really serious, probing investigation into HM Government's National Identity Scheme that there has been in any media yet. You can listen to it here, and it is full of fascinating things for the attentive listener.

The most extraordinary is this testimony from IT consultant Peter Tomlinson:

The meetings were called by people in the Cabinet Office. There were topics on the agenda that were set by people in the Cabinet Office and we kept on thinking: why are we not seeing people from the Home Office.

Why are we not seeing technical people from the Home Office, or people involved in technical management? Eventually they began to come along but they never produced anyone who had any technical understanding of large-scale systems. We were just completely puzzled.

This is the first really solid public evidence I have seen that the scheme really is [or was?] intended by strategists at the highest level as a complete population management system and revolution in the nature of government, rather than being one by accident. That it is the emanation of a philosophy of government. It is it is not always good to have one's analysis confirmed. In this case I would prefer not to have been vindicated.

Remember Philip Gould? He's one of those high-level strategists.

This is not some silly idea of the phoney left. It is a mainstream idea of modern times. It is a new kind of identity and a new kind of freedom. I respect the noble Lords' views, but it would help if they respected the fact that the Bill and the identity cards represent the future: a new kind of freedom and a new kind of identity.

The philosophy is probably best summed up by a word from Foucault: governmentalism. Christopher Booker to the contrary, it is not a 'mental' creed of "The Mad Officals" but a pervasive pragmatism - using the natural history of humanity the better to shepherd it. The better shepherd is a member of the new innominate politico-bureaucratic class: maybe a civil 'servant', maybe a politician, maybe officially neither.

And just today a new example of the sage. A strategy memo has leaked to the Daily Mirror's sharp political editor Kevin Maguire. Lord Gould allegedly writes:

No-one in Britain should have any doubt about what you stand for, what you want to achieve. You should position yourself as a powerful, muscular modernisation politician with the power and the determination to change Britain. You should aim to be a great reforming PM.

You have to meet this mood for change. You have to exemplify renewal and a fresh start.

Your Premiership has to have a dynamism and an energy that pulls people along in its slipstream. You must become the change that Britain needs.

There is a name for this, too. It is one of the most widely used populist techniques in world politics: Strong Man government, tribal leadership, caudillismo. A national security state, presided over by a Big Man - has "a nation of freemen, a polite and commercial people" (Blackstone), really come to that? When exactly did liberty become such a minority taste in Britain that it were possible?

[Just a footnote on the BBC below the fold.]

And the BBC? Well. it remains independent, but since 1st January 2007, it too has fundamentally changed, though fundamental changes work slowly through large flabby organisations.

It is now defined by its duties (where have I heard that before? - oh yes...): They are headed by: "sustaining citizenship and civil society," and include, "representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities". Its previous objects were to provide broadcasting as a public service, as it saw fit, subject to certain restrictions, impartiality being the most prominent requirement. "Impartiality" is not to be found in the new charter. It is relegated to the supplementary "Agreement" between the BBC Trust and Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for
Culture, Media and Sport.

I have no doubt the BBC will retain its capacity to irritate me. (Some other recent Files on 4 have been predicated on some classic lefty axioms.) The question is, will "sustaining citizenship and civil society," and "representing the UK," allow it to continue to irritate the Government of the day?

I am currently in Beijing, which is up there amongst the most polluted cities in the world. Beijing's summer days are characterised by heavy cloud cover, which traps the unsightly gaseous consequences of China's lightning-fast growth. The sun usually becomes discernable at around 4pm, when a golden-brown orb peers timidly through the haze. Being more acquainted with the brilliant Australian sun, for a split-second I wasn't exactly sure what I was looking at when I first saw its rather diminished Chinese incarnation.

In such circumstances, I have been thinking a lot about the "carbon footprint" of countries in the economic vanguard of the developing world - countries like China and India. Like most who contribute and comment here, l classify myself as a "global warming skeptic", due to the evangelical, anti-science and frequently absurd rhetoric that typifies global warming activists of all stripes. I am not a complete denialist - I have not written off the theory of anthropogenic global warming entirely. I simply believe there is an awful lot we do not yet know, and it is rash to be making grand predictions about impending weather-related catastrophes, and demanding action based on such flawed predictions. If, however, I was to reconsider my position and embrace the concept of AGW, I would still not champion the Kyoto Protocol or any other effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

The fact is that if AGW is a genuine phenomenon, it is inevitable. There is absolutely no point in the rich world winding back its CO2 output, because China, India and the rest of the developing world will replace any first world CO2 reductions several times over. Despite the occasionally placatory noises about limiting CO2 emissions heard from the likes of the Chinese central government, the fact is that the Chinese, the Indians, the Russians, the Brazilians, nor anyone else from the developing world will ever stymy their nations' opportunity to develop by hobbling their industrial output via significant CO2 emissions controls. Nor are the leaders of these countries likely to do anything to incur the wrath of their citizens by curtailing their perfectly reasonable aspirations to own motorcars, motorcycles, air conditioners and enjoy the convenience of air travel - all enormous direct or indirect sources of CO2 emissions. If significant CO2 reduction could be achieved with minimal economic and social cost, then perhaps the developing world would cooperate. However, large-scale CO2 reduction is an extremely expensive and socially disruptive exercise, and this reality will persist for several decades.

And it is too late to roll back the clock - too many people in the developing world have tasted the fruits of development, and quite legitimately demand more. Those governing the aspirational billions are far more likely to be influenced by them than An Inconvenient Truth. Global CO2 emissions are going to continue to grow for many years, there is no doubt about it. The "global warmenists", as the mighty Tim Blair calls them, need to re-evaluate their positions, because what they propose at present is simply an exercise in developed-world wealth destruction on an epic scale. Those insisting on such a state of affairs appear little short of anti-human luddites, as detractors of the green movement have long asserted. Bjørn Lomborg is spot on - any resources allocated towards the AGW issue should be directed towards researching crisis management and developing an appropriate disaster-relief capacity under the circumstances of rapid climate change, even if only as an insurance policy. And the absolute last thing we in the developed world should be doing is hampering the wealth-creating organs of our societies in a futile effort to cut CO2 emissions. If AGW is truly the looming catastrophe that many predict, we need to be as wealthy as possible to plan and make provisions for its impending consequences, and thus deal with them when they start to unfold.

Two little bits of green craziness from yesterday's Ethical Living section of the Guardian. Interesting that it is no longer Environment Guardian, which I think is a hint that greenery is more a system of morals than a mode of scientific policy formation.

First, can't add. Bibi van der Zee addresses a reader's ethical dilemma:

Well, yes, cotton hankies, obviously. It's not like disposable nappies versus reusables, where the disposable bunch can defend themselves on the grounds of the powere used to launder reusables. Because, really, how much electricity does it take to wash a handkerchief?

If Ms van der Zee could take some time off from expostulation - really - to think, she might spot that if you use a machine rather than bashing it on rocks at the riverside, laundering a piece of cloth takes pretty much the same amount of energy until it is too big to get in the machine, and the likelihood is greater that a handkerchief gets more energy (water, detergent...) used on it than strictly necessary than for any other item you might launder, precisely because it is smaller.

Second, won't add. Caroline Lucas MEP answers the question, "Do you know your carbon footprint?"

Yes. It's about seven tonnes of carbon a year, at least three times the global average but a little below the UK mean. That doesn't include the essential travel in my work as an MEP - or the other carbon costs associated with running busy offices in Brussels and London. Measuring one's carbon footprint is difficult, because differing systems calculate it differently. Mine includes an estimate for the carbon dioxide embedded in the clothes I wear, the food I eat and the goods I buy, for which I am responsible. So policy on reducing emissions can be based on actual or worst case figures, rather than the wishful thinking engendered by those who consider only travel and household fuel.

... but cosily ignoring the wishful thinking involved in excluding from consideration that MEPs spend more time on jets than many people who own one.

Oh Caroline! (She was a friend of mine, though I have not seen her for years.) What was wrong with saying the European government is insanely wasteful and you are trying to reduce that at the same time as contributing? Frightened of losing the moral high ground? Or such a believer in the value of more "essential" government that you exempt it from a calculation that purports to weigh every other human activity?

Those greens who favour carbon allowances tracked and enforced by government - very many of them - usually fall into the won't add category. I have yet to see any of them attempt to quantify, or even acknowledge the existence of, the "carbon footprint" of the fabs and server farms, the bureaucrats and analysts, the data infrastructure and policing, needed to monitor and control everyone else's lifestyle. Your personal carbon is a sooty sin consumed of private desire. That expended by the good state managing you is essential, virtuous, too cheap to meter. The divine Ms Lucas has internalised that distinction, it seems.

I am quite fond of the Scots Nats, but then, I am English. The BBC has/had a headline today (which, because of the unique way the BBC is ... interpreting web conventions... may disappear without warning) that for a moment made me love them:

SNP planning to cut down cabinet

Wouldn't that make politics a bit more exciting? Sad to say, it is an administrative detail in Holyrood, not a plot to draw claymores in Whitehall.

Steven Baker of Blogspotting writes about his experience of casino backstage:

They have banks and banks of TV screens looking at the tables and the traffic of people. They have fixed cameras over every table, and tracking cameras operating within what look like black cantaloupe-sized half domes on the ceilings.

They zoom on one woman's behaviour:

Then he saw it. She had her cards, a black jack, and with one quick movement she upped her bet by adding another $5 chip. We watched again and again in slow motion.

This is still fine by me. The casino is private property, in a business where some people are highly motivated to cheat. It is what happened afterwards that I find interesting.

They decided she was no pro. Still, they sent a security person to talk to her as she was leaving the table. We watched. She was surprised, confused, then grave. Then he said something that put her at ease. She relaxed, smiled, joked, and then went along her tipsy way.

I share Steven's unease and his realisation that these casinos are giving us a preview of life in the coming age of surveillance.

Increasingly our movements and gestures, online and off, will be open to scrutiny by companies and governments alike. It will be up to them to decide what to crack down on, what to let pass. In making these decisions, they'll be weighing not only our innocence or guilt, but also our happiness as customers, our ability to stir up a fuss, the cost of the public perception that they're snoops. The upshot: We won't have much privacy, but crafty governments and companies will give us the illusion we do.

In other words, technology in an environment that has not evolved to match it, i.e. does not have respect for the individual as a fundamental principle, eventually leads to a dystopia. In a society without openness and individual autonomy, technology amplifies and entrenches the power of the centralised system, however benign the original intention. I am reminded of The Difference Engine, a novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. The story is set in Victorian times, in a society with all the pathologies of an authoritarian system, i.e. one lacking proper checks and balances. It is taken to the point of grotesqueness and shown as ultimately fragile - its strength rests on the technology to the exclusion of individual freedom. Innovation is institutionalised, variety killed, leading to vulnerability to outside innovation and to inherent flaws within the system.

The difference between the impact of technology online and offline could not be more stark. Offline we have the modern Panopticon, surveillance cameras of increasing sophistication and intrusiveness. Online we still have the ability to protect ourselves or can find those who can help us do so rather than have our 'protection' imposed by a centralised institution. Yes, the internet is an anarchy and a sewer - as Ben Laurie who ought to know describes it :). But it is also a space where new ways of doing things can emerge and more importantly where individuals can flourish without depending on organisational resources. Offline we are defenceless against somebody building the aforementioned Panopticon, online there are ways to design against it.

So simply put, I would rather have the anarchy and the sewer with individual sovereignty than a Big Brother in whatever disguise.

cross-posted from Media Influencer

I do not have a link, but David Brooks was speaking on Meet the Press this morning about the Don Imus affair in the USA.

He says shock-jock popularity is not about racism. It is about cruelty. Institutionalized culturally based cruelty. Indiscriminate cruelty for its own sake.

On hearing the case (allegedly put forth by Snoop Dog in defense of his own misogynistic lyrics) that these particular women, the basketball players should not have been spoken about that way, Brooks said with sad derision, "We can only step on the down trodden."

Brooks also points out that Imus was very heavily watched and listened to by the power elite. After an appearance on Imus' show he, Brooks, received a remarkable amount of feedback from the power elite that make made up a disproportionate part of Imus' audience. So now I ask, what does this say about the souls of those who demand the power and authority to be our masters? What does it mean that the powerful should be so enamoured of deliberate and systematic cruelty that they listen to it for entertainment? Somehow, I am not as surprised as I would like to be.

I think this path to cruelty is one that has been travelled farther in the UK than here, but we appear to be following closely behind you. My personal opinion is that cruelty is a/the clear marker for both the decadence and impotence of a society. Celebrated cruelty is the symptom of a society that has reoriented from protecting its weakest members to baiting them for entertainment. It is historically clear that cruelty, a cultural coldness in the extremities of society, is one of the final signs of its imminent death.

On a positive note, watching this exposure of the internal tensions in the power cabal has provided some interesting moments. For me, the most interesting of all was hearing the market place being praised from the left for having removed Imus from the air (referring to the actions of sponsors). I will take all such statements/concessions as a sign of our strength.

"Whenever I heard the word culture, I reach for my gun".

That is a phrase that I had always attributed to Nazi grand fromage Hermann Goering. I have no idea when he said it or under what circumstances but, somehow, it seems to suit him. I can just imagine his pudgy hand fumbling around for a Walther while some petrified underling who realises that he has just put his foot in it urgently seeks a window to jump out of. However, according to this wiki, the quote was actually penned by a pro-Nazi playwright in the 1930's.

But whatever the distasteful provenance, it should not blind anyone to value of the quote as an expression of inveterate grouchiness. In fact, as far as I am concerned, it succinctly and perfectly conveys my own sentiments in response to hearing or reading certain words or phrases. Examples are:

• Sustainable development
• Social justice
• Fairtrade
• Ethical anything
• Eco-friendly
• The anything community
• Ken Livingstone

Of course, the above list is nowhere near exhaustive and is subject to constant updating and review.

Now the problem here is that I have to make do with reaching for my metaphorical gun because I live in the UK where having any sort of real, actual gun is pretty much prohibited, thanks largely to the indefatigable efforts of the same people who conjured up the words and phrases that appear in my list. I suppose that they must have known in advance the effect they would have on me and so combined their lexical work with a programme of self-preservation. A pox on them.

I suppose it is not very noble of me to share this wee story with you, but the sun is shining and I am still feeling a warm glow after hearing this from my brother:

Brother: "Hey, you know that guy Mark who used to bully you at school a bit, you know, the one that went off to run a music shop?"

Me: "Er, yes, but it is a long time ago".

Brother: "I bankrupted him this morning."

My brother is a civil litigator.

I suggest that you read this before you sit down to eat breakfast and not afterwards, lest you spend the rest of your morning mopping semi-digested coco-pops off the kitchen floor. Here are a few tasters:

I'm in tune with the 'I can' generation

Wow! Is that anything like the Pepsi Generation? Like, totally kewwwwllll. Not to mention hot, hip, happening, in the groove and sexeeeeeee.

That is why social and economic change today require government leadership and profes sional innovation, as well as mass mobilisation.

Certainly, sir. Corporal Tremayne reporting for duty, sir (salutes).

In public services, an "I can" service will continually ask: how can we devolve power, funding and control to the lowest appropriate level, while maintaining high national minimum standards? Can teachers and children inject more creativity into what is learnt, where and how?

Well, 'I can' tell him what the 'lowest appropriate level' is for funding and power.

This is not a zero-sum game between government power and citizen power; it is a genuine partnership that breaks down the divide between producer and consumer.

Eh?

It doesn't get any better than that. This man has penned a whole mainstream editorial vision every single syllable of which is complete bollocks. I have to ask myself whether he actually believes this horse-manure or is he just saying these things because he thinks that this is what the public wants to hear? What world does he see through his eyes? Does he actually see hordes of shiny, happy, clappy 'I can' people exalting at his feet and begging him to lead them to the Promised Environment? Is he so twisted by lies that he can open wine bottles with his fingers or he is so spaced-out on his own propoganda that he has drifted hopelessly away from anything that could reasonably be described as the real world?

Perhaps one of you 'I can' types out there can tell me.

It will not have escaped the notice of our regular readers that I have shown a somewhat less than charitable attitude towards the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron. I think the time has come to provide some reasons for my hostility.

I realise that some people (maybe Cameron supporters among them) would dismiss my onslaught as the product of a crotchety, pessimistic and intolerant personality. Well, as a matter of fact, I am crotchety, pessimistic and intolerant but I have what I consider to be very good reasons for singling out David Cameron as the particular object of my animosity.

