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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Today I came across this on my wanderings, a US Libertarian Party candidate called Ken Krawchuk who seems to be making some kind of impact, in particular by wiping the studio floor in a TV debate with his Republicrat opponents. A huge haul of votes, forget it, but the serious spreading of some of our memes, definitely. Such as:
We’re letting murderers and rapists out of prison to make room for pot-smoking Grateful Dead fans. That’s insane!
That got a cheer from a mostly college audience. And there was another good one about a handgun being a girl’s best friend. Thanks to Heretical Ideas for the link.
It’s Sunday, and since Friday evening I’ve been staying with my older sister Daphne and brother-in-law Denis in western Wales, in the countryside very near the coast, just east of Fishguard, which is where the ferries to southern Ireland sail from. They’ve been living here for the best part of a decade, but this is my first visit to them. They seem very content. That this is a most beautiful part of the world is true, but to be expected. Countryside, especially if next to the sea and viewed in the fine weather I’ve enjoyed, is beautiful.
Many Samizdata readers will also know two other facts about this part of Britain. First, that Daphne and Denis aren’t the only retired English people living in Wales, and second, that in these parts, although they mostly speak English, a substantial minority of the people speak their own local language, Welsh.
But here’s where it gets interesting. Daphne and Denis are both learning Welsh. They are taking it very seriously. From October 1st of this year until March 31st 2003 (at which time the plan will be reassessed) they will be speaking to each other entirely in Welsh, unless third parties who only understand English are present. Daphne has also told all her local acquaintances that she would also like to speak Welsh with all of them who speak it.
They are not the only retired English expats here to do this, in fact Denis tells me that it was meeting another Englishman who had become fluent in Welsh was what first encouraged him. Welsh classes abound.
Why are these people doing this?
Basically, they are learning Welsh because it is there. Welsh is by far the most substantial non-English language spoken in Britain. Eighteen per cent of the Welsh people speak it, so Denis tells me, and although hardly anyone is fluent only in Welsh, many prefer Welsh and speak it whenever they can. In a mere couple of days I have already experience the feeling of exclusion that you get here as a mono-lingual Englishman. Yesterday Denis and I walked to a local tourist site, an ancient Celtic burial mound with a weird looking mini-stonehenge-like structure on the top which looks down on their home across the valley, and he was soon chatting away in Welsh to some of the other visitors. What were they talking about? And exactly which Welsh words on the bilingual signposts that they have everywhere correspond to which English words on the signposts? If you’re an Anglo living here, that question must occur to you pretty well every time you go out.
Denis is saying to me as I type that there is nothing threatening about this, at any rate not in this bit of Wales – which is known as “Little England”. The Welsh, as I have always found, are charming people. But when Denis switches from English to Welsh, politeness turns at once to genuine friendliness. I remember being told that the Japanese get very twitchy if, when in Japan, you try to speak to them in Japanese. It’s as if you had tried to barge your way into a private club. Here it’s the opposite. Yes, join the club. Come on in and be welcome. So once you start to learn Welsh, you get nothing but help and encouragement from the locals to stick with it.
And the other big reason why these people are learning it is that the Welsh language is, like other mountains that people climb because they are there, a challenge. It is not easy. The first letters of words, for instance, fluctuate wildly according to how exactly the words are being used – who owns it, what they’re doing with it, and so on. There are, apparently, about a dozen different ways of saying “yes”, depending on what exactly is being agreed with. So, an intellectual battle. But intellectual battlers is what Daphne and Denis, and many other retired Anglos out here, are. They had tough, intellectually demanding jobs – they were doctors (like Daphne), lawyers, university professors, highish ranking army people, in other words they are the educated upper-middle classes, which is how they earned the money to buy nice places here. Now they don’t have their challenging jobs any more, and they need new challenges. What better than the challenge of learning the one foreign language that you can learn in Britain that you can actually practise using with the locals for real?
That’s it, that’s the end of this. I don’t know what it means. Very little I imagine. But as a little titbit of life in a corner of the Anglosphere, I think it rates a mention.
Intellectual property rights are a hot issue now, probably because there are at least two distinct intellectual and political traditions who want to talk about them. The left are having a huge push about (especially) pharmaceutical patents in the third world as Alex Knapp of Heretical Ideas reported last Sunday. So does this press release about a new book that also contests such notions.
Meanwhile many libertarians are particularly interested in the impact of the new instant copying technology that is now spreading to every other desk on earth. It used to be quite an effort to photocopy a book (although even that got the patent lawyers and lobbyists very jumpy). Now you can copy whole movies in minutes, and individual music tracks in seconds. Entire industries are tottering.
