We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
– Tacitus
“The man must be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and in any event, there is still some chance that the whole sordid affair turns out to have been a political set-up, in which case he might even emerge from this bizarre scandal with credit and sympathy. Yet it is about time Europe’s ownership of the International Monetary Fund, and particularly France’s apparently divine right to the top job, was brought to a close. If Mr Strauss-Kahn’s nemesis in a New York hotel room loosens Europe’s grip, then that may be no bad thing. Whatever the truth of otherwise of the allegations, Mr Strauss-Kahn’s spectacular fall from grace is widely seen as a near catastrophe both for the IMF and the delicate negotiations around further rescue packages for the stricken eurozone periphery. This it is definitively not. To the contrary, it might even bring about a rethink of the currently doomed strategy of throwing good money after bad.”
– Jeremy Warner
The historian and libertarian writer, Robert Higgs. is most upset that some Americans had celebrated when Osama bin Laden was killed by US special forces a few days ago:
“The caretakers who comfort the sick and dying are often great. The priests and friends who revive the will to live in those who have lost hope are great. The entrepreneurs who establish successful businesses that better satisfy consumer demands for faster communication, safer travel, fresher food, and countless other goods and services are great. The scientists and inventors who peer deeper into the nature of the universe and devise technologies to accomplish humane, heretofore impossible feats are great. The artists who elevate the souls of those who hear their music and view their paintings are great.”
“But mere killing is never great, and those who carry out the killings are not great, either. No matter how much one may believe that people must sometimes commit homicide in defense of themselves and the defenseless, the killing itself is always to be deeply regretted. To take delight in killings, as so many Americans seem to have done in the past day or so, marks a person as a savage at heart. Human beings have the capacity to be better than savages. Oh that more of them would employ that capacity.”
I agree utterly with the first paragraph. We should celebrate goodness more than we do. Absolutely right. But come on. I really have had it with the moral posturing of people who wax indignant about their countrymen feeling pleased because an evil man has been killed. When an evil person, in a confrontation such as occurred a few days ago, is killed, then why should not the admittedly rough justice of what happened be marked by a certain degree of grim satisfaction? I don’t imagine for a moment that anyone who voiced satisfaction at OBL’s death is under the illusion that this can possibly put right the evil that was done on 9/11. There are times, however, when grim satisfaction at what happened to OBL is not only the understandable reaction, but the just one.
It interests me how some on the almost pacifist wing of the libertarian movement – if I can call it that these days – have reacted to the demise of this man. After all, such folk often complained that “neoconservatives” who supported the overthrow of Saddam or the Taliban, say, were going beyond just retribution in response to the 9/11 attacks. So what I would ask of Higgs, and for that matter, would-be POTUS Ron Paul, is what exactly do they suggest should have happened in the case of OBL, had by any chance a pristine, moral libertarian regime have managed to find him and track him down? File a lawsuit? Suggest he surrenders to the nearest police station where he can be read his Miranda rights? That was not going to happen: the most probable outcome for a person such as this would be a messy arrest, and the charade of a trial and lifetime jail term/execution, or a firefight. Welcome to reality.
Higgs finishes with this:
“Glory to the USA, glory to its hired killers, glory above all to its heroic Great Leader. The whole spectacle is profoundly disgusting. Yet we can see that many Americans have enthusiastically fallen for this trick, dancing in the streets in celebration of a man’s death in faraway Pakistan. Such unseemly behavior is not the stuff of which true greatness is made.”
“Unseemly”. Oh get over yourselves.
Here are some more thoughts over at Pajamas TV. I particularly enjoyed Bill Whittle’s comments. I share his take.
When a man is tired of ITV4 he is tired of life.
– Patrick Crozier.
 If sport were a drug, there would be no option but to institute a mandatory death penalty for people partaking in it, and nobody would want thatMy apologies for the blurriness of the first picture. I find that people in uniforms in secure areas of airports can lack a sense of humor when I start taking photographs, so I try to do it surreptitiously. This can sometimes detract from the quality of the photographs.
The arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF and a member of the Socialist Party in France, on sexual assault charges in the USA has triggered a stream of bizarre collectivist wailing.
“Arrest Throws France Into Disarray and Disbelief” says the New York Times…
But why ‘disbelief’? Now I have no idea as to the merits of this particular case and thus no position on this statist bastard’s guilt in this matter, but socialists are people with a profound sense of entitlement to what other people have but are not freely willing to give up without threats of violence.
So is it hard to believe that someone whose entire world view is based on using force to take what is private without prior consent might have used force to take what they wanted from a woman? It is not really so different.
Owing to my habit of listening to the BBC radio news at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, on account of me liking to record CD Review, I just heard about this:
The heads of 15 green campaign groups have written to the prime minister warning the government is in danger of losing its way on environmental policy.
I do hope so.
The letter says the coalition should promote a green economy with “urgency and resolve” if it is to follow its vow to be the “greenest government ever”.