I also want to make it clear that I am not hostile to Cameron because he is not a libertarian. I do not expect Conservatives to be libertarians hence they are called ‘Conservatives’. Nor am I bitter about the fact that he is not a Conservative either. I expect very little from the current crop of moral and intellectual midgets that have aggregated in the Conservative Party and I am seldom disappointed.

Nor am I especially, or even moderately, outraged by his brazen careerism, his opportunism and his readiness not just to be cynical but to openly be seen to be cynical (e.g. peddling his eco-friendly bicycle to work, a few yards in front of the gas-guzzling limo bearing his briefcase). To this extent Mr. Cameron is probably no better or no worse than any of the other political jobbists who have infested our public realm like a colony of plague bacteria in the lymph node of a 14th Century peasant and from where they can, and do, distribute their pathogens around the national bloodstream.

No, my antipathy towards Cameron (which is really an expression of my fear of Cameron) is based entirely around the twin facts of his current status and this particular moment in history which combine to create (for want of a better term) a clear and present danger in two serious respects:

1. The current incumbents are devils all right but they are, at least, the devils we know. Furthermore, they are now tired, shop worn, wounded and semi-clapped out devils whose appetite for human flesh may not now be what it once was. The Cameronites, on the other hand, are a bunch of hungry, zesty, eager young devils who have publicly committed themselves to perpetuating the policies of the current government only they will have a fresh, newly-mandated set of legs with which to run with them. Thus, a Cameron government will inflict all the same predations that we currently endure under Blair, only amplified.
2. The commanding heights of our culture and public life are still controlled by the left. It is a control that, one day, may be wrested from them but not in time I think. It is for this reason that our narrative is shot through with contemptible lies.

For example, Nulabor stormed to power in 1997 largely on the back of public alarm about the fate of the National Health Service. By 1997, the settled opinion was that the poor old health service had been the victim of savage Thatcherite spending cuts which had brought that much-loved institution to its knees.

Well, that’s politics for you but truth is a quite distinct commodity and the truth is that the Tories did not ever cut spending on the NHS. In fact, the last time any government cut public spending on the health service was way back in 1976 (and that was a Labour government to boot). Since then, state spending on the NHS had been increased in real terms every year, including every single year of Thatcher’s premiership.

But, every single year, the BBC and others went to considerable lengths to ensure that everyone blamed the state of the NHS on ‘selfish Tory spending cuts’ (a complaint that was customarily accompanied by a hard case story of some war widow or cancer patient being turfed out of a hospital bed and onto the unforgiving streets to die). It was a lie that went unchallenged (or insufficiently challenged) and by 1997 it was a lie that had solidified into a settled national consensus. Indeed, it still is and it is largely for this reason that the Conservatives are associated in the public mind (quite wrongly) with hostility to the public sector and a preference for the market.

Similarly, it now appears to be the received wisdom that Tony Blair and Nulabour have been ‘seduced’ by ‘neoliberal economics’ and, as a result, they have unleashed the ‘rampant free market’ on us all. Never mind that even the humblest of private enterprises has been crippled by regulatory burdens and bled white with pernicious taxes. No, that’s all quite beside the point. No, everyone who is anyone is united in their opinion that somebody should rein in this irresponsible, unchecked, wild west-style, dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself, atomised, so-called free market culture (I have even seen kind of dog-shit in the Daily Telegraph, for chrissakes!).

So how does all this relate to the Bullingdon boy and his chums? Quite significantly. The Cameronites have made a crystal-clear promise to maintaining the tax-and-spend levels of the current government and have even suggested that they may well decide to crank them up further. Add that abuse to the profusion of ‘green’ restrictions which Cameron has also pledged to inflict and it won’t be too long before a mutilated economy finally collapses in an exhausted, anaemic heap.

And who will get the blame for all resultant chaos and pain? Certainly Cameron and the Tories will and that’s just ticketty-boo with me. But the trouble is that the turmoil will also be blamed on the alleged (and widely believed) Tory fealty to the “so-called free market” and so, as the Tory ship sinks like a scuttled frigate, it sucks our ideas down with it. That is the kind of damage that could set our cause back a generation or more (and we are struggling enough as it is). No, it is not fair or true but what have fairness or truth got to do with anything?

Of course, I would not be bothering to say any of this were it not for the fact that I honestly fear that Cameron is poised to win the next election and win it by a comfortable country mile. All the ducks (which is to say, all the ducks that matter) are lined up behind him and are noisily quacking their approval. Add to this that fact that the public is genuinely sick of the sight of Nulabour and it will not take much prodding, goading, lying, spinning or bamboozling to persuade them to elevate the only other man left standing into the No.1 spot.

In short, I can see the train hurtling towards the buffers and I feel powerless to stop it. Except that I can tell other people what I think is going to happen and why. Besides, if nothing else, it does go some way to explain why I am generally so crotchety, pessimistic and intolerant.

My apologies for writing very little for a while. I have ideas but not much time. And I am a slow writer. By way of explanation if not excuse:

Today I visited the consulate of an Asian nation to apply for a tourist visa. When observing the visa application fee, I noticed that those travelling on a U.S. passport must pay almost three times more for a visa to enter this particular country. I believe many other countries impose an extraordinary surcharge for visa applicants travelling as U.S. citizens, too. Talk about American exceptionalism.

Still, I expect Americans are used to this sort of arrangement. When it comes to a whole suite of multilateral projects, the rest of the world expects the American taxpayer to cough up a hugely disproportionate share. When the American taxpayer wants to travel to the rest of the world, they find themselves paying considerably more for an entry visa to many countries as punishment for their poor choice of nationality.

Being a U.S. citizen must rankle at times.

I just picked up Tuesday's Guardian to do my clippings (everything is behind), and found an article by George Monbiot, an attack on loony-toon 'documentary' Loose Change, almost all of which I agree with. Even when he says:

People believe Loose Change because it proposes a closed world: comprehensible, controllable, small. Despite the great evil that runs it, it is more companionable than the chaos that really governs our lives, a world without destination or purpose. This neat story draws campaigners away from real issues - global warming, the Iraq war, nuclear weapons, privatisation, inequality - while permanently wrecking their credibility. Bush did capitalise on the attacks, and he did follow a pre-existing agenda, spelt out, as Loose Change says, by the Project for the New American Century. But by drowning this truth in an ocean of nonsense, the conspiracists ensure that it can never again be taken seriously.

He is right. Those are the real issues. He is on the wrong side of them mostly, but they are worth arguing about. When he suggests that the delusional state of politics is caused insufficient democracy, he is wrong about that too as there is actually too much, the principal form of governance in the English-speaking world being imbecility howlback. But at least he has identified the problem.

Shock of recognition: Monbiot and I are brothers under the skin. We belong to recognisably the same impersonal, evolving, rationalist civilization in which there are real contentions, even though we have extremely different takes on it. The screw-Loose-Changers, bin-Laden-ists, the creationists, all live in a personified universe where humans are ants: someone is permanently in charge of everything, and anyone who disagrees is not just wrong but marked for destruction.

On occasion over the last 20 years I have met an animal-rights hysteric who sobbingly insisted the ALF "are not terrorists", and that their campaigns of persecution were justified - though never someone who would say scientists should be murdered. Equally I have only rarely come across Irish republican sympathisers who passively supported the IRA in fighting 'British colonialism' - though never anyone who thought bombing civilians was a good idea. But yesterday alone I spoke to three people, respectable middle-class people in politics and business, who volunteered remarks on our latest letter-bombings that very much suggested they were pleased, and they expected me to be too.

That is surprising enough. But the trouble is, dear reader, I was.

I certainly do not want more bombings. I hope it is stopped before anyone is hurt. I would not countenance doing something myself that by deliberate action might injure some unknown other person. But nonetheless there is something in me that exults in this violence in way I - a person revolted by boxing and war-footage - have never felt. Someone, somewhere, is fighting back!

There is no excuse for this. I am fighting back myself in a peaceful liberal way, through the legitimate means of political campaigning within the law. The persistent fantasy about long-handled bolt-cutters that springs out of the back of my mind 100 times a day, every time I see the snakey armoured cables of a CCTV camera, remains a fantasy. No need for violence. Not even against things, let alone people. And the spreading conception, that resort to violence is a right if people do not do what you want is a recipe for bloody anarchy. Violence is counter-productive.

But my emotions, and those of my interlocutors, hint that just beneath the surface parts of Britain are boiling. A lot of people have had enough of the surveillance state, though they are bonded, compliant, cowed by the suggestion that to oppose it makes them "a friend of terrorists," an enemy of Helfansafey, or even of Skoolzanospitalz. The people who spoke to me believed that whoever is doing it is doing it as a protest against the tracking of motorists, and that my public position as an uncowed opponent of the securocrats made me someone it was safe to say such things to.

I hope that this is not as bad as it seems. I am sure that we are not so desperate, yet, in Britain that liberty requires insurrection. But I also hope that the bomber is not an isolated madman. I hope he is an extreme outlier of a general public anger at being constantly watched and continually chivvied by officialdom. If is, then a peaceful counter-revolution does require people to speak out against the inspectorate, not just to those they think might share their views, but publicly.

I am fed up with Western companies collaborating with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, helping them restrict the internet and monitor communications by those who disagree and oppose them. Julien Pain of Reporters without Borders writes in Dictatorships catching up with Web 2.0.

These days, "subversive" or "counter-revolutionary" material goes on the Internet and political dissidents and journalists have become "cyberdissidents" and "online journalists." ... The Web makes networking much easier, for political activists as well as teenagers. Unfortunately, this progress and use of new tools by activists is now being matched by the efforts of dictatorships to fight them. Dictators, too, have entered the world of Web 2.0.

He expands:

The predators of free expression are not all the same. China keeps a tight grip on what is written and downloaded by users, spends an enormous amount on Internet surveillance equipment, and hires armies of informants and cyberpolice. It also has the political weight to force the companies in the sector--such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems--to do what it wants them to; all have agreed to censor their search engines to filter out Web sites overcritical of the authorities.

Long-time readers of Samizdata.net will know that one of the bees in our bonnet is collaboration of Western corporations with totalitarian and authoritarian regimes anywhere, in any way but especially when it comes to limiting the technology that could help dissidents to communicate among themselves and with the outside world - the first step to any meaningful resistance. Both Perry and I and others have blogged about it when Yahoo, Cisco, Microsoft or Google put their foot among the oppressors' jackboots.

I have often said, although have not blogged it anywhere in detail yet, that had the internet existed in the days of the Cold War, its end would have come much sooner and possibly in a different manner. I say this on the basis of my own experience of the power of communication and information dissemination within an oppressed society. Not just the serious political information. I remember the first 15 minutes of any clandestine meeting was spent sharing new jokes. All of them political, of course. And then there were western adverts that caused considerable damage to the communist propaganda. Soft-focus commercials for washing powder, chocolates, electrical appliances that we did not know even existed. The images of a world beyond got through thanks to the clear reception of the few TV channels near the borders with the Western countries. Speed that up, add scale and the rips the internet could have made in the Iron Curtain are beyond measure... imagine all the YouTube videos testifying to the ubiquitous presence of technology (cameras, computers and connectivity, not to mention homes, past-times and the luxury of being able to post inane clips online) for the exploited workers in the corrupt and decaying capitalist countries. Hmmm.

Even without quaint anecdotes from dissident days, most people can appreciate the importance of free flow of information and see what the internet has done for freedom of speech. What I see is a shift in the balance of power between systems (political and corporate) and the individual (citizen or consumer). That is why I do what I do (crusade against advertising and for individual empowerment) and why I am a big fan of technology like blogs, wikis, tagging, VoIP etc, and especially of applications such as Skype that is P2P, encrypted and distributed by individuals. Since its beginnings a few years ago, it has spread like wildfire precisely because it is secure and decentralised and, most importantly, unmonitored.

The Web phone service Skype, for example, has made it much easier for journalists - and Reporters Without Borders - to communicate with their sources. It works especially well because it is encrypted, so conversations are hard to tap.

Apparently, not any longer, which is the source of my anger and disappointment:

But China has already signed an agreement with Skype to block key words, so how can we be sure our conversations are not being listened to? How do we know if Skype will not also allow (or already has allowed) the Chinese police to spy on its customers?

After Googling "Skype" and "Chinese government", I found more about the story which broke some time ago. Shame on me for missing it:

In September 2005 Skype and TOM formed a joint venture company to "develop, customize and distribute a simplified Chinese version of the Skype software and premium services to Internet users and service providers in China." The Chinese client distributed by TOM Online employs a filtering mechanism that prevents users from sending text messages with banned phrases such as "Falungong" and "Dalai Lama."

Human Rights Watch provides a comprehensive summary well worth reading in How Multinational Internet Companies assist Government Censorship in China. (Scroll down to point 4 for Skype.)

The real issue for me here is a moral one, not political or technological, although they define the context within which the moral choice should be exercised. I know and believe that technological innovation will prevail in the end. In fact, I am banking on it. For each repressive use of technology there will be new ways of bypassing it. My problem is that this merely treats the symptoms, not the disease. It leads to a kind of arms race, dictators and geeks locked in a battle to bypass each others' technological resources and cleverness. True, geeks may be winning on that front. But the dictators are still oppressing and the losers (apart from the victims), in more ways than one, are the companies that have made the pact with the devil.

To explain where I am coming from, let me quote the Black Book of Communism, the most erudite and articulate book about the horrors of communism to date (2000 edition p. 11):

In addition to the question of whether the Communists in power were directly responsible for these crimes, there is also the issue of complicity. Incredibly, from the 1920s to the 1950s, when hundreds of thousands of people served in the ranks fo the Communist International and local sections of the "world party of the revolution", Communists and fellow-travellers around the world warmly approved Lenin's and subsequently Stalin's policies. continued...

Undoubtedly, of course, it was not always easy to learn the facts or to discover the truth, for Communist regimes had mastered the art of censorship as their favourite technique for concealing their true activities. But quite often this ignorance was merely the result of ideologically motivated self-deception. Starting in the 1940s and 1950s, many facts about these atrocities had become public knowledge and undeniable. And although many of these apologists have cast aside their gods of yesterday, they have done so quietly and discreetly. What are we to make of a profoundly amoral doctrine that seeks to stamp out every last trace of civic-mindedness in men's souls and damn the consequences?

Today the likes of Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Skype, Yahoo! cannot be excused even on the basis of ignorance...

Robert Conquest wrote: The fact that so many people "swallowed" [the Great Terror] hook, line, and sinker was probably one of the reasons that the Terror succeeded so well. In particular, the trials would not be so significant had they not received the blessing of some 'independent' foreign commentators. These pundits should be held accountable as accomplices in the bloody politics of the purges...

But what self-deception kept Western European Communists, who had not been directly arrested by the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD, the secret police), blindly babbling away about the system and its leader? Why could they not hear the wake-up call at the very start?

The complicity of those who rushed into voluntary servitude has not always been as abstract and theoretical as it may seem. Simple acceptance and/or dissemination of propaganda designed to conceal the truth is invariably a symptom of active complicity. Although it may not always succeed, as it was demonstrated by the tragedy in Rwanda, the glare of the spotlight is the only effective response to mass crimes that are committed in secret and kept hidden from prying eyes.

They say that history repeats itself... a truly depressing and frightening thought.

In Australia, the federal government's propaganda tends to condescendingly heckle citizens about various issues that are pretty much always best left to the individual's discretion - not unlike the output from NuLabour's Ministry of Truth - similar beast, albeit with a more sinister bark. So in Britain you get this (probably one of the more egregious examples), and in Australia, this (ditto).

On balance, the naff Australian stuff is the lesser of two evils, but it is still deeply irritating, patronising bilge. Take the abovementioned 'understanding money really pays off' campaign the government is running via billboards and television commercials. Thanks so much for spending my tax money on delivering that sterling piece of advice - let me just make a note of it on my invisible typewriter. The most wasteful entity in society is wasting more of our money by telling us to mind our pennies! That is rich - even if we are not.

Still, it is exactly the sort of hypocritical, wealth-destroying enterprise one would expect the government to embark upon. However, it is pretty depressing when your (private sector) employer gets in on the act. I arrived home today to find the company I work for have decided to post me a brochure titled 'Safety At Home'. Apparently "every day is Safety Day - think safety 24/7". It is full of handy tips along the lines of "don't hold any part of your body over a boiling kettle - steam can be hotter than water" and "read labels before use...take notice of cautions and warnings" and "try not to stick your head in the oven when the gas is on but not lit - unless you feel suicidal. If you feel only slightly suicidal, keep reading this brochure and you will want to get it over and done with in no time at all." And in the foreword from our CEO:

We have produced this booklet as a reminder of the simple [really, painfully, embarrassingly simple - JW] things that we can all do outside the workplace to make sure we're thinking safety 24/7 (...) stay safe and keep well.