But hot issue or not, the Libertarian Alliance will always be interested in publishing a piece like Nigel Meeks’s An Individualist Anarchist Critique of ‘Intellectual Property’: The Views of Benjamin Tucker (1854-1939) (Libertarian Heritage Number 23). Follow the link and read all of it (although I’m embarrassed to say that we are still only producing our stuff in Acrobat format, a situation I hope very soon to correct). This piece is the ideal introduction to Tucker’s ideas about how ideas should, and more particularly should not, be protected. → Continue reading: New from the Libertarian Alliance: Benjamin Tucker and intellectual property rights
Last night I came upon Steven Den Beste’s piece about the USA conquering and rearranging the Middle East, in the manner of the USA’s conquest and re-arrangement of Japan after WW2.
Like Perry I liked Den Beste’s description of the nature of the contest, but I recoiled somewhat from his proposed solution. I also found Eric Raymond’s supportive reaction to it very thought-provoking.
I wasn’t the only one who was provoked. Commenter Logi Ragnarsson (5.12 pm Thur 19) said, in among saying ruder things: “Why do you want to start a massive assymmetric war in the world I have to live in?” Others with similarly Iceland-like names piled in with similar points. As Dave Roberts commented a bit later (6.14 pm):
Well, you’ve really stirred up everyone with a ‘sson in their name.
There followed an intriguing digression into the question of how much, if at all, my British ancestors imposed civilisation upon the Indian ancestors of N. Srinivasan (7.58 pm). → Continue reading: Let them hate provided that they hear
Earlier today I did a a piece for UK Transport, in which I had a go at the idea that we live in an overcrowded country. I said the only reason people think it’s overcrowded is because the crowded bits are the bits that most people spend most of their time looking at.
UKT boss Patrick Crozier linked me to another explanation, and maybe a better one, for this daft idea:
We wonder if those who claim the country is being ‘covered in tarmac’ are looking at small scale maps of large areas on which the width of roads is grossly exaggerated to make them obvious. On a 1:10000000 scale wall map of the UK, a motorway may be shown as being 1mm wide. This equates to 1km, when in reality motorways are only about 32m wide – 1/30 of their apparent width on a map. Surely no-one could be so stupid as to believe that thick lines on a small map represent real tarmac on the ground?
Well, no, not when you spell it out like that. But if people have spent their lives looking at the maps and not thinking … And since this overcrowded thing is such an important anti-progress meme, I think this is a very good question. It comes from the Association of British Drivers.
My big brother did a tour of accountancy duty in Hong Kong a few years back. “Overcrowded?” says he to the greenery-sodden English, “You don’t know the meaning of the word.”
Thanks again to Instapundit for the link to this, about the history of gun control in England, and about the various Americans who seem to be doing most of the serious arguing about it.
The focus of the debate this time is professor of history at Bentley College Joyce Malcolm‘s new book Guns and Violence: The English Experience.
Time was when, as the sandal-wearing corduroy-jacket gun-wimp chick-flick-preferring libertarian that I still am, I opposed gun control only out of duty and only with difficulty. Now I’m utterly convinced, and it didn’t take the fact that recent British gun control tightening has made gun crime even worse. It was books and arguments like those of Joyce Malcolm – although not her actual book because I’ve yet to see it.
Time for another spook outing. Former US Marine and former UN arms inspector, still playing flat out for the home team, laying down his reputation for his country: Scott Ritter.
You’re the US government. You decided, soon after 9/11, to redo Gulf War 1 and this time finish it. You need inside intelligence. You dig through your mountains of electro-data with your electro-diggers. You exhaustively debrief everyone who ever has any remotely significant dealings with the Iraqi regime, and you put it all together as best you can. You’re looking for any sign of Saddam trying to get his retaliation in first, one way or another, and you’re looking for information about just how he is setting about defending himself, so that you can come at him from different directions to the ones he’s ready for.
One way in is to get your spooks onto that “UN” WMD inspection team. And … another is to set up your very own peacenik pro-Saddamite appeaser, who can tramp all over various Iraqi red carpets, shake lots of hands, talk to lots of assemblies, conspire with or be deluded by lots of Iraqi dirty tricksters and generally shine a different light on all the things and the people and the places you want to know about. Whatever happens, however Ritter’s treated and by whom – trusted, distrusted, used, abused, whatever – you learn things, and possibly (when you combine it with all the other things you’ve learned) important things. Ritter himself may never know how well he’s now doing. → Continue reading: Scott Ritter – All American good guy
I once asked this literary agent what kind of writing paid best. He said: ransom notes.