The groups include Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the RSPB.
Downing Street says it stands by its record of protecting the environment and delivering a low carbon economy.
A year ago, David Cameron said the environment would be a top priority.
I love the phrase “a top priority”, in particular the “a”. And when a government says that it “stands by its record”, that often means that it realises that it’s a stupid record and is about to attempt a somewhat different record. It will never apologise for past errors, but is now wanting to make different errors, now that the political wind has altered somewhat. It was trying to get elected. Now, it is trying to at least to appear to balance the books that the election has placed in front of it.
David Cameron is the sort of politician who cannot be relied upon even to break a “vow”, but this news sounds, if not good, then at least like an improvement. There has been quite a little furry of news lately to the effect that his government is starting to have doubts about its electoral promise to wreck the British economy in the name of junk science, by making modern life illegal. Given that the British economy is already being wrecked in the service of junk money, I guess they are starting to reckon that one self-administered catastrophe is probably as much as the country can take just now.
Presumably similar calculations are going on in all other countries. Again, I hope so.
The Daily Telegraph – which in my view continues to go downhill as a newspaper – has this decidedly mixed quality article by Jim White about the alleged evils of a large sporting institution being owned not by its “local community” but, horror of horrors, by a US family living in the sleazy state of Florida, no less. Words such as “leeches” are used. We are talking about the Glazer family, owner of Manchester United. Perhaps someone at that newspaper might gently remind Mr White that the Glazers are of Jewish origin, and that it is not terribly clever to use words such as “leeches”, given the historical demonisation of Jewish speculators as “bloodsuckers”. To be fair to White, I am sure nothing untoward was involved and he got carried away. Even so, this paragraph should have set off some editorial alarm bells:
“I believe United’s success has arrived in spite of the Glazers, not thanks to them. Rather than astute custodians, they are merely monumental leeches, blessed, in their endless requirement for blood, to be attached to such a healthy host body.”
Mr White struggles to lay out how awful it is that the club, purchased earlier in the ‘Noughties in a leveraged buyout, is now a privately held firm with a large debt interest bill. Indeed, it does seem eye-watering that since the day of purchase, interest charges of around £300 million have been paid on the debt, financed through things like rising ticket prices and the like. And yes, the days when factory workers could watch the likes of Duncan Edwards or George Best in the 50s and 60s for a relative puny sum have gone. There are even software engineers and financiers watching football these days (how vulgar!). But surely, the Glazers bought the club in a free market – no gun was held to anyone’s head when that transaction was made.
Mr White does not, as he could have done, argue that the tax rules could be changed so that equity financing is put on a level playing field (excuse the pun) with debt; arguably, some of the more foolish-looking leveraged buyouts that arose just before the credit market debacle of 2008 were encouraged by favourable tax treatment of debt. But he should realise that had ManU remainded a listed business, then the shareholders would want to see return on equity and for those returns to increase. They also want a dividend occasionally. This growth has to come from somewhere. With many sporting institutions, that growth requires things like rising ticket revenues, sponsorship, and the like. I personally think that outside of a few very big sporting institutions, such capital growth is questionable and that sport is subject to all manner of vagaries that make it an unappealing investment, in my view.
Now, if Mr White wants to make the case that the state should somehow decide and regulate the ownership of sporting institutions, then he should have the courage of his convictions and argue for sport to be run on socialist principles. Let’s see how far he can go with that.
I don’t like much of the modern professional footballing world, and yes, the lure of big money has made some players behave with particular foolishness in recent years. But Mr White should remember that if people really detest the vulgarity of modern sport as much as he claims they do, there is a simple solution. Don’t go to matches and do something more edifying instead. Or even play some football with your kids in the back yard.
I had already pencilled in the Rally Against Debt as something I would try to be at, if only because it will be taking place a mere walk away from where I live. An incoming email forwarded to me via the Cobden Centre has made this more likely. The email had this attached:
For me, those speakers are an appealing combination of the known, the known of, and the unknown.
How many others will show up, I have absolutely no idea. But, if I can do my tiny little bit to make the turnout that tiny little bit less insignificant, I think that I should. I still promise nothing, but I really will do my best to be there, and then to report back here, hopefully with some photos.
The Daily Mash satire site has this beauty of an item on Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
He is the gift that keeps on giving, as Perry de Havilland of this parish noticed a while ago.
I ran across this interesting tit-bit today:
US probably used classified helo in Bin Laden operation
The US military may have operated a hitherto undisclosed classified helicopter type in its recent raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. Images of the wreckage of a helicopter that reportedly crashed during the operation, apparently due to an undisclosed technical malfunction, do not conform to any types that are known to be in service with the US military or in development
This was in a Jane’s newsletter teaser so this is the total information I have available at this moment. Has anyone else heard any interesting rumors?
I eagerly await Amnesty’s Human Rights Action Centre being turned over to the BNP for a debate on how changing demographics in England are depleting national pride
– Michael Weiss
Superb.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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