Where does a nice big steaming hot mug of "fuck the hell off!" flung at your nether regions fit into your Safety at Home recommendations, Mr CEO? And get the hell out of my house while you are at it, you finger-wagging ponce. Shareholders bankroll enough useless expenditure via the taxation system as things are; corporate nannies are not welcome. Give us our money back.

Just got an e-mail from someone I met in Beijing in late 2005. I enjoyed his company especially because we shared a similarly self-deprecating, absurdist sense of humour. A good bloke - the sort that makes you understand why Aussies and Brits get along so well in spite of the silly state of sporting rivalry that exists between us. Craig was a thirty-something English teacher who had been on the Asia circuit for some time. Stories of his doomed-in-hindsight relationship forays amused me. When we were hanging out in 2005, his current romantic interest spoke no English and they (barely) communicated via the ridiculously inadequate translator installed on their respective mobile phones - think sub-2000 Alta Vista Babelfish - painfully erroneous. They had been out to dinner a couple of times. Boggles the mind, yes. Anyway, today I received an e-mail from him:

hey james....hows sunny australia these days? i got this email from kanjing, the girl with the very cute smile at the jade youth hostel. haha, this poor guys trying to chat her up and she goes and forwards the reply to every westerner she knows. ahhh, chinese girls.

He is right - she did have an awfully cute smile and was really quite lovely - in an untouchable sort of way. And he is also right about her forwarding said correspondence to a bunch of vague acquaintances - that is exactly the sort of thing a Chinese girl would do! Gotta love 'em. It is all one big English lesson.

What our amorous charge wrote to his fair damsel - and her response - is somewhat beside the point, but I could not help but note that the English proficiency he demonstrated was not enormously superior to that of our (slightly coherent) Chinese heroine. If I was feeling sympathetic, I would mark it down to the less rigorous standards demanded of e-mail communication. But still... awww... I had such a great time in China! I want to be there now. I laughed a lot. The glorious clash of customs taking place can be quite hilarious.

I would like to draw your attention to what's happened to The Times's Law section in the noughties. Once upon a time this was a lively mini-newspaper on a Tuesday, aimed at lawyers, with two or three substantial comment pieces, news, Law Reports and lots of job ads. Now it is a single sheet of newsprint, and found buried inside a growing section entitled Public Agenda.

From an advertisement in last week's Economist:

Devolution Trust for Community Empowerment (DTCE), a Pakistan based non-governmental organisation funded by a consortium of donors through UNDP, is plannning to undertake a social audit in 110 districts across the country compatible with baseline social audit established in 2001/02 and first annual follow-up application undertaken in 2004/05. The objective of the exercise is to obtain policy feedback on citizens' views and experience in relation to key public services sectors like health, education, water and sanitation, police, access to justice and engagement in local governance arrangements. The study design should consider the comparison overtime [sic] with the baseline and follow-up applicaions in citizens' views, use and experience of public services under the devolved local government system in Pakistan with a strong element of institutionalization of the social audit process.

Meanwhile, working the other way round, a flyer reaches me from De Havilland information services [no relation] for a conference on "Embedding the Third Sector in Public Services":

Third Sector public service delivery is a new, effective and exciting avenue to further revolutionise and modernise service provision as we know it. However, this is no longer an innovation, it is a reality and public money already funds multiple public services through third sector organisations. It is acknowledged that the opportunities, expertise and fresh, grass-roots approach the third sector brings will bring improvement and better value to public services.

Major efforts to reinforce this through building an infrastructure and action planning to rationalize and embed this are underway in te Third Sector Review, recently conducted by the Office of the Third Sector. The final report is due in March [and?] will culminate in summarising the sector's contribution and propose how this will work in a better, stronger, more resilient infrastructure.

[all sic]

The Office of the Third Sector is very pleased with what has happened to the role of charities, and will be colonising more of British civil society presently..

"Metaphors furnish clues to transformation, but they are not the powers that resist or engender such new realities," a literary theorist once wrote.

I know a lot of Samizdata contributors and readers are cricket buffs. So, what do you all think about the Twenty20 limited overs format now that it has had some more exposure since last being discussed here?

Why am I so uninspired when it comes to blogging these days? Is it the alcohol? I could cut down - come the new year, I have cut down. Weekends only (except when I am drinking during the week). Or the caffeine? I only drink coffee when I am asked out 'for coffee' or if I have had a particularly satisfying meal that cannot be denied a ristretto chaser - I do not drink coffee as a coping mechanism for human interaction in the 'am' hours any more. Perhaps these recent lifestyle adjustments will cause the shingles to fall from my mind and thus bloggable considerations will gush forth as readily as, well, the clichés did when I was constructing this sentence. That would be nice.

As an entirely unrelated aside, I recently had a sort-of bigwig in the large organisation I work for sit me down and tell me what a credit I could be to said organisation if I got into its graduate programme. His schtick was familiar 21st Centurese motivationary-speak - casually, genially, avuncularly domineering - "Here's what I want you to do by the end of next week..." Despite an arguably unhealthy self-belief in my critical faculties, I found myself drawn to this man (who barely knows me) and his vision for my future; a spell that only lapsed after he had breezed out the door to no doubt galvanise some other vessel with the company mettle. Not a bad trick - identify the promising juniors and intimidate/flatter them into the arms of the company via the personal attention and counsel of vastly senior colleagues. I must remember that one when I have my own business. I did not sign anything.

The point is that up until the early months of 2006 I have always written, argued and thought voraciously. Inspiration was never a problem, an elegant turn-of-phrase never hard to deploy. It is now - I feel barren. And it is not the booze or caffeine or any other drug; I need to leave Perth. Perth is too easy. Having left Perth for more exotic destinations in the past, I now realise that not being in Perth piques my intellectual curiosity like no other. Okay, not being on Easy Street piques my intellectual curiosity like no other, but that is practically the same thing. Perth is a marvellous city to live in, especially if you want an uncomplicated life, but I need to struggle. I need to challenge myself beyond the stultifying rigours of a weekend team-building exercise conducted at some five star hobby farm resort. Yes, I trust you will catch me if I fall back ramrod-straight into your arms, but how will I fare on the Ropes Course with only my team members to spot me? What a load of wank! I've been offered a promising career path in one of Australia's biggest and most successful companies. But to be honest, the very thought bores the absolute tits off of me. I am going to leave Australia and try to make my own way in the New World - Asia.

Ta-ra.

(TBC)

Given that the papers are full of the most appalling socialist commentators sharpening their knives to butcher Britain's remaining economic freedoms, when 'right-wing' (in their terms, God help us) Tony Blair leaves office, it is nice to be able to point out a ray of sunshine.

I like Nick Cohen. He is often wrong, but he does have the sense to follow his own mind rather than retailing the received wisdom . And he is intellectually honest and self-aware, which is more than can be said for most commentators on the left. This is an impressive example:

Too many on the liberal-left, including me, don't feel in our bones that it is as wrong for the state to take billions of pounds from taxpayers and waste them on, say, the fatally overambitious National Health Service IT project as it is for the owners of Farepak to take the Christmas savings of thousands of poor families and throw them away.

Leave aside for the moment that no one was compelled to take the appalling bargain offered by Farepak in the first place, and that no one, including the same poor families, has an option about the taxes going to the mad NPfIT or the destruction of their privacy that it entails. Leave aside that, even if one counts as robbery in the same way as the other, the NPfIT is more than 120 times as bad. (Though one couldn't pass that topic without noting Gordon Brown took out of the nation's pension funds in one early budget, what it would have taken 300 Robert Maxwells to steal.)

Cohen has recognised (1) that there is something not quite right about the disproportionate outrage lavished by the left on the Farepak disaster, when government spending takes money from people who need it and gives them nothing; and (2) that some other people do not share the reflex. He offers the insight as a matter of electoral strategy for Labour, so insight (1) may be a bit weak. But it looks to me like progress. Cohen can not quite see what is wrong with his viewpoint clearly enough to shift his ingrained value-judgements, but he can see that it might be wrong.

To my complete lack of surprise, the latest inquest into Princess Diana's death in 1997 is expected to state that she died because her chauffeur was drunk and lost control of the car whilst evading paparazzi. Sad but it happens all the time.

Why is it that people have such need to concoct weird conspiracy theories to explain so many events when recourse to good ol' William of Ockham usually provides a far simpler explanation for why things happen? In particular, government conspiracies are either obvious (revealed by ineptitude or crassness) or non-existent due to the extraordinary difficulty of any group of more than three people have in keeping anything secret for more than a short period of time. It is not that conspiracies do not happen, it is just that they cannot stay secret for very long.

Other people will debate whether Augusto Pinochet, who died yesterday, was a wicked man who led a regime that killed three thousand people, or whether he should have killed rather more than three thousand as his communists foes have never had much of a moral problem with killing their enemies. My own opinion is that one should never kill an unarmed enemy - no matter what he or she might have been planning to do.

In the interests of honesty I should note that was not my opinion at the time. Many other communists regarded the independent Marxist President Allende as too rash and it is worth noting he was never a member of the official Communist party of Chile. Indeed when I heard the story about a group of communists mostly from outside Chile had been building forces from all over Latin America and beyond, had been told that President was about to deliver a speech and that they should come (leaving their firearms behind) and, when they got to the place the speech was supposed to take place, they were greeted with 50 calibre machine guns - well I laughed. But I was a child when I heard that story and children tend to be cruel.

Everyone has different levels of being shocked. For example, Pinochet either did not care (or did not want to know) about torture and summary execution. But when he got to hear of a rape of a prisoner he went through the roof (I heard this story from the prisoner via a BBC radio interview years ago) - the 'holy army' of Chile, based on the army of pre World War I Prussia - with joining up to the officer corps at the age of 15 and a monk like existence to one's early 20's, must not behave like 'Argentines', the prisoner must be released - and whoever was responsible must be...

On the democracy issue: It is true that Allende got more votes than any other candidate for President in the 1970 election (he got about a third of the vote), but he had violated the Constitution so much since then that the Congress had voted to outlaw him. Of course Pinochet did not turn over power to the Congress - he dissolved it (whatever it thought of Allende, the Congress with its majority of socialists and Christian Democrats would not have favoured someone who had just killed a lot of people - that it a problem with picking up a gun and doing some killing, how do you put it down again and not get punished?). By the way it was not, as is often claimed, the "first military coup in the history of Chile" as there was the coup of 1924 (but perhaps that does not count, as it was a leftist coup).

But then what do you do? I suppose one could rule as a military dictator for life - without any constitutional settlement, but (for better or worse) that is not what Pinochet wanted to do. Yes there was repression and yes there was terrorism (not all the violence was one way - even though Pinochet had used the element of surprise to kill or arrest a lot of the communists before they had a chance to organize their war effort).

After the economy recovered from the mass takeover of private property, both the official nationalizations, and the unofficial takeovers by armed mobs that Allende had organized, and from the hyper inflation, which was neither 'caused by the CIA' nor caused by 'Marxism' - Allende and his people just liked printing money like crazy, there is not a word anywhere in the writings of Karl Marx that urges such a policy,. Pinochet got a Constitution passed by the voters in (if my memory serves) 1981 so that he could point to popular support, but then the economy fell off a cliff again.

The reason for this is interesting. For a man who is supposed to have been close to Milton Friedman (in fact they only met once, and Friedman often openly said that he opposed military government) Pinochet ignored a central teaching of his - one must not rig exchange rates.

The truth is that Pinochet did not know much about economics. And the advisers that he had ('Chicago boys' or not) did not agree with Milton Friedman on this - they thought 'rigging' the exchange rate to the Dollar was a good way of getting rid of high inflation.

Actually the supply of fiat (government command) money is the only thing they should have been looking at. But they wanted to be clever and run an exchange rate scam.

I do not know why people do this. Nigel Lawson (to give one example) actually wrote against this practice when he was editor of the Spectator, but as Chancellor he himself rigged the exchange rate of the Pound (with the D-Mark) which led to the expansion of the money supply and a classic boom-bust cycle (which the economically illiterate blamed on tax cuts).

True the Chilean economy recovered (when the rigging was stopped), but Pinochet never really had majority support again. As he found out in the 1989 vote. The economy had recovered, he thought he was going win - but he lost.

Various Christian Democrats (really social democrat) have held office since 1990, these days an official social democrat holds office which (no doubt) means there will be an ever bigger rise in government health, education and welfare spending. No conservative has won a contested election for President of Chile in my life time - although they might have won in 1964 (if the Americans had not backed the Christian Democrats so much).

So was it all for nothing?

No, the compulsory pension system still has some real investments (rather than being entirely a government Ponzi scheme like the British and American systems). And the government does not have a monopoly of health or education (although there is pressure for more statism in both).

Most importantly there is still private property in the means of production in Chile. True, the copper industry in mostly state owned. The American backed Christian Democrat government of 1964-1970 started the nationalization of that - and the military got too much money out of the copper mines to really want to turn most of them over to private enterprise - actually they may happen under the civilians as selling the mines is a good way of getting money to spend on their welfare schemes, but most other things are private.

Chile still has some of the highest living standards in Latin America (and it would not have without Pinochet's time in power). And as for killings - those people opposed to Marxism who did not leave Chile would have been killed if the Marxists had remained in power, and that would have been a few million dead rather than a few thousand. Although, as I said at the start, that does not make killing a few thousand people right.

Steve Edwards has administered a particularly welcome hatchet job on critical aspects of the ostensibly benevolent, world government-loving Bahá'í religion. Check the comments - the Bahá'í faithful have piled in.

A while back I had not read my email for a day or so and found several waiting in my 'IN' box. Two were from Perry. Oh no. What have I done now? In the halls of debate, I am not very house broken. Fearing a 'please cease and desist' is in store, I open one. To my startled surprise, Perry is offering me a byline and contributing privileges! Startled is an understatement. Apparently I am doing something that Perry actually wants to continue. But what?

I have one all encompassing principle. 'Reality.' This is a more complicated choice than it may first seem, but still an easy one..

There are very few guidelines for contributors to Samizdata. Basically, the content guidelines are simple. The key position statement is "liberty - good, big government - bad". Surprisingly, this is the one I will need to be careful with. For it is possible within my principles, to hold a collectivist position that is both philosophically consistent and morally sound. But while I am acknowledging that a collectivist can be morally sound and philosophically consistent, I am also mustering my defences and preparing for a 'debate' that can only be resolved by physical contest. I have made my choice and there is no middle ground.

Unlike many here, I do not believe morality is a continuum from collectivist - bad, to individualist - good. In my philosophy of morality, the middle ground is immoral. Relativism, subjectivism and pragmatism are my immoralities. Unprincipled decision making. Good morals are at my end of the spectrum. Evil morals are at the other end of the spectrum. But immorality is to be found in the middle. And to those on the other end of collectivist - individualist spectrum, I am the evil and they are the good. That is as it should be. Like matter and anti-matter, the legitimacy of each is not in question. But sustained contact is impossible.

I am not sure if this understanding of my outlook has been obvious. I have never explained it here to any extent, but this position has been the foundation of every stance I take. Though incomplete and sometimes misinformed, there is a coherent and consistent framework available for all of my rational decisions. With Perry's generosity, I will lay it out for those of you who are doubtful or curious. Digging into the essence of many years spent winnowing philosophies and developing my own moral base, I will try to clean some of it up enough to present a little at a time.

Two absolute moralities exist, and they carry contrary and absolute moral imperatives.

I am and will continue to be amazed that I am being offered this forum. I would like to say that I will behave and conduct myself with restraint and deference, but I think if Perry had wanted me to change, he would have said so. Or more likely, not have made the offer. Feel free to offer advice. In addition to the two bases for morality, I will occasionally post conversation starters that tickle my interest. Sometimes truisms of the 'why didn't I think of that?' sort. Certain topics, particularly actions that have irreparable consequences, will cause me to blow a gasket from time to time. And suggestions for any topics and themes you want me to pursue are much welcomed.

After many months of work, travel and no play, I went to a cinema to see Pan's Labyrinth. A friend of mine thought it was my kind of film and he was right - it is dark, surreal and based on a fairy tale. It is set against the backdrop of the aftermath of the Spanish civil war. The story blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality but only to those who are not familiar with the stark realism of fairy tales. I know on which side of reality I stand.

Visually, the film is reminiscent of Mirrormask, which by comparison is light-hearted and flippant. Almost everything about Pan's Labyrinth is dreamlike - imagery, acting, music. Except the violence and pain. This is no Disney movie.