– Harry Zimm (struggling film producer played by Gene Hackman in Get Shorty, shown on Channel 4 last night)
Instapundit has a link to ScrappleFace, which looks like it’s worth a regular visit, and a rootle around in its archives. The target, all the time, is the portentously urgent and cliché-riden prose of the mainstream US media.
I couldn’t find any mention at ScrappleFace of Samizdata, but this could be because Scott Ott of ScrappleFace, judging by an early posting about Darwinism, is opposed to such things as Darwinism, as, on the whole, aren’t we. And then again, maybe I didn’t find any mention of Samizdata because I just didn’t find it.
I’m also enjoying the Orrin Judd versus Jonah Goldberg stuff, also flagged up by Instapundit.
Judd’s case is that although blogs won’t replace the mainstream media, and although bloggers won’t make any money, they do still profoundly influence the mainstream. One of the “under the radar” notions that Orin Judd noted as starting in the blogs and only later getting to the regular media is popular hostility to Saudi Arabia. Changing my subject somewhat, to content, it occurs to me that what President Bush may have in mind is that if all goes well in Gulf War 2, the USA will then have itself a new and staunch ally (Iraq) in the Middle East. And from this new Iraq, it can then turn around and start to discuss matters in Saudi Arabia, from a somewhat new perspective. Instead of depending on Saudi Arabia to influence Iraq, Bush will have Iraq to influence Saudi Arabia with. Which just might explain the difference in attitude of the Saudis towards Gulf War 1 and Gulf War 2.
I doubt that this kind of speculation has been much featured on the regular media, if only because the US government wouldn’t want it on the regular media – not just yet. But I bet I’m not the first bloggist to have said such a thing, and I further bet that the comments on this will quickly prove me right. (Prove me right someone – quickly please.)
More from my webwanderings. This is from sashinka, who is one of the other bloggers that the Guardian bloggers like.
One of the other students revealed [that] adopting the Brace Position during airplane emergencies does not improve your chances of surviving an impact. What it does do is preserve the location of your teeth in proximity to your mortal remains in order to aid forensic odontologists in corpse identification.
That sounds horribly true to me. Sashinka got it from somewhere (don’t know where) in a blog/website/virtual place called Methysalicylate. Most blogs go up and down, but Methy-etc. scrolls sideways. Well why not?
I have finally, at last, got my all-you-can-eat-at-no-extra-cost adsl www connection, and am finally free to go awandering and not be frightened of getting too interested.
The best story I have found so far on my travels has been this from Asparagirl last Thursday, about a ship with a dirty bomb on board, or maybe just some mildly radioactive ceramic tiles, ready to destroy New York on the anniversary of you know what, or maybe just add some tiles to it. Don’t miss the comments. (And I do love comments. Where would Samizdata have been on 9/11/02 without them?)
My take is: it was perhaps a fuss about nothing, but it was still a fuss, and it is depressing to me – as it was to Asparagirl – how completely governments can damp down media reports of such things, simply on account of the sheer volume of news that governments themselves generate and can accordingly threaten, selectively, to withhold.
Asparagirl noted that the big story they did go with that day was a washed-up half-dead whale. Said she scornfully: “Whoop-dee-doo.” Said one of her commenters, elbowing his way past conspiracy buffs, conspiracy phobes and bomb-making experts: “You’ve obviously never been downwind of a dead whale. It’s news, lemme tell you.”
Is it right, on the day when most minds (certainly the minds of most Samizdata readers) are focussed on a war that is very much in progress, to think also about an earlier one, the Cold one, the one that ended, approximately speaking, around 1990? I hope so. Like everyone I have my “what I was doing”, my “how I heard about it” and my “how I felt as I watched it” stories concerning today’s recollections of a year ago. (Someone rang me. I was at my desk. I didn’t like it.) But, rightly or wrongly, appropriately or inappropriately, I choose also to ruminate today upon events from an earlier time. (And besides, I cannot possibly do better than Perry’s photos, or David’s inspired “root causes of American anger” posting of last Sunday.)
So anyway, in the latest issue (October 2002) of Gramophone, there’s a letter concerning the Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnanyi (1877-1960), from Professor William Lee Pryor of the University of Houston. Here’s this letter in full (but with apologies for the absence of Hungarian accents):
In his review of some orchestral music by Dohnanyi (June, page 44), David Gutman writes, ‘I wonder how many readers are still bothered by the bizarre trajectory of the pianist composer’s wartime career.’ This is no doubt a veiled allusion to false charges brought against this greatly maligned musician during the Second World War. I knew Dohnanyi well and would like to respond.
→ Continue reading: Not a Nazi and not an anti-semite – just an anti-communist
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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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