It is a stark reminder of brutality of situations in which the warped and the sadistic have the upper hand. There are no heroes or winners. Just those who manage to preserve a shred of humanity by escaping to an alternative reality and by finding courage to act against the overwhelming evil.

It is also a reminder of the deep-seated morality of fairy tales. Tasks, rules, forbidden 'fruit' with dire consequences that follow any mis-behaviour. Monsters can be released by seemingly trivial acts of misdemeanour and can only be bound again at enormous cost. So just like the real life.

cross-posted from Media Influencer

On Saturday I went to the annual conference of the Bruges Group - an organization that has moved from a critical attitude to the European Union to an understanding that the United Kingdom should get out of the of the E.U.

One of the speakers was Mr Booker of the Sunday Telegraph a man who has specialized in detailing the exact harm done to business after business (normally small business enterprises) by EU inspired regulations after the Single European Act of 1986 allowed E.U. directives to be applied to most areas of British life. Small damage at first (just a few people's lives destroyed) but over the last two decades more and more enterprises (and the people who go with them) destroyed. Although, of course, much of the damage of the EU (such as the CAP and the CFP) go back to when we joined back in 1973.

I will not go into the mistakes of some British politicians (such as Mrs Thatcher) who were tricked by the EU people and their British supporters, or the actions of other British politicians (such as Sir Edward Heath or Lord Howe) who deliberately acted for this hostile power against their own country. Other than to say that I do not accept the Benedict Arnold defence - i.e. that brave service in war means that a man should still be considered a patriot if he later changes his coat.

I am more concerned with a minor matter here. As I heard Mr Booker's speech I thought "it is a long time since I bought the Sunday Telegraph - I will buy it tomorrow".

And so I did buy it - and was reminded why I do not buy it any more.

Sure enough there was Mr Booker - a half page of his writing. And Niall Ferguson had written a good article on Milton Friedman and the threat of inflation in the West (when I had last read the Sunday Telegraph Niall Ferguson's writings had not been very good). But there was so much useless stuff.

An 'Alan B'Stard' piece of 'humour' claiming that the philosophy of "free market capitalism" was the basis of 'New Labour', And that this free market capitalism meant "every man for himself" and that no problems could be ameliorated (if I wanted stuff like this I would turn on the BBC).

There was also a article by Matthew d'Ancona about Mr Blair in which Mr d'Ancona wrote about "the Cameron phenomenon" and how the Labour party might "lose votes on the left to Mr Cameron". I can not trust myself to type anything polite about this sort of stuff from Mr d'Ancona so I will leave it there.

There was also an article by Albert Gore, former Vice President of the United States (yes you guessed it, C02 emissions are leading to terrible things but not a word about atomic power - well at least he did not say he was against it).

There was also a lot of stuff that was not so much bad as just ordinary - stuff that could be got from any news service, with no particular "conservative" style to it (and a conservative style is what people who might buy the Sunday Telegraph are going to be looking for).

Then of course there are the supplements. Supplements can be justified in a Sunday newspaper (they can not be in a daily newspaper which is one of the reasons I do not buy the Daily Telegraph - I can not mess about with a newspaper that is too big to comfortably hold and has bits in that fall out when one unfolds the paper). Indeed at least one of the supplements was of use to me - the magazine which contained some information on television and radio for the week and some decent film reviews (the lady who does some of the Sunday Telegraph film reviews must be one of the few film reviewers who does not have a political axe to grind).

But then it fell out on the floor in front of me - a supplement entirely made up of articles from the New York Times. It was like suddenly coming upon a big turd.

True there were no articles supporting Stalin (as there were in the 1930's), but there was the stuff one might accept. The tiny tax rate reductions of President Bush (which have brought in extra revenue and thus helped finance "no child left behind" and his other absurd ideas) denounced as "reckless" stuff that were undermining the economy. And lots of other stuff that I could not stand reading - so, in the end, I gave up and got rid of most of the supplement unread.

I fully understand that one is not supposed to read every supplement, but the knowledge that my money had subsidized the New York Times (a newspaper that stands for so many things that I hate) helped me make up my mind.

I will not buy the Sunday Telegraph again.

Tim Blair links to a critique of the ubiquitous Stern Report, written by Bjørn Lomborg. Perhaps his most damning (and least surprising) criticism of the Report is that it is "unrealistically pessimistic", and considering its wholesale adoption by the Green lobby, I have no doubt that this is true. The article is well worth a read as an antidote to all the hand-wringing the Stern Report's tabling has inspired. However, Lomborg's rejoinder only receives two cheers from me.

Whilst Lomborg's most famous publication - The Skeptical Environmentalist - was enormously refreshing, I found many of his remedies to the world's problems uncomfortable. He really seems to believe that solving these crises is as simple as throwing a pre-determined mega-amount of cash at them - x billion dollars here will provide clean drinking water for those who currently have no access to it, x billion dollars there will defeat malaria. In this latest article of Lomborg's, he ambitiously declares that all of the major problems of the poverty-stricken world can be solved by spending x billion dollars per year, claiming:

Spending just a fraction of this figure [$450 billion p.a. to cut carbon emissions, as recommended by Stern - JW] - $75 billion - the U.N. estimates that we could solve all the world's major basic problems. We could give everyone clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care and education right now.

Really? Who is going to disperse this cash, and how? Lomborg does not say, but such a project has the State's fingerprints all over it. Where else could Lomborg expect to get this sort of sustained funding from? Only an entity with the coercive power to extract resources from countless others would be able to volunteer a sum like 75 billion dollars year in, year out. Are we talking about government - or a coalition of governments? Of course we are! Surely only governments (or an intergovernmental body like the U.N.) are trustworthy enough to distribute such a volume of resources fairly and efficiently. Only governments would utilise these resources in the single-minded purpose of lightening the burden of the world's poor, unadulterated by the agenda of other forces. An organic, non-governmental response is simply not organised; not holistic enough. Consider how well large-scale state planning has served us this past century or so.

Not buying it?

Well, I think we can all agree that the record of government and the U.N. in the field of aid distribution and poverty alleviation is really quite something. So whilst Lomborg is a useful resource if one is hosing down the wilder claims of the Global Climate Change mullahs, his obvious faith in government action should remind all liberals that he is not one of us. His solutions to the world's problems are ultimately as futile as those proposed by the environmental industry, although Mr Lomborg's are admittedly rather less demanding on the wallets of long-suffering taxpayers.

Yesterday I went down to the library in my hometown of Kettering, Northamptonshire.

There was a big display with a lot of 'politically correct' language - all about 'sustainable development' and other such. But when I worked out what it was all about it turned out to be the council's plan for the Kettering area.

Exactly how many new houses, business enterprises and jobs there were to be was laid out (a bit like Gosplan from the old Soviet Union). The fact that it is impossible for some 'plan' to calculate the 'correct' level of all these things (something that Ludwig Von Mises pointed out in 1920) was ignored.

Nor was the possibility that government (in this case local government) should not provide all the roads, drainage, and other such that such developments demand. Of course the only way to judge if someone really thinks that a development is viable is to see whether they are willing to pay for everything (roads, drainage... and the maintenance of such things) themselves - if they are not it is a con.

In short the old unholy alliance between private developers and government (i.e. taxpayer) subsidies...even the Soviets did not have that. All in contradiction to the promises that the town and county councillors got elected on (i.e. that they would oppose such 'development'.

The level of 'research' and 'knowledge' that the council has is shown by the picture of the building they choose to illustrate their plans for the centre of Kettering (presently, years after the present administration came to power, the 'one way' and road blockage system is still driving customers to other towns and divides the town into two parts, north and south, that are virtually cut off from each other) - the picture was of a building, and not even a very good building, that is miles outside of the centre of Kettering in south Kettering (a few hundred yards from my home).

Almost needless to say the whole display included a lot of words about the 'environment' (the environment that the developments would be built on I suppose).

It is a rerun of the trash collection scam. Lots of different coloured waste bins and a collection (of one or more of the coloured bins) only once every two weeks, rather than every week for one bin - all in the name of the "environment" (although all the carefully separated, on the pain of punishment, trash is then mixed together again because the council has no way of disposing of it separately). The whole scam costs a fortune and is a health hazard due to trash rotting for two weeks in bins - or being spread about when they get knocked over.

If attacked on any of the above local councillors will just blame national or European Union regulations and they may well be right, but I suspect that it is not a matter of where the government plan comes from, it is a matter of it being a government plan that is the problem.

Meanwhile the councilors concern themselves with another project. After wasting large amounts of taxpayer's money on (daft) changes to the Town Hall, they now plan to waste millions on building a new Town Hall, or whatever politically correct name they come up with for it, someone miles out of town...I suppose they want to hide somewhere isolated so that angry people can not find them or the local government officers.

I have not mentioned what political party controls Kettering town council and Northamptonshire county council - but it does not really matter. The 'Chief Executive' (what we used to call the Town Clerk) and his deputy chief executives and other senior local government officers control everything - and they do so on the basis of various local and national regulations and policies.

Local councilors cannot even oppose these people as any written or verbal counter attack could be seen as 'bringing the council into disrepute' by the Local Government Standards Board - this body has hit councilors in other places for daring to speak against the administrators.

This is what it is like living in a 'planned society' like Britain, people who have something to lose do not tend to speak out.

Overconfident?

Governments are happily increasing their power everywhere by stoking fear of terrorists. Why risk undermining that by spilling over into loony implausibility?

Terrorism is the "biggest threat to all European nations," Home Secretary John Reid has said as he discusses ways to boost security with five EU ministers.
- BBC

Utter tripe. Terrorism does kill, indubitably. That embarrasses governments that pretend to be perfect protectors.

Ignoring government self-image, it might be a serious enough threat to some people in some European states, to be worth some European governments spending a lot of treasure tackling it; and it might even be serious enough to merit changing the law to cope with it. I doubt both those prescriptions, and the latter more than the former, as regular readers will know. But they could conceivably be true.

However, let us review the facts against Mr Reid's stronger assertion:

1. Terrorism is NOT a threat to any European nation. No European nation state, and no identifiable national group in Europe is in danger of loss to terrorism endangering its identity or existence.
2. Terrorism is NOT a threat to any Europen state. There are a handful of states in the world whose existence is from time to time endangered by terrorism. None of them is currently in Europe. The only very obvious example is Iraq. Colombia, Nepal, and others have come close recently, but no EU country has been in that position since the Greek civil war.
3. To individual people and certain groups more than others, terrorism may present a threat, it is true. But that is not true of all European nations. The majority of EU countries have had no terrorist incidents whatsoever in at least a decade.
4. Even in the few countries with significant terrorism in recent years (which really means France, Italy, Spain, Germany and the UK, if you extend 'recent years' to cover the last 20 or 30, which is a pretty generous estimate of the contemporary for a political phenomenon), actual casualties have been small. Hospital infection, food poisoning, non-political crime, bad driving... each presents a bigger risk to any of us. Terrorism is plainly not the biggest threat faced by people anywhere in Europe.

Witless hyperbole is the stock-in-trade of dictatorships propagandising their presumed-credulous servitors, in order to buff up their self-image. (Read any government-endorsed press story from an African or Mddle Eastern bullydom.) Dictatorships cannot bear to be embarrassed, and are embarrassed by terrorists, because they can never concede anything is outside their control. But in liberal states that sort of pretension to deity is supposed to be mocked from office. Which is Britain? Or is the question, which is Europe?

I wrote two posts for Biased BBC about the BBC's reporting of President Bush's "admission" that there were parallels between the present situation and Iraq and the Tet Offensive. The BBC, of course, is neither the only nor by any means the worst offender among the media organisations that have seized on this.

Those who think that a clueless idiot can get and keep the office of President of the United States may well be good children or pleasant neighbours but there is no need to take anything they say about politics seriously. Whatever criticisms one might justly make of Bush, one thing he cannot be is a simpleton. For all that there is a kind of truth behind it: Bush is a simple man. As I wrote here, precisely because he is a child of privilege "in important respects his values are more normal than is normal in his milieu." Poor guy. Of course he had thought about the similarities to the Tet Offensive. Like some prince letting slip that there might be something to this Copernican system in front of his less enlightened bishops, he just forgot for a moment to keep one of the taboos that it is safer to observe when so many of the intermediaries between him and the populace are either ignoramuses or hostile.

He forgot that so many of them rejoice that the American media managed to turn that offensive, which General Giap viewed as a failure, into "proof" that the war could not be won. He forgot that so many of them view the conquest of Vietnam by a regime so detested by its own people that thousands of Boat People preferred the mercies of the open sea to enduring it any longer, and the deliverance of Cambodia into the hands of the democidal Khmer Rouge, to be their finest hour.

You know, thinking about it, his moment of forgetfulness might make a few people remember these things. It may not do him such harm after all.

Having given up trying to stay PM and handed over the kulturcampf to Mr Brown, St Anthony now wishes to save the world:

In his strongest warning yet on the environment, the prime minister will tell fellow EU leaders that the world faces "conflict and insecurity" unless it acts now. "We have a window of only 10-15 years to take the steps we need to avoid crossing catastrophic tipping points," Mr Blair says, in a joint letter with his Dutch counterpart, Jan Peter Balkenende.

I am not interested for this purpose in whether he is right about 'catastrophic tipping points'. It is entirely possible he is. It is interesting that this is certainly not from his own knowledge. And since actually no one knows enough about climate to say under what conditions, never mind when, a catastrophe, bifurcation, flip, transition... whatever you would like to call it... might occur, then the fact the firm limit of years is reported as as little as 7 in some places, and up to 25 elsewhere, should not worry us.

What should, is the contradiction between the millenarian rhetoric and the irrelevance in its own terms of the hair-shirt policy that we are being exhorted to adopt. If the quantity of CO₂ in the atmosphere will cause catastrophe at some threshold level, then capping emissions from human activity merely postpones reaching the threshold. By not very much.

If things are that bad either: (1) We should find ways yet unknown to make global human greenhouse-gas emissions close to zero or net negative. (Sorry, no cooked food - except sun-baked and geyser-boiled - until we do.) Or (2) we should enjoy the party at the end of the world. But it seems those in charge do not know the difference between quantity and rate.

Now that is really scary. Reality I can cope with. I am aware I'm going to die, and probably suffer disease and loss first. That the course of my life will be determined not by biology, physics and economics, but by messianic imbeciles with no grasp of any of them, is harder to bear.

For me; the non-exclusive or: technofix plus fun.

For the Head Boy; "Repent, o ye sinners or burn in hell on earth! Go, and sin no more. (Than you did in 1990)."

I came out of hospital yesterday. La Belle Dame is in America making money (one of us has to) so Dave picked me up and steered me home. I live quite close to the Chelsea & Westminster and needed some air to clear my head so we walked back. I felt surprisingly well considering I have been under a general anaesthetic and had quite a few squishy bits from inside lopped off me. In fact I felt amazingly well.

The journey back home was interesting. The colours were so very bright and someone seems to have turned up the contrast. Sometimes when I looked closely as the things written on the back of people's tee-shirts whilst walking down King's Road, the words seemed to suddenly zoom away from me towards some vanishing point.

Getting home and having a nice shower was a transcendent experience but the thing that really kept me captivated was the way the water fell down, coming from hundreds of feet above my head and travelling downwards towards the gleaming ceramic floor perhaps three yards below. I could feel the vibration of the water spiralling down the plughole and the strange flute-like sound it made.

I looked forward to getting some good food as being chopped up had not dented my appetite and the hospital food was moderately dreadful. When it came time to eat, for some reason Dave would not let me near the hot stove. The smell of bacon was almost erotic.

Dave and I work together and I had been struck by some really good creative ideas whilst pacing back and forth in the ward the night before last, waiting for the frigging painkillers to actually do something. The ideas kept pouring out of me and Dave just absorbed them like the 185 IQ colossus he is. For a while at least.

But then I noticed that I was having to force the ideas out through clenched teeth and they kept bouncing off Dave's head rather than going in. To make matters worse although the bacon surrendered to me willingly, the sausages were staring at me with ill concealed contempt. I stabbed a couple to death as punishment and gave the rest to Dave.

Today I find the internet in front of me and deep throbbing pains from within. Be prepared from some bad tempered blogging over the next few days when I can drag my fingers to the mouse. Tramadol, Co-Codamol and Diclofenac are pallid impostors. Sister Morphine is a fickle lover and she would not come home with me.

There are some similarities in the USA and UK with the convergence of practical politics into a 'radical centre' of regulatory big government statists, whose 'left' and 'right' labels are rather like those of Coke and Pepsi... sure there are differences, but in the end they are still selling sweet brown fizzy drinks... or selling a vision of state in which the mainstream 'right', be it Dave Cameron or George W. Bush, are not talking about shrinking the state (even a bit) and freeing the individual (or even the community) but rather just increasing the pace of regulation a bit slower and in different places than the 'left'.

Similarly the mainstream 'left' like Tony Blair or Al Gore are not selling wholesale paleo-socialist nationalisation of businesses as they did in the past, because they, like the mainstream 'right', now follow a more (technically) fascist economic model in which property can be 'private' but control of it is contingent upon being in accord with national political objectives and permission from some local political authority.

The 'left' and 'right' use different metaphors, different cultural references, different symbolism, but in truth they are selling much the same product. They put huge effort into fetishising their product differentiation precisely because there is so little difference in their core beliefs. In the USA, even the issue of self-defence and opposition to victim disarmament is less than solid with the Republicans than it once was as Bush made is clear he was 'flexible' regarding anti-gun legislation and needed hard lobbying to not renew the so-called 'assault rifle' ban (i.e. semi-automatic rifles which look 'scary'). Put simply, all mainstream political parties (at the moment) are statist centrists, neither in favour of overt nationalisation nor of individual autonomy, regardless of their sales schpiel.

Why this is true is not hard to glean. Professional politicians are people who have the psychological disposition to both meddle in other people's lives and to use force to have their views imposed. They are people who value having power over others above all else and the more aspects of society that are subject to political direction, the more important politicians become regardless of their hue.

So the natural order of things, if you are a person who makes their living out of being a politician, is to work to extend the state into more and more areas of life because the state is what you have influence over, thereby making yourself more important to ever more people.

Politicians who do not want to constantly expand their power do exist of course, trying to work within the system to limit the system's power over people. But the very nature of politics makes such folks a rarity, particularly as decency, honesty and frankness are hardly survival traits in in their chosen profession. Centrist politicians keep themselves in power by identifying a group of people that want to hear certain things and then by adjusting their sales techniques to appeal to them whilst being pragmatic about moving your 'opinions' to wherever advantages lie.

Most importantly, politicians use what can only be called 'tribal loyalties' to act as a base upon which they can rely regardless of their actual voting records. They do this by carefully genuflecting towards a few of the sacred cows the people who vote for them seem to regard as important (hence the obsessive fetishisation of minor differences with the Other Party)... and then by adjusting their actual policy-making to buy voters less concerned with appearances, by diverting bits of national wealth to them either directly or more usually by regulating in ways that favour a narrow sectonal interest. A classical example is Dave Cameron promising all manner of big state interventionism and yet praising the antithetical set of principles offered up by Conservative Way Forward. Thus the quixotic faithful are given a gleaming golden thread upon which to hang their fantasies that their chosen leader actually shares their values and when elected will act completely differently from how he has been telling everyone he intends to.

But the Chosen Leader knows that as long as he can highlight one or two differences with his political opponents, the fact he will leave 99% of the state more or less unchanged if he finds himself in power does not matter to the loyalists. After all, even though conservatives groan about the way George Bush has expanded the state in the USA, or the way Dave Cameron promises to add more 'green' regulations and not cut taxes in the UK, those men know that most loyal Tories/Republican would not be able to break the habit of a lifetime and vote for the Bad Guys... why? Because "vote for the lesser evil" has been drummed into them. You are told to be realistic and as you will never get want you really want, you have to vote for the least-worst choice.

And so after years of voting for the lesser evil, Tory and Republican voters have only themselves to blame when all that is on offer is evil. Just slightly less of it than the Other Guys. Or so you are lead to believe.

But to ever have even a chance of getting what you really want, you have to be prepared to let the old party of your tribal affections lose and for the Even Worse Guys to get into office. Again and again if that is what it takes, which is not a pleasant prospect, I grant you.

But in the end, "spare the rod, spoil the child". Even better (if you think The System is salvageable in the long run) if there is another party which more correctly reflects your views, vote for them rather than staying at home. You may not win but voting for another 'fringe' party does make it clear why your previous party lost your vote. At worst you send a message to your old party to reform in ways you can support, at best your new party starts to actually make a difference itself. If you vote for a party which does not really share your convictions, you are part of the problem. In the UK in particular, there is no excuse for any conservative to vote 'Conservative' when there is an alternative party that actually is conservative (i.e. UKIP) in a more or less classical liberal sense. It is unrealistic to expect something like a political party to be in complete lock-step with all your views but for a socialist (say someone who wants Harold Wilson style nationalisation of industry) to still be a member of Blair's Labour Party or a conservative (say someone who wants society strengthened rather than replaced by the state) to still be a member of Cameron's Conservative Party, that must require some extreme cognitive gymnastics when it has been clear for years that neither party will give those folks what they want.

'The Blogging Caesar' makes an impassioned plea for Republicans to get out and vote regardless of the scandals and ever bigger government. He makes a direct "Or the Even Worse Guys will win" argument... and of course that is true. But if you really do not like the fact the GOP has expanded the state, abridged civil liberties and a passable attempt to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq (force levels too low, refusal to allow country to be partitioned) and Afghanistan (sub-moronic ally alienating anti-drugs policy), voting for the party which did those things is tantamount to saying "fine... keep on doing that". Sure, if the Democrats win control of the house and/or senate, they will do even worse things, but only a bit worse. However by making Big Government the ONLY political reality for both parties, you will never, ever get anything except Big Government.

David Cameron is at home and he is as horny as hell:

David Cameron will today unveil radical plans to harness the power of the internet by reaching out to a blogging generation that is disaffected and disconnected from mainstream politics.

At the heart of the initiative, which is designed to make the Tories one of the most technologically progressive parties in Europe, is "webcameron" - a website for video blogs by their leader. Mr Cameron will provide regular clips with him speaking direct to camera, as well as written blogs and podcasts.

Dave 'Boy' Cameron is in his bedroom and he wants to play. He is ready to fulfill all your fantasies. Anything goes. Features include:

• Tory leader undresses in his bedroom, reveals 7" uncut
• Anonymous access
• Free registration
• Live sex chat
• The 3 'G's - Girls, Guys and Goats!
• Meet hot and sexy Tory singles for erotic chat and more
• Cheapest cam rates on the web

So join now for hot, horny, sexy live action with Tory leader. Everything turns him on. Whatever you like, he is into.

...declared my recently-returned father, after enthusing over many aspects of Russia's cultural heritage and before waxing lyrical about the beauty of its landscape. He opined that the country appears to be in a sort of collective malaise; birth rates have declined markedly, with terminated pregnancies outnumbering their full-term counterparts significantly. The population is shrinking and the remainder are scared out of their wits - Dad surmised the latter opinion from his observation that Russian churches appear to be the most highly maintained, furnished and adorned buildings in Russia.

Of course, the fact that Russia is facing a profound demography-related meltdown is unlikely to be news for the average Samizdata reader. One of the more renowned articles written about the deep population crisis facing the modern Russian state was penned by Mark Steyn. It makes for interesting, if not always absolutely convincing, reading. In a piece of analysis that I think is dead wrong, Steyn, citing the precedent of the sale of Russia's North American territories to the United States, asserts that a depopulated Russia will soon enough have its resource-rich Siberian hinterland snatched from it by an envious (and greatly more populous) China - so it may as well benefit from the inevitable and sell Siberia to Beijing. I suspect that if the Russians possessed as plentiful a supply of nuclear-tipped ICBMs in 1867 as they do now, Alaska would still be known as 'Russian America' in the Anglophonic world. Tom Clancy-esque Chinese plots against Siberia aside, Steyn is right to be gloomy about Russia's future prospects; whilst her formidable nuclear deterrent should guarantee her borders, it will not secure her birthrate. The Economist recently published an article detailing the depressing facts regarding modern Russia's population. Russia's birthrate is dangerously low, but still comparable to a number of European nations (which certainly does not auger well for them, either). However, the real catastrophe is found in Russia's soaring death rate:

At less than 59, male life expectancy has collapsed in a way otherwise found only in sub-Saharan Africa. It is around five years lower than it was 40 years ago, and 13 years lower than that of Russian women—one of the biggest gaps in the world.

The article goes on to detail a host of lifestyle-induced afflictions and misfortunes that kill Russians off at uniquely high rates, resulting in unparalleled population contraction.

For those concerned with curtailing the influence of government, it is worth pondering how much of the blame for this utter catastrophe can be laid at the feet of Russia's previous political arrangements, ending 1991. Not all, but I suspect an awful lot. Admittedly, most of the health issues responsible for the abysmally low male life expectancy are related to alcoholism, and vodka was around a long time before 1917. However, the Soviets showed they understood the power of hard liquor as political lubricant on a massive scale in Mongolia in the 1970s, when the dissemination of previously rare vodka ensured growing discontent was muted by an alcoholic fog that continues to blight the lives of countless Mongolians today. I find it difficult to believe that vodka was not widely distributed for similar purposes throughout the duration of the Soviet Union.

Of course, the relationship between Russia's unhappy present, Russia's unhappy future and Russia's unhappy communist past is deeply complex; the above example representing a tiny portion of the picture. It is also worth considering the fate of other nations who endured a dalliance with Marxism. Certainly, many of the former members of the Soviet bloc and/or Warsaw Pact are surging ahead - Estonia and Slovenia spring to mind. Others are not doing too badly on a mish-mash of free-market reforms and Soviet-era controls, like Poland. Then there are the revisionist basketcases like Moldova and Belarus, whose wretched citizens will be immersed in deep Third World poverty for the foreseeable future. I believe Brink Lindsey justifies such variation in this quote from his excellent book, Against The Dead Hand:

The creative power of market competition can cover a multitude of policy sins...in developing countries the availability of accelerated catch-up growth allows even badly distorted economies to post impressive numbers for sustained periods of time. And in the rich countries, the lavish abundance generated by private enterprise can support a heavy load of incentive-squelching redistribution.

It is a matter of the degree of economic liberation after being freed from the yoke of the Soviet Union. I think it is fair to state that no nation has benefited because it existed under the aegis of the Soviet Union, however some have benefited in spite of the fact they were under the aegis of the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, that is an educated guess, and I can only comment conclusively on nations that I have visited and studied.

Firstly, China. A largely unacknowledged victim of Marxism is post-Mao China, whose economic woes - I believe - are pending (as per Mr Lindsey's assertion above). My rationales for such a statement can be found here and here. The cultural losses of Chinese communism need to be considered, too. The will to exercise arbitrary control over others, that indivisible component of the collectivist power structure, drove Mao Zedong to vanquish his political rivals by sweeping them away via a profoundly corrupt and duplicitous "modernity" programme - commonly known as the Cultural Revolution - to be executed by his overly numerous and impressionable young acolytes. A few million people lost their lives as a consequence of this exercise, and an inconceivable amount of the history of humanity was destroyed. To get a feel for how much was lost, it is worth visiting India - or even Thailand - to compare the cultural landscapes of these venerable and long-lived cultures with that of similarly venerable and long-lived China.

Previously I mentioned Mongolia, and previously I wrote about what I think communism did to Mongolia. Earlier in this article, I also discussed the former epicentre of communism - a nation that has barely begun to come to terms with the loss of its ill-afforded superpowerdom - and the demographic horrors it is foisting upon itself. In the face of such history, I cannot help but marvel at the remarkably stultifying, soul-destroying influence of overweening statism and central planning, and how quickly it can despoil an ancient nation and a proud people.

I dislike 'push' advertising, no, I hate 'push' advertising and go out of my way to avoid products advertised in ways that annoy me, the sort that tries to shove what you are doing aside and force their goddamn product in your face... and a prime example is those web banners advertising animated 'similes' that play audible intensely annoying sounds as you are browsing, shouting "Say something! What?" at you. My usual response is to rather pointlessly yell "Piss off!" at my monitor.

I regularly and quixotically write to websites running these accursed advertisements and tell them I will never return as long as they run audible advertisements. One site did agree they were unacceptably intrusive but sadly a couple weeks on they are still running the damn things. Does anyone know of some way to turn off unsolicited sounds in Internet Explorer so I do not have these moronic things inflicted on me when I arrive on some site?

The Pope Benedict XVI knew very well what he was doing quoting Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologu. Once more, with feeling...

Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.

The BBC's correspondent in Rome, David Willey, suggests that Pope Benedict may have not understood the potential implications of his remarks. I beg to differ. The Vatican spends a fair amount of time and effort on other religions, both as part of its institutions and as a continuation of ecumenism so dear to John Paul II. I therefore doubt that Pope Benedict would be oblivious to the Muslim 'sensitivities'. I suspect he understands rather well how modern victimhood assists Muslims in the West. In short, he has done a great service to the public debate about Islam, such as it is, by holding a mirror to those whose only response is to strike at it violently.

I am disappointed that the public figures defending him cannot do better than saying his speech was misunderstood (re German Chancellor Angela Merkel). Catholic Church for all its vilification throughout the ages, some of it deserved and a lot of it not, is the last remaining Western institution that holds values to be above public opinion(s). One of the values that the Church has paid dearly for acquiring and upholding is the understanding that spreading the faith through violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul...

Interestingly Pope Benedict's lecture was about faith and reason. It was based around one of the central beliefs of Catholicism - that God is knowable through reason. His intention was to broaden our concept of reason and its application... not contrary to the scientific nature of Western philosophy but as a matter of rational and practical approach to the cultural and social problems that the West faces.

A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.

I do not mean to exonerate the Pope from being 'subversive' of Islam as there is a bit in his lecture that I find more central to the debate than the infamous quote from 14th century:

But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.

This is a far more damning statement than the one that caused all the commotion. There is not much tolerance these days in the Vatican for intolerance and, gasp, lack of reason.

Earlier tonight, whilst browsing in a shop, I was listening to a song playing on the radio that I have not heard for years. It is an appallingly bad, drivellous, sappy love tune with a disco beat called Lady (Hear Me Tonight) by one-hit-wonder group Modjo. What makes this song so utterly shit are the lyrics - they were surely written by a computer or perhaps someone who does not speak English. I'm going to reproduce them now, so if you intend to read on, make sure you have a bucket within easy reach. Consider yourself warned:

Lady/Hear me tonight/'Cos my feeling/Is just so right/As we dance/By the moonlight/Can't you see/You're my delight/Lady/I just feel like/I won't get you/Out of my mind/I feel loved/For the first time/And I know that it's true/I can tell by the look in your eyes

Is this the worst song ever written? I think it a strong contender for that title, but I would like to see some differing opinion from the worldly and wise that congregate here. Therefore, inspired as I am by Johnathan's recent vox pop and Perry's determination to position Samizdata as a YouGov competitor, I petition you, dear reader, to leave your nominations for worst song lyrics (with a sample of the horror) in comments.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's national current affairs flagship, the 7.30 Report, ran an interesting piece on Peak Oil theory, which was surprisingly contrarian considering the ABC's traditional biases (think BBC protégé). The most common manifestation of Peak Oil theory - a belief that at some point soon oil production will peak and then decline, causing spiralling oil prices and a world of chaos - has long been a favourite of environmentalists, leftists and the perpetually gloomy. However, of late Peak Oil's slip is showing to such an extent that even an organisation like the ABC cannot deny it is distinctly iffy. I would go further; it's demonstrably false. Mark Nolan, ExxonMobil Australia's Chief Executive controversially stated earlier this week that

According to the US Geological Survey, the earth currently has more than three trillion barrels of conventional recoverable oil resources. So far, we have produced one trillion of that.

When an oil company representative talks like that, one tends to believe him - oil companies have a natural interest in maintaining a perception of scarcity to maintain upward pressure on the price of crude.

And he's referring to known oil reserves. Thanks to woeful underinvestment in exploration by - and equally woeful management of - many of the world's true oil majors, the state owned National Oil Companies (subscriber-only article, sorry), we may have knowledge of just the tip of the iceberg.

Considering the pace of development of alternative energy sources, the famous quote from former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani that "the Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil." is looking more prophetic than ever. Peak Oil chaos? Stuff and nonsense.

Sometimes you read something that you have every reason to believe was written by a sane, intelligent and logical person, and you are shocked. Shocked at how incredibly twisted this sane, intelligent and logical person's perspective could be regarding one singular subject their pen encountered. Tim Blair points out such an example. To quote the estimable Mr Blair's post:

Graeme Blundell’s review of The Falling Man includes a curious claim:

In an extraordinary act of national media self-censorship, several days after the photograph appeared, it vanished. Papers across the US defended themselves against charges of invading a dying man’s privacy and turning tragedy into pornography. The photograph became impermissible. There was a deeply held belief the deaths of the jumpers weren’t proper, indeed that they were cowardly. [JW - Blair's emphasis, not mine] The images that came to symbolise the day were of helmeted heroic rescuers working in the rubble and the jumpers disappeared to the shameful websites that traffic in autopsy photos and videotapes of executions.

The commenters at Tim's site rightfully voiced their disgust at such a sentiment. I could not help but marvel at the sheer ignorance betrayed by the author's reading of events, too. I quite confidently assert, with no supporting evidence, that not one media outlet in the Western world even briefly pondered cowardice as a motive of those wretched jumpers. The fact that Blundell so egregiously detects this wildly inaccurate perception as a "deeply held belief" amongst many suggests to me that this is his own delusion, which is where the ignorance part introduces itself. When trapped out on a stricken building's precipice - with intolerable heat and the promise of excruciating pain at one's back and cool, open air at one's front - people do jump. I cannot possibly know or understand what would be running through a desperate victim's mind at a time like that, but I would guess that a very basic, elemental survival mechanism - buried deep in our ancient animal instincts and wholly unencumbered by conscious and cerebral rationality - might well be invoked. Step back into a hellish inferno and certain death. Step forward into benevolent - tragically fleetingly benevolent - open air and possible survival. Only one profoundly ignorant of the human condition would mistake the latter choice as an act of cowardice.

On a lighter note; since I have mentioned Tim Blair here, I may as well press an unrelated fact. The man is right up there with the very wittiest writers in the blogosphere. In the middle of a gadfly-esque post confronting the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's marketing of a book published by them (the book is also written by an ABC science broadcaster) - whereby Blair contrasts a strident and hyperbole-ridden stance towards the rather wacky and more-or-less harmless Intelligent Design movement with the ABC's generally sheepish reaction to the world's most dangerous religious phenomena - we stumble across Exhibit A:

I’m not religious, so I don’t have a God in this fight

Brilliant.

Right, I am taking a break from scribbling about the iniquities of inheritance tax, dumb airline security and so forth to link to this terrific article by Ed Brayton about golfing phenomenon and American icon, Tiger Woods. Even if you do not give a two-foot putt about the game, this article is a fine study of the sheer force of will that has propelled a man to become the master of his sporting world:

I have to admit to being absolutely fascinated by Tiger Woods. I've followed his career closely, despite doubting him initially. I remember watching the press conference when he announced that he was leaving Stanford and turning pro. I particularly remember watching Phil Knight, CEO of Nike, talk about the $40 million contract they had signed with Woods, and I remember laughing out loud and ridiculing Knight when he said that Tiger Woods would transcend the game of golf the way Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali transcended their sports.

No way, I said; not a chance. No matter how good he is, no matter how much he dominates the sport, golf will never be anywhere near as popular as basketball or boxing and that will limit his fame and his standing in relation to the rest of the sports world. Golf is too much an exclusive sport, too tied in with the rich and the well born to have the kind of universal appeal that other sports have. And it's solitary, one man by himself, with no defense to be played and no one on one competition to fuel rivalries. Yeah, I'm glad I didn't put any money on that prediction.

Brayton's blog, Despatches from the Culture Wars, is definitely worth a regular visit, too.

It seems that academia is in league with the legal profession and the growing army of largely pointless psychologists and 'counselors' who treat the myriad of syndromes which we are told plague society.

Blackberry email devices can be so addictive that owners may need to be weaned off them with treatment similar to that given to drug users, experts warned today. They said the palmtop gadgets, which have been nicknamed 'crackberries' because users quickly become hooked on them, could be seriously damaging to mental health.

...and what is quite literally the 'money quote'...

[She] added: 'Employers provide programmes to help workers with chemical or substance addictions. 'Addiction to technology can be equally damaging to a worker's mental health'.

It is not hard to see where this is going. Owning a Blackberry can be pathologised into 'Information and Communication technology (ICT) addition' and clearly any company not providing professional help for ICT addiction could well be negligent (i.e liable to be sued) for ignoring work related harm caused to employees.

Academics love pathologising things as that leads to grants for 'further study', psychologists love it because they can make a fortune as 'counselors' treating the afflicted, lawyers love it when academics pathologise something as that means a company can be sued for causing someone to 'catch' a 'recognised syndrome', and of course politicians love it because that means clearly there is something here that must be regulated and perhaps even taxed more to discourage it.

But what is the solution if your Blackberry is messing with your mind? Turn the fucking thing off when you go home. Sorted. My bill for your therapy session is in the post.

"If Israel uses its military decisively to wipe out Hezbollah, such an action will simply create a whole new generation of terrorists."

Someone close to me recently lectured me on this fact. It appears to makes sense prima facie, but such an enlightened-sounding utterance falls apart as an empty truism with the addition of a little perspective. The Middle Eastern conflict must be viewed from a long-term angle, whilst attempting to countenance the ramifications of the alternative tactic mentioned. Those who might be attracted to the deceivingly pacific fog shrouding the above statement would benefit from realising that by strategically not responding in kind to a belligerent act by zealots like Hezbollah is no silver bullet to the problems of the Middle East; on the contrary, such a strategy may well carry consequences that could ultimately be unthinkably awful.

A powerful expression of the quote I provided above can be found in Steven Spielberg's recent movie, Munich. The moral of that tale is identical to the one pronounced by my close relative; if one hunts down and kills those who planned and carried out the kidnapping-murders of the Israeli athletes at those fateful Games, all one does is inspire a new and more brutal generation to rise up in its place and start spreading increased chaos.

In response to this assertion, I ask; was this same generation not destined to pollute the earth with their hatred and intolerance in one form or another? Israel, by its relatively frequent, um, non-diplomatic actions, may well have inspired many, many Muslims to embark on violent jihad over the course of its existence. However, if Israel left - for example - the horrors of the Munich Olympic Games unanswered, it is perfectly conceivable that the people who reacted to Israel's subsequent blatant retaliatory assassination programme by joining Islamic militant movements would readily join the same sorts of organisations (or even Arab state militaries) when inspired and emboldened by a flaccid Israeli reaction to a travesty of this kind, or perhaps an aura of weakness created by such a profound act of Israeli inertia in the face of this sort of crime. Long and rambling sentence, sorry. Considering that the existence of Israel is an anathema to so many Middle-Eastern Muslims, Israeli inaction and the perception of Israeli weakness is plausibly just as strong an inspiration to take up arms against the relatively tiny Jewish state as a hail of super-potent Star of David-marked precision-guided missiles.

The overarching problem - and this extends beyond Israel and into the international arena - is Islam and its unique propensity, amongst the major religions, towards radicalism. It seems more than likely that Israel will defeat Hezbollah in the future, however I have no doubt that some other radical Islamic organisation will fill any breach left expeditiously. If radical Islam's nature is hydra-like, as those urging Israeli restraint imply from the above quote (and I believe they are correct), chopping off the heads of the hydra when they appear until the organism is exhausted through struggle or circumstance seems a perfectly logical grand strategy for the enormously durable West to pursue over the decades.

The ideal that lasting peace could reign in the Middle East if Israel would simply act passively towards its aggressors when she comes under attack is delusional nonsense. Israel is (again) biblical territory in Huntingdon's oft-quoted, prescient - and surely by now undeniable - Clash of Civilizations, and ultimately the conflict between the liberal West and conservative Islam is a fiendishly complicated, opaque and unpredictable game of strategy that will be played out over many, many years. Every move in this game has the potential to yield both highly predictable and confoundingly unpredictable consequences. It is predictable that when Israel neutralizes an external threat using its military, a certain kind of person will be motivated to fight this force. Conversely and equally predictably, if Israel fails to respond adequately to an external threat, the enduring pan-Arab desire to drive the Israelis into the sea will stir in the heart of the same sort of person, provoking a similar outcome. I fear Israel, due to its location, will suffer negative long-term consequences emanating from the actions of the armed belligerati of conservative Islam, regardless of whatever strategy Israel chooses (ranging from rank appeasement to overwhelming military retaliation) to deal with blows bestowed by these aggressors, for that is the nature of the consolidated foe. Hence, Israel needs long-term support from the Western world. Israel may not be a liberal place itself in many ways, but in many ways it is the (somewhat unlikely) vanguard of liberalism.

I was struck by a comment from Professor Michael Clarke, writing in The Times yesterday: "Commercial aircraft represent globalism and high technology - they shrink the world and threaten cultural conservatism."

Symbols are important because they illustrate the cloudiness of motives and social dynamics. They show the world is not black and white, neatly predictable. Not divided into the elect and the rest. People's motives are mixed, and they often hide them from themselves or express them to seem grander than they are.

Which is why I do wish otherwise sensible people would stop taking Islamist loonies at their own evaluation. The same were not taken in by the 1970s liberationist terrorists' claim to be the vanguard of The Revolution. We knew we had the Soviets in the background, quietly encouraging the mayhem for imperial reasons, but no one with a brain believed the workers and students actually were going to rise up and overthrow the bourgeois state.

They are self-identified as Muslim holy warriors, fighting on behalf of the Umma, but actually they are a tiny unrepresentative group. There is no more physical threat from the average western Muslim than there was from the average 1970s trades unionist. They might in a large minority have beliefs which if taken literally would have scary results (Sharia v. state ownership of the means of production). Those need to be disputed and opposed, but
such uncontemplated dreams and their achievement are far apart.

Terrorists for an abstract cause fit a very, very specific profile: spoiled middle-class kids of more education than brain, and petty-criminals made good who find their psychopathy is accepted and admired by the former when applied to the cause. He is not an evil genius; he's a very naughty boy.

The wittering left always looks for moral justification in 'rage'. It seeks oppression and struggle - violence as a response to poverty - bad for bad. And the terrorist will often take up that chant: he is doing this on behalf of some group of people that is suffering, so the suffering he causes is legitimate, praiseworthy. But it is not his underlying motive any more than the broader ideological picture he fits himself into. It is about being important, making a difference to the world, and the violent purpose shared with other young males adds a testosterone buzz. If they did not have intellectual pretensions, and a bigger concept of what it means to be somebody, they would join a street gang and get some bling.

There are evidently cultural factors. Given the fuel you also need the fire of contact with others who will give meaning to a tantrum. A sense of separation helps, but also a sense of connection to a radically different life. For the revolutionary left this was provided by the new academic lifestyle contrasted with a straitened post-war home-life and the teachings of internationalist Marxism about communist countries. I suggest that explains the British Pakistani experience: communities are large enough for the would-be alienated to avoid mixing with their neighbours and have strong links to bits of Pakistan which have come under Deobandi influence.

My prediction in comments to Perry's discrimination piece...

The young men arrested today are overwhelmingly likely to be of Pakistani heritage or black English converts like previous actual terrorists. Perhaps that's prejudice by me, perhaps the facts if they bear me out would represent prejudice by the police, and artifact of arrest, but there are more factors acting than merely religion. Young and men for a start.

... appears to have been borne out.

And the liberal papers are expressing puzzlement about the young men's privileged backgrounds. Déjà vue. And the rest offer politico-military reasoning. Ditto.

It was the humiliating failure of the Revolution to appear, and the sclerosis of Soviet power in the face of the roaring technology and communications of the West, that disarmed and marginalised The Movement. We win not by exhibiting fearfulness, and giving the spoiled kids the attention they crave, but symbolising our contempt for their dim pseudo-philosophy. Terrorism is gesture politics. Dismissive not submissive gestures are what we require to cut it down to size.

Increasing not decreasing our freedom to travel and freedom of speech would be a start.

My career in student politics lasted approximately 2 minutes. Recollected, hazily, over a distance of 25 years, it went like this:

GH to Conservative stallholder at fresher's fair, eagerly: Is this where I join the FCS?

Student hack (horrified): Oh no, we don't have anything like that here!

So I never did join the FCS. Unlike, I suspect, many of blogistan's more venerable residents. Now Tim Hames is doing a radio history for the BBC. I am not sure how to read this. Are people like us now history? Or has Hames persuaded someone in the commissioning department that the FCS generation is about to come to power, as a generation of 70s New Lefties did under Blair, in heavy disguise, but with their ideals intact?

That would be a lovely thought, but there is a problem with that theory. Part of the reason the Tory Party was in such an appalling mess by the 90s was the foolhardy destruction of the FCS which drove out of the party a generation. Old Labour, in the 70s, on the other hand, clasped the New Lefties to its bosom: paid for fraternal trips to Cuba and Bulgaria, gave them speechwriting and policy jobs, helped them in the Long March Through The Institutions that was achieved by the turn of the century. The New Left base is strong. The New Right are even now outcasts. They (we?) are not close to power, unless I am much mistaken. Not even in alliance with the RCP...

Still Hames' piece is full of delightful quirks. I liked in particular his treatment of Marc Glendenning, whom he insisted on giving the full grandeur of Marc-Henri, "a philosopher-king among politicians". I did not meet Marc until quite recently, and though I have thought of him up to now as a conspicuously pleasant and interesting chap, I will look at him now in a whole new light. Would bended knee be appropriate, I wonder?

The New American Century is beginning to prove trying. I have remarked here before about the spreading fondness of governments for extraterritoriality, and the cartelisation of states. The global War on Drugs of the last century has been almost entirely driven by the US, but has operated through state cartels. Non-Americans can hold themselves and their countrymen to blame for going along with the moralistic folly.

Now, however, the US is starting to apply its laws in ways that purport to apply in the rest of the world, and to reach into other states and impose those laws on their residents, their citizens, who would have had every reason to believe they were entitled to live according to local custom. I suspect that this is partly a phenomenon of power, that any other state with the power to do so would be similarly tempted. But the US, a state founded on the principle of limited self-governance, should know better. Unfortunately limited self-governance looks more and more tainted with unlimited self-righteousness. As with the War on Drugs, so with the War on Terror - "the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power."

Last week we had the NatWest three: charged with a 'crime' against a British bank in Britain that neither the bank itself nor the normally trigger-happy FSA and Serious Fraud Office had taken any interest in, yet extradited to Texas - "transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences."

This week the chief executive of an internet gambling firm listed on the London Stock Exchange is arrested air-side on 'racketeering' charges on his way to Costa Rica The basis appears to be that some Americans choose to gamble online, and for their immorality someone must be punished - that the person is a foreigner operating entirely legally according to the foreign jurisdiction he does business in does not bother the feds, who "subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws.".

Something is askew when the US federal government purports to operate such an extraterritorial jurisdiction over a Briton, but will not touch gambling in the Native American territories on the fiction that they are independent.. try putting anything but tobacco in your peace-pipe, and see how far being in an Indian Nation exempts you from the mission of government. You probably will not get that far. Nor have I seen signs of a civil war being levied against Nevada and New Jersey. US forces will happily bomb obscure Peruvian and Afghan drug fields over enormous logistical difficulty, and without regard for (foreign) casualties ("...plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people"). Meanwhile Las Vegas - a large, well illuminated target close to several major air-bases is mysteriously still standing.

Forget several property for a moment. To insure any of the rights we have against a global tyranny, we need de facto several jurisdiction: separate and equal station among the powers of the earth. The state does have a value, folks. But we forget at our peril that the key one is to defend us against other states. If they club together against their peoples, or subordinate their power to other states, then states might as well not exist. The limiting cases are places like Congo where neighbouring powers prey at will on the population.

This should mean something:

Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let of hiderance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.

But I do not think it does, much. Even Britain, notionally a Great Power, scarcely pretends to assert its power for the protection of its own people's interests.

There has to be somewhere to run or all the world ends enslaved to a monopoly of power. Let us have some diversity. Disunited nations would be a good thing. What will it take to get nations to declare their independence of the international system?

Recently, I heard someone describe the Australian constitution as the second best in the world. No prizes for guessing the best. Since the recent 4th of July celebrations, I have been revelling in the bracing ideological purity of the Constitution of the United States of America, and I have no doubt that it is superior to the constitutions of other nations - in the mind of a liberal, anyway. What of Australia's, however? It is hopelessly outdated and largely irrelevant - the form of state it envisions bears little likeness to modern Australia. For example, the office of Prime Minister is not mentioned at all and most of the mechanics of government exist thanks to convention rather than doctrine. It is not a bad constitution; mainly for the fact that it contains none of the Fabianesque "positive" rights (citizens have a right to a life free of poverty, etc) which tend to enable and then entrench statism. Such caveats are common in most modern constitutions, to their great detriment. If Australia's constitution is the second best in the world, it is certainly a very distant second. As regular commenter Chris Harper said in a recent Samizdata thread,

The Constitution of the United States of America, one of the great works of human thought.

Quite. In contrast, Australia's constitution is passable only due to the elements it does not contain - surely there are a number of superior (in ideology and effectiveness) national constitutions in place today. So what is the second best constitution in the world?

You would think Switzerland's should be a contender. It is a country that holds a number of liberal values as national traits. It is also admired by many of the Samizdatistas, who tend to be a rather liberal bunch (for the most part). One would not be being unreasonable if they predicted that the Swiss constitution is a relatively liberal document. However, if you did predict that, you would be wrong. I did a little research to test my above hypothesis, and was surprised with what I discovered. Far from being one of the best constitutions around (from a liberal perspective), I believe the Swiss document to be one of the worst - if not the worst. For a start, it is too easily altered. According to Wikipedia, the original Swiss constitution was altered to include

the "right of initiative", under which a certain number of voters could make a request to amend a constitutional article, or even to introduce a new article into the constitution. Thus, partial revisions of the constitution could be made any time.

Worse still, a revised version of the constitution that came into force in the 1990s

is subject to continual changes

due to

constitutional initiatives and counterproposals[.]

This is no good at all. Most liberals are deeply interested in durably enshrining the rights and freedoms of the individual; if these can be swept away on a majoritarian whim, then sooner or later it is likely they will be. Such ease of amendment dramatically weakens the document, although worse is to come. From the same Wikipedia article mentioned above:

[The] Swiss Federal Constitution has a certain peculiarity when compared to other constitutions in the world. It does not provide for any constitutional jurisdiction over any federal laws, that is, laws proclaimed by Parliament may not be struck down by the Federal Court on the grounds of unconstitutionality. This special provision in the Swiss Constitution is a manifestation of how democratic principles are held to outweigh the principles upon which the constitutional state is built.

What a terrible idea. A liberal would assert that the whole point of a constitution is to constrain majoritarian democracy - has the phrase "tyranny of the majority" been widely translated into French, German or Italian? This "peculiarity" consigns the Swiss constitution to complete irrelevance. Regarding the contents of the document - who cares? They can be ignored at any time by a majority of the Federal parliament. The constitution may currently be adhered to by Swiss federal politicians, but there is nothing enforcing their adherence. The only thing that stands between the relatively liberal arrangement the Swiss enjoy today and a Blairite soft tyranny (or worse) is the Swiss people's enduring common sense and conservatism. I have met a number of Swiss folk in my time and have found that generally they are predisposed to exhibit both traits. However, events change people. Time changes people. If the Swiss elect a Tony Blair and the political circumstances allow it, such an individual could set about dismantling the various manifestations of Swiss liberalism, completely unrestrained by the toothless constitution. I am led to believe that the Swiss constitution is relatively popular in that country. For a generally conservative people, it is hard not to remark that they paradoxically admire a document that is inherently unconservative - dangerously so.

As for the second best constitution in the world, perhaps some of the readers of this post might put forward a few contenders.

(An English translation of the Swiss constitution can be found here - also via the aforementioned Wikipedia article.)

I recently read This is Burning Man by Brian Doherty, chronicling the remarkable phenomenon of the Burning Man annual festival/event/blowout in the middle of the harsh Nevada desert. Despite the occasional slip into Sixties hippyspeak which might suggest a sort of communalistic mushiness, the book contained at its core the profoundly rational message that we can enjoy civil society by reducing the state to its barest minimum. Very subversive of statism, Doherty writes with obvious passion for the festival and affection for the often nutty but loveable characters who have developed the event. A great way to while away the hours while waiting to catch my delayed flight out of Nice after a business conference yesterday. Money quote:

"Any political virtue I saw in Burning Man always had to do with its avoidance of politics as I see it - the game of some people telling other people what to do. Burning Man to me was about liberty, and ordered anarchy, the inherent strength and possible joys of a civilisation in which all the "government" you need can be purchased in a freely chosen market."

I may even go there one day and try and combine a Burning Man trip with a visit to the magnificent Reno air race festival. Yowza!

Mike Hudack of blip.tv wishes all a happy Independence Day with a few thoughts worth noting:

The Fourth of July isn’t significant simply because it marks the beginning of independent American politics. It’s significant because it marked one of the first times that a group of people threw off the yolk of foreign leadership and chose self-government. It is significant because of the emphasis placed on individual empowerment and individual choice. It is significant, most of all, because of the ideal of America created on or around July 4, 1776 — an ideal that we have yet to realize, but that we continually strive for.

His personal hero of the American revolution is Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, whose arguments created conditions for writing the Declaration of Independence.

“[the] distinction of men into kings and subjects… [is something for which] no truly natural or religious reason can be found.”

and

“I challenge the warmest advocate for reconciliation to show a single advantage that this continent can reap by being connected with Great Britain.”

It is allowed to be idealistic today:

The moral here is a simple one. In 1775 and 1776 one man’s words ignited the firestorm that led to the Declaration of Independence. One man’s views on democracy, on republicanism, on individual rights and individual responsibility. One man’s views that almost didn’t get printed because no printer would dare put those words down in ink. Thomas Paine’s access to the printing press, thanks to Robert Bell, changed the world.

Such words are very encouraging, especially coming from someone who has set up and runs a videoblogging community. It means that this particular community and the company behind it is driven by an understanding of the profound impact that individual creativity and its distribution will have on the future. And, surely, that is a Good Thing.

When someone denies the essential historical facts about the Jewish Holocaust, here at Samizdata what that means is you get moved into the category of presumed paleo-fascists or racist Jew-haters with whom intelligent discourse is highly unlikely to be possible.

Even so, when such remarks arrive in our comment section, that alone is (usually) not enough to get you immediately banned from commenting here. Opinions offered by members of the commentariat which are very much at odds with the world view propounded here by Sazmizdata's authors are hardly rare and even more rarely constitute a 'hanging offence' (i.e. banning). No, what tends to get people banned is when they make (and keep making) assertions so preposterous that they are almost certainly not made in good faith.

For an example, take when someone makes obviously fantastical assertions to explain why Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 'has a case' when he denies lavishly documented historical facts of what occurred more than half a century ago in Central Europe, claiming he is not simply a racist Jew-hater (i.e. hates Jews for being Jews) but is rather just 'anti-Zionist' (i.e. opposes a political movement):

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has a case for querying the Holocaust. His argument is that Nazi Germany simply didn’t have the facility and technology to dispose of some six million corpses (or whatever it was) within the assumed time frame. Therefore, the authorized version, while not entirely a fiction, was a huge exaggeration.

So let me get this straight, the claim here is that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 'has a case', i.e. he is not a liar and/or a complete jackass if he thinks that Nazi Germany, a nation which produced and operated tens of thousands of combat aircraft, fielded the world's first operational jet fighters, built and deployed the world's first effective guided missiles, glide bombs, and military supersonic ballistic missiles, installed tens of thousands of concrete fortifications and shelters, placed hundreds of thousands of concrete and metal anti-tank obstacles across Europe, surrounded its cities with great flak batteries, laid thousands of kilometres of railtracks (re-gauging much of European Russia's rail system!), had the logistic capacity to support millions of men equipt with vast fleets of motor vehicles in operational areas from North Africa to Norway and the French coast to the Urals, DID NOT HAVE THE FACILITIES OR TECHNOLOGY TO DISPOSE OF SIX MILLION DEAD BODIES OVER SEVERAL YEARS?

The notion is so absurd that I do not for a second think it could be said in good faith. That is what often gets a person banned from Samizdata.

I love the CNE's blogs to bits. They are eclectic, interesting, and at times controversial, and with writers like Brian Micklethwait and Antoine Clarke, they are compulsive reading. There's the CNE Environment Blog, CNE Competition, CNE Health, and CNE Intellectual Property, all making excellent reading. They have launched a survey to find out if people would appreciate an RSS feed. I know I would, because it is easy for forget about a blog for a few weeks if it is not in an RSS reader, but maybe I am not an average user. Let them know whether you think it would be useful by clicking here.

Well, I had to return to normality eventually. I have just come back with the new Mrs Pearce from Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean lying off the east coast of Africa and south of the Equator. An extremely interesting island with a mixed history and a heady brew of different cultures, part Anglosphere, part French, part Indian and part African.(Here is a good collection of literature linked to it). About 11 hours direct flying time from London, the island is pretty much geared these days as a "romantic destination in the tropics". I liked the place and its people a lot as we travelled around the various nature parks, looking at the coral reefs, the fish, birdlife and assorted animals. If I have one grumble it is that, much to my amazement, the whole island is besotted with English football. Egads, I go all this way and they are still raving about the World Cup.

It is funny what sticks in the mind, often completely unexpected. I discovered that the island produces some of the finest and most fantastically detailed model boats I have ever seen. You can, for a fraction of what it would cost in Britain, buy a scale model wooden Victory, or Constitution, or Sovereign of the Seas, or an America's Cup racer, WW2 battleship, cruiser or Blue Riband liner. There is a substantial industry of locals churning out these boats. The Napoleonic era - when Mauritius was seized by the British from the French - seems to provide the inspiration for most of the models. Unable to resist - I am an amateur sailor anyway - my wife and I bought a model of the 1840s U.S. schooner Albatros, now sitting proudly on the mantelpiece. Hardwoods are the base for much of the boats that are made and as a result, will last for years. The detailing on the rigging, sails, tiny cannon and masts are incredible. (Okay, I am an overgrown boy at heart).

And of course while on the island I read Patrick O'Brien's The Mauritius Command. For a moment, sitting on the beach sipping a beer, I thought I saw Lucky Jack Aubrey walking along, staring out to sea to spot French raiders...

Anyway, it has been good to give blogging a miss for a while and re-charge the writing batteries. Thanks to everyone for their good wishes and messages. I really appreciate it.

The refrain that "environmentalism is the new religion" is common enough, and there is much truth in such a statement. Several years ago, when I was a confused, largely ignorant and idealistic socialist - thus environmentalist - someone (who was also partly responsible for my enlightenment) challenged me to consider the way I critically analyse the various doomsday statements environmentalists were and are prone to making. Even then, in a deep state of group-think, I had to admit to myself that the illiterate peasants of 16th century Europe probably responded to their priests' exhortations in a similar way.

However, why is this? As a species, most of us are profoundly limited to our own tiny perspectives. For example, we look out over what is actually a gleaming Western city of unparalleled cleanliness, temporarily cloaked in off-coloured smoke caused by a transient climatic event known as a temperature inversion. This event gets us thinking. We think about how we live in only one of a great many cities. Many cities are bigger than ours and many cities are dirtier than ours. Our city is so ugly right now - imagine what effect this ugliness, multiplied across the world, is having on 'the environment'. It looks bad here, and there must be a lot worse elsewhere. What is the cumulative effect of all this ugliness? It must be appalling. We are ruining our environment.

Of course, such considerations ignore the phenomenal machinations of the earth's natural processes which dwarf our own so-called 'footprint'. For all our technological advances, if humankind were to be deleted from the planet overnight, I believe our impact on the surface of the earth would be more or less completely erased within half a millennium - the blink of an eye in terms of this planet's history. Our earth's environment is durable because it's been forged by billions of years of evolution. However, we humans only have an interest in our short lifespans. A priest tells you the marauding army that swept through your village, raped your wife and burnt your house is down to the fact that you have sinned by not obeying some political expedience which nevertheless failed to appear in the popularly-unread bible. An environmentalist tells you your dirty city - as evidenced by an unsightly, temporary smog or something similar - is destroying the earth, despite the fact that the science your environmentalist stakes their legitimacy on is less than kind to such a thesis. Both scenarios resonate with a huge number of individuals in their respective ages.

Humanity's limited perspectives are a terrifying prospect, and today the most threatening manifestation of this can be found in the widespread acceptance of the environmentalist movement and its demands. We hear environmentalists claiming to act in the names of their unborn children and grandchildren, yet so many of the rest of us do not realise that if their demands were played out to a logical conclusion, the children of tomorrow would be considerably less comfortable; their future considerably less secure than at present.

And here I am, stumped by my own meagre perspective. I am an individual butting against the forces of vast armies who pressure and reassure each other into forwarding a creed I know will be ruinous for our species. They appear to be gaining a considerable amount of traction. How could I, an individual who firmly believes in the power of individuals, combat such a homogenous tide? Where to start, for starters. One thing I am sure of, however - the natural earth will go on, regardless of whether we decide to consign ourselves to misery and decline in our efforts to ensure that fact.

Articles often reveal more about their author than their subject. A case in point is a fairly bizarre article by Martin Samuel in the Times. He writes about US warships being named to commemorate the 9/11 atrocities and moreover being contructed in part using steel salvaged from the WTC (I have no idea if this is true but I will take his word for it). He then goes on to say:

The ships would commemorate the attacks, if that is the right word, which it is plainly not.

If a warship named after something does not thereby 'commemorate' it, then what is the right word?

Exactly what is being commemorated anyway? Not the memory of the victims, as nothing is known of how they want to be remembered, and certainly not whether they would wish a warship to be dedicated in their name.

And so by that logic, the cenotaph in Whitehall and all those Great War memorials in almost every town and village in the UK do not 'commemorate' the victims of Britain's various wars either, unless a Ouija board was used to conduct a post-mortem opinion poll of Britain's war dead to see how they might like to be remembered. Or perhaps, seeing as how we British are so much more insightful than those funny Americans, the wise old Ministry of Defence as a matter of policy asks all servicemen "In the event you buy the farm for Queen and Country in some godforsaken hole we sent you to, what sort of edifice would you like us to use to commemorate your demise?"

Who knows in which direction their anger would be channelled? It could be that some of the dead might have thought over-reliance on warships was their downfall in the first place.

Well call me presumptuous if you like but from what I know of human nature in general and Americans in particular, my money is on the hypothetical post-mortem anger of 9/11's victims being directed at the sons of bitches who murdered them, rather than at Presidents Clinton or Bush or the US Navy. Just a guess mind you.

While not excusing wicked acts committed by terrorists, it would be foolish to view the behaviour of terrorists as motiveless. If we regard terrorism as the work of madmen and unrelated to our relationship with their world, we learn nothing from history.

I love it when 'sophisticated' and 'nuanced' Brits and Europeans lecture Americans about history, given the millions and millions of corpses littered across Europe within living memory. Attacks by people from abroad are caused by interventionist foreign policies, clever Mr. Samuel tells us, with his wise Old World perspectives, which of course explains how places like Poland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Czechoslovakia etc. managed to sit out World War II in peace by minding their own business.

Moreover whilst nothing is guaranteed in this life, as close to certainty as you may ever come is when someone says "While not excusing wicked acts committed by terrorists..." they are about to do exactly that.

His entire article tells us nothing about America, American foreign policy, the people who committed mass murder on 9/11, the people who died on 9/11 or even how to commemorate the untimely dead. All his article tells us is that Martin Samuel neither likes nor understands Americans. It also reveals that unlike many in the Muslim world whose perpectives have changed considerably since that fateful day in 2001, it is Martin Samuel who has a very poor understanding of cause and effect.

On a recent trip to the English city to Sheffield I was reminded of the cause of our problem with the growth of statism - and the threat it poses to civilization.

The purpose of my visit was to meet up with an old friend, be shown round the centre of the city (some interesting buildings, and good parks in walking distance - offering a fine view of the city) and to go out into the hills over the Yorkshire border in Derbyshire (fine hills right next to the road).

However, there was a sale at the central library in Sheffield and we visited it. Library sales are a common thing in Britain, to "make space for new books" - but also to get rid of books that are no longer tolerated, without having to actually destroy them (book burning is still considered a thing to be avoided). One of the works on sale was the four volume 'The Science of Society' produced by William Graham Sumner Associates at Yale in 1927 (Sumner himself having died in 1910). The four volume work was on sale for a Pound (no surprise - I was got a 1949 edition of Human Action for ten pence from a British Library sale).

In those days, even at an elite University like Yale, it was still not uncommon for academics to be free market folk and Sumner had been the best known pro freedom sociologist in the United States. The Sumner club carried on Sumner's opinions and was to provide resistance to President Roosevelt and the other "New Dealers" in the 1930's. So one would expect a scholarly examination of the customs of various societies (in those days the lines between sociology and anthropology were less rigid), but an examination from a pro private property point of view. Just as modern examinations are scholarly, but written from a point of view which favours violations of private property.

Well what is there?

The first thing I noticed I was expecting - the evolutionist philosophy. Just as with Hayek, private property is not supported as a matter of metaphysical (by 'metaphysical' I mean something that does not depend on material advantage, i.e. something that is supported on principle - Hayek's talk of rights in the Road to Serfdom is lip surface, Hayek neither believed in metaphysical rights or even free will).

Private property is supported because it is good for society - a larger population can be sustained over the long term, and all sorts of development can occur. Cultural evolution is an older idea than biological evolution. Work on the evolution of such social institutions as language goes back to at least the 18th century.

As for the philosophy of evolution (as opposed to the factual theory), I do not happen to share it. I do not believe that the moral goodness or badness of something should be judged on whether it means that a larger and more developed society can occur (this just sneaks in the assumption that larger and more complex equals good). To me not aggressing against others (by robbing, raping or murdering them) is a moral principle, a foundation in itself - not one that needs to be 'justified' by economic advantage.

However, why should people care what I think? If the Sumner people wanted to justify a minimal state (just opposing aggression) or no state at all, with their 'evolutionary utilitarianism' why should I complain?

Well I might (and would) say that just stressing material advantage (indeed sneering with contempt at the idea that there could be any such thing as principles of 'right' and 'wrong' independent of 'evolutionary advantage') is not very inspiring - but that is not my main point.

Sumner people (and remember these are the best people of their time) did NOT uphold a minimal state.

Looking at just two pages is enough to make the point. On pages 2222 - 2223 (which are to be found at the start of section 461 in Volume III of the "Science of Society"). We are told that there are three attitudes for government to take.

One is 'laissez-faire' or 'laissez-allez' - 'Hands Off' the "swiftly running and delicate machinery" (which is the authors view of society - seeing society as a machine irritates me, but let us leave that aside). We are told that no government has ever adopted such a position, which may or may not be true - but is no argument against the position (unless we are to a follow an interpretation of Hegal that holds that whatever exists must be rational and, therefore, good).

Of course 'to meddle indiscriminately' is bad, and we are told that this is the normal default position of politicians and the writers who only see the suffering that exists - not the greater suffering that their very interventions will cause.

But there is supposedly a third alternative, indeed it "is the only hope men have". Limited intervention by wise men. This turns out to be like Hayek's 'limited state' (Hayek rejecting the libertarian non-aggression principle and the minimal state, or no state, that it demands).

Hayek, of cause, tries to set out principles for this limited state (see his "Constitution of Liberty" and other works), these principles tend to be very vague (a law must be universal [everyone to have no legs?] and so on) - but then Hayek was a philosophical evolutionist (as well as a scientific one) he did not want to be tied down to principles of right and wrong (even though he attacked other people for having a similar attitude).

The Sunmer people are rather clearer - the "only hope men have" has no principles at all. "There is no body of principles to refer to" - it would be nice if there was some guide to action, but no one has done the "dog-labour necessary to collect and classify the facts; much less have they been able to, in the absence of scientific materials, to rise to guiding generalizations".

In short the sort of inductivism (beloved of Francis Bacon) that both Hayek and his friend Karl Popper despised in the physical sciences (where they may have overstated their case) let alone the human sciences (such as political philosophy or economics). So we have no rules for this limited intervention, and the way suggested to get them (inductivism) is not suitable for the task.

But have no fear, the warnings against intervention "do not apply to the engineer" (I wonder if they were thinking of the 'Great Engineer', Herbert Hoover, who was to win the Presidency a year later and who, contrary to his reputation, was a dedicated 'scientific' interventionist - the authors certainly meant themselves).

These all wise super beings can improve civil society by using the power of the state - even if we (the authors) admit that we have not worked out any principles for how that is to be done just yet. Still the engineers (the authors) will (indeed must) twist things to their will - it will turn out fine (although they have admitted they do not know anything) - because they are so wise.

All of the above would not matter if it were just statist ranting, but it is not. People like the Sumner club were the arch enemies of statism - way back in the 1920's they were the best defence of civil society that there was. And it was no better outside the United States (it was worse).

Really even the anti-statist writers of the time presented no principled opposition to statism. The reader of such works as the 'Science of Society' is invited to think of himself as an engineer who can treat civil society (i.e. human beings and their civil interactions) as a machine to be controlled. With no silly metaphysical notions like right and wrong to stand his way. I say again that people like the Sumner club were the main anti-statist force in the conflict of ideas.

So if our civilization is doomed, it deserves to be. Pity about all the people living in it.

Ever read something you wrote not all that long ago and pondered how you could have got it so epically wrong? Take this article I wrote last year about forcing the Middle East into a strategic decline. My prescription? Government action - tax breaks, subsidies, strategic state investment; a Keynesian smorgasbord. Ugh! Why did I not think this through more fully? Five years of sky-high oil prices will go an awful long way towards solving the problems mentioned in the article, courtesy of the market. No government meddling required. As it happens, I submitted the essay for a university assignment and received a pleasing mark. A bit regrettable that I felt sticking the bloody thing up around this rather more intellectually rigorous domain was a good idea.

Gary Jason - a writer I had not heard of before, has an interesting review about a book chronicling how filthy rich some prominent American leftists are. The usual collection of intellectual gargoyles are on show: Ralph Nader, Nancy Pelosi and Michael Moore. I must admit I was taken aback as to how much money Nader is worth, although that is probably my naivete. Jason asks the interesting question about how leftists who decry business are so easy with a life of affluence, and takes a stab at a few answers.

For example, I rather liked this paragraph:

I suspect that there is also a subtler phenomenon at work, one that I would call "warding off the evil eye." I suspect that some successful people — here I have in mind certain businessmen who have become enormously rich — fear that the envious lower classes will possibly do them harm. Considering the long history of class warfare politics, this is not an irrational fear. To ward off envy, these captains of industry make a conspicuous show of being kind and caring, setting up foundations that prominently feature their names.

This sort of ground has been trodden a few times before. What intrigues me is why there are so few seriously, stinkingly, rich folk on the libertarian side of the street, so to speak. There are a few libertarian friends of mine with decent jobs, nice houses; some have inherited fairly serious money and do not have to work; but I don't know any of our number who has the sort of wealth described in Jason's book review. It is a paradox that celebrants of capitalism and market economics are often on their uppers, financially, in my experience, although my impressions are just that, impressions.

I guess it may be partly down to the fact that folk who are good at handling ideas and making arguments for this and that tend not to have the sort of skills to make pots of money. It may also be that, in today's largely corporate world, being known as a holder of controversial ideas (such as legalising heroin, zero state welfare, etc) is not good for the prospects of a person trying to clamber up the corporate ladder. And if a person wants to create their own business, they tend not to have the time to ponder the Big Questions, write The Road To Serfdom or Atlas Shrugged.

Even so, it remains for me a bit of a puzzle why so few of us are not rolling in cash, given our views about the benefits of the marketplace.

On a related theme, I can recommend this article on why intellectuals often hate capitalism, by the late Harvard University professor, Robert Nozick, and this book, by Ludwig von Mises.

There are few topics in the world that get people heated up more then immigration, and in both Australia and the United States, societies that have been built by mass immigration, the topic is in the news.

In the United States, the question is based more on what to do about the millions of illegal immigrants that have consistently been keen to seek opportunity in that great country, and have taken the dubious path of avoiding the proper legal channels to do so. In ordinary times this would not have been such an issue. However, since 2001 the United States has become naturally very sensitive about who enters its borders. I am actually surprised that it has taken this long to surface.

The United States immigration question is particularly interesting. You might think that a society that has built itself on mass immigration would be in favour of more immigration, but this is not the case, and generally never has been the case. In general immigration is tolerated, rather then actively embraced by the general populace, but when times get tough, the political mood can turn quite quickly on newcomers. This was as true in the recession of 1819 as it is today.

This is because the costs of immigration are felt and paid for by individuals, but the benefits of immigration are diffuse and spread right across society. It is a shame that many defenders of the right of the free movement of people refuse to admit that there are costs to immigration. The worker who finds his wages undercut or loses his job entirely, or the victim of violence or the householder who finds his property values eroded is naturally going to feel distressed and angry at what he or she sees as the ‘cause’ of his or her loss. People find themselves surrounded by people of different appearance, religion, and cultural conditions, and worry about how the newcomers will assimilate.

These natural concerns of individuals become political fodder for political ratbags and racist hate mongers who wish to exploit individual discontents to promote their own grab bag of political statism and worse. In Europe this has become a particular problem because of the disconnect between mainstream politicians and ordinary voters caused by the ‘democratic deficit’.

Nevertheless the society that receives immigrants is usually much better off for having them. Immigrants are usually the best and the brightest of their societies, and the most driven. Having uprooted their lives to make a fresh start, they are open to new ways of doing things, and are thus an engine of innovation. In this era of ‘baby drought’ they boost the population and the dynamism of their new societies, and increase the purchasing power of their economies. However, because these effects are spread widely, few people identify their prosperity with immigrants.

In Europe, the situation is rather different, mostly because generous welfare provisions that are provided from the start tend to reduce the benefits and increase the costs to a host society of immigration. This situation used to apply in Australia, but a change in the law that made new migrants wait two years before being eligible for welfare has not only changed this dynamic, but taken a lot of the political heat out of the issue.

So it takes political leadership of high calibre to stand up for immigration despite the obvious merits of the cause. The freedom of the individual to choose the place of his or her residence is a precious one worth defending, but the sad fact is that in this day and age, standing up for freedom is not a cause that political leaders in the West are that happy to embrace.

Have a glorious and happy Easter.

More official exhortation from the British state. This a poster on the underground.

Quite an interesting case, I think, because it isn't the standard minatory approach: Do X as the Y agency demands, or get a big fine. This has the superficially laudable object of preventing children from bullying one another.

You may think (I do) that it ought to be unnecessary to urge people to protect children against bullies, and that this is not a suitable topic for state propaganda - that most adults could be counted on to intervene as a matter of ordinary humanity. But that reckons without the passivity and inanition fostered by 60 years of welfarism, and 30 years or so of 'child protection' doctrine under which speaking roughly to a little boy (let alone touching him), makes one the wickedest of criminals. You might have to work on people these days to get them to do something.

But plainly that isn't the object of the exercise here. This ad doesn't encourage people to stop bullying. For all the empty vapourings about 'active citizenship' (See here for an example of the Government propaganda on that topic that is churned out by notionally independent organisations), nothing may undermine the dependency culture. What this campaign is for is to get people to report incidents they think might be bullying to the authorities. There is a website and a subsidised telephone line for you to do so.

It is obviously impossible that this could help the unfortunate smaller boy. One has to conclude that isn't really the point. The point is to get members of the public to adopt official attitudes, and engrain them by providing a mechanism to rehearse, to act out, concern. It is for to prove you are a compliant member of society by watching others carefully and reporting deviant behaviour. The state will deal with the problem, however minor, however fleeting, however apparently amenable to personal decision.

I don't think that this is a deliberate, explicit project. I think it is a natural outcome of the cultural assumptions of those who commission such ads. We are not just supposed to love the surveillance camera, but to identify with it. The ideal citizen is a passive tool that reports back as requested; that fits in with the total bureaucracy's demand for record.

For those of us - left and right - who still hold to the western liberal tradition of individual moral responsibility, this is a sickening, vertiginous conception of social life. The life of ants, not human beings. For those who are broadly conservative communitarians - right and left - who would like embedded institutions, direct relationships and personal responsibilities to dominate, likewise. The possibility that we may - all taken together - be in the minority should be a source of terror.

Secure beneath the watching eyes? Not in the slightest, me.

Recently I had the pleasure of watching a Zulu choir perform the South African national anthem. Even though mostly incomprehensible to me, it was incredibly moving - perfectly combining the men's deep basses and baritones with the higher ranges of the female vocalists. The South Africans are lucky to have such an inspiring anthem, although the version linked here is not the best rendition around.

The Russian anthem is also particularly stirring, if you can overlook the Soviet connection regarding the tune. I didn't much care for the Chinese national song the first time I heard it, but it grew on me. The lyrics of the Star Spangled Banner are poetically pleasing, if a little thematically blood spattered in the lesser known verses.

As for the not-so-good anthems, I think Australia's is down there. Tedious lyrics, boring tune. Britain's is somewhat lacking, too; as a symbol of the nation, an anthem should do more than just beseech God to look out for the monarch. Granted, the monarch is a symbol of the nation too, but it is arguably an outdated, practically irrelevant symbol. I am sure there are far more miserable anthems than those two - give us your worst!

UPDATE: I do not mean to gloat, but oh dear.

There has been much gnashing of teeth at the death of Slobodan Milosevich. Apparently justice was not served. So what is justice? The man was ignominiously removed from his position of authority, forced to cower in safe houses until the time came when his people sold him out because they valued engagement with the outside world more than his worthless hide. He spent the rest of his days in a prison cell interspersed with trial appointments at a court with questionable legitimacy. He is dead now. If there were any direct positive benefits culminating from his rule, they will almost universally be forgotten and at the very least massively overshadowed. Those that openly claim to admire him will be shunned by wider society. Billions upon billions will learn of him and regard him odiously, even though he died before their birth. History will curse his existence - each and every unchoking breath he took upon this earth.

Hitler was never tried. Does anyone lament this fact? What do people like Hitler or Milosevich gain by not being tried after their downfall?

'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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

"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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

... 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' well on his way to just calling myself an atheist, 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.

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?

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.)

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.

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.

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).

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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

He will be greatly missed.

Rest In Peace, Ed.

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.

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.

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:

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:

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:

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.

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:

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 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.

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!

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!

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!

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?

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

In Dale Amon's article about his libertarian road to Damascus, he quite correctly points out that we are neither left nor right. For this reason the path by which the Samizdata people came to our respective forms of hyphenated libertarianism is often quite different.

Like Dale, Natalie Solent came to libertarianism from the left, in her case the overtly socialist British left (the 'unequivocal left' as I often call it). Although I do not know Natalie personally, we do have friends in common, one of whom I am dinning with tonight. However I read her blog daily and have seem many of her posts to an e-forum of which we are both members, thus I feel I have a very good idea of where she stands. Clearly socialism found her critically rational mind a poor place to set down roots.

Natalija Radic, having grown up under communism and living under that system until 1991, came to libertarianism perhaps more directly via the 'dissident' route. Unlike many, she was never an ethnic nationalist but rather an anti-communist. As she once put it to me, "Libertarians were the only ones who actually had anything interesting to say about liberty, rather than just economy, and why true liberty requires true capitalism". As I was one of the first self-described libertarians she ever met (in 1992), I take partial credit/blame for spurring her off in the overtly libertarian direction.

However others on this forum have taken a vaguely similar path to me. David Carr and Tom Burroughes both have British Tory Party 'history'. I too was very much one of 'Thatcher's children', seeing her rise as nothing less than the start of a new Enlightenment.

However my political background is very transatlantic (my mother was American, my father British). Back when I decided to go to university in the USA, I fell in with the inimitable Walter Uhlman via our mutual fascination with guns, interesting women and unusual beer (or was that unusual women and interesting beer...my memory is a little fuzzy there). We both moved in very 'Reagan Republican' circles, as did pretty much all our extended circle of friends. Most of that circle in the USA still are voting Republicans yet nearly all are at the emphatically libertarian end of the party. I think I can safely say Walter votes Republican these days for entirely negative reasons, i.e. they are the lesser of two evils. I recall seeing a pithy quote to the effect 'The Republicans support Big Government whereas the Democrats support really big government'. This is certainly a view that would produce a grim nod of agreement from most of my Republican friends who regard voting Republican as a rear guard action to be done with little true enthusiasm. Unfortunately I do not see any point whatsoever for voting Conservative in the UK at the moment. Unless someone like Oliver Letwin gets control of the top echelon of the Party I am unlikely to change my mind even under the 'lesser of two evils' principle, not that Letwin is much to get excited about to put it mildly.

Like many UK libertarians, I abandoned the Tory Party after Thatcher, who was in truth an actuator of liberty without being a libertarian herself, and I moved out of the political mainstream altogether. Certainly with the defeat of Michael Portillo in the leadership battle to succeed William Hague, any last fantasies that the Tory party might rediscover any affinity for liberty was harshly disabused. It definitely had a very radicalizing effect on me.

My business background is in various aspects of international finance, though I am not doing that these days, and so it would be fair to say my attachment to capitalism began as self-evident axioms, like most practicing capitalists and serial entrepreneurs. Only later did I acquire deeper philosophical and theoretical understandings of a less intuitive and practicle nature. It was through this process that I think I began to see the glaring philosophical holes in conservative thought, with its largely intuitive underpinnings that sow the seeds of its own failure. When I read remarks by some conservatives that 'libertarianism is a weaker form of conservatism' I find it hard to keep a straight face and can only assume these people have done little more than timidly stick a tentative toe in the vast ocean of libertarian theories lying beyond the arid shores of the constitutional legalisms they mistake for society's bedrock.

Yet that is also why I see things differently to Dale. I don't despise conservatives, at least not all of them. Where as I regard socialists (or 'liberals' to use the weird American euphemism) as entirely wrong, I regard some conservatives as half-right (no pun intended).

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]

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.