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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God is on the side not of the heavy battalions, but of the best shots.
-Voltaire
Is it just me? Apparently yes. And of course it must be very clear to all our readers what is causing this. All the others Samizdatistas are still recovering from the blogger bash. Lots of photos of people doing embarrassing things. Two bits from Perry and David before they succumbed to unconsciousness. Then silence for 48 hours from almost all of them apart from me. It’s obvious.
No doubt in the hours and days that follow, the others will slowly emerge in ones and twos from their sickbeds and from behind the sofas and out of the various closets and small rooms in Chateau Perry behind which and within which they still now groan and toss and roll about in a purgatorial state between sleep and wakefulness, pain and nightmare, and others besides me will eventually again be telling you things. But for now, mine are the only hands at the blogpump, and if you don’t like me, well, I don’t really know, being too polite, what to suggest about that.
But I know what you’re thinking. Why am I the only conscious and functioning Samizdatista? Did I not drink any alcohol? Did I drink lots of alcohol but am I unaffected by alcohol, immune from dizziness, vomiting, violent headaches, and so forth?
Strangely, it’s the opposite. I am no better at resisting pleasure than anyone else, or even postponing it, and my constitution is made not of iron but of balsa wood. And that, ladies and gentlemen of the sober world, is what gives me my competitive advantage when it comes to blogging only a few hours after participating in a blogger bash. Alcohol affects me immediately. I get my hangovers straight away, within minutes. Thus I immediately switch to girlie drinks like Pepsi and Orange Juice. I am not teetotal. But I genuinely drink only in moderation, even at parties where everyone else is chucking it down like there’s no tomorrow. With the result that when tomorrow does come, they all wish there really was no tomorrow, but I’m still operating at my usual steady if indolent rate.
My late father was just the same. He too would refrain from excessive drinking, not because of any great strength of character – although unlike me he was quite a strong character – but because of the same genetically inborn instant aversion therapy that curbs any inclination I ever have towards alcoholic excess. I’ve only ever been properly drunk once in my entire life.
I just thought you might like to know.
A piece in yesterday’s Sunday Times (Sept 8 2002 – page 1.24) deals with the creepy subject of children having computer chips implanted into them, so that their parents can keep track of them and stop them being abducted and murdered by mad sex-fiend serial killers. The technologist at the centre of this is Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University, and maybe we ought to plant a chip in him to keep track of him, because he’s a rather strange person himself by all accounts.
On the face of it, planting chips in people is a clear violation of liberty, fraught with the danger of many further violations of liberty, especially when governments start planting chips in criminals, and then in people suspected of being criminals, and then in people, and then finally (checkmate) in all people.
But I don’t think that’s the whole story. I don’t think children nowadays have nearly as much freedom of movement as they might have. They are now mostly expected to show up at the same place, day after day for months at a time, whether that makes sense or not.
Time was when schools really were educational institutions first and surveillance operations only incidentally, but that balance is shifting all the time. Put it this way: if there were a massive year-long strike by the teaching profession, which of their contributions to society would be most missed? Their teaching of children or their mere keeping of tabs on children. Parents and other responsible adults want children to be “educated”, but what they really really want is to know where their children are and that they aren’t getting into evil company, if not second by second then at least hour by hour.
This is surely why portable phones are now so popular as gifts from parents to children. But they’re hardly foolproof for this job. Portable phones can be stolen by other children. They can just be lost. And there can’t be a great missing child panic every time that happens. (A wrist watch portable phone might work better, and no doubt the techies are working on that.)
To put it another way, the choice for children is not so much between children being kept track of by some kind of electronic communications device, or not; it is between children being kept track of, or being made to stay put in one or a few known-in-advance locations. And being made stay in fixed places is not exactly what we libertarians call “freedom”. Paradoxically, childr-tracking technology is what may make freedom of movement for children much more common in the near future.
Of course this kit can be used by parents and teachers to drive children crazy. But children are already at the mercy of adults. For those adults who want children to have freer and happier lives than they do now, this sort of kit, used with humanity and with common sense, will surely be part of the answer.
Maybe Professor Warwick isn’t such a creep after all.
I’m going on the radio this (early) evening for a few minutes to talk about this stuff, and happily they’re not expecting me to come crashing down on only one side of the argument. The radio station is Ondacero International, which is basically Spanish but which also does English language broadcasts for Anglo expatriates living in Spain, of whom there are at least a million. I couldn’t find any hint of English at the Ondacero website, but maybe you can. If you do contrive to tune in by some magical means or another, the show goes out at 7 pm Spanish time, which is 6 pm London time, and whatever that might be your time. Who knows? – maybe some Samizdata readers are themselves Anglo-Spaniards within regular radio range of this. I’m fixed to be on for a few minutes at around twenty past the hour. My thanks for making the contact to my good (and good libertarian) friend David Botsford, who’s been on this show several times himself.
Last week I had dinner with Alex Singleton of Liberty Log so I took a look at what he’d been saying there, and found this:
One American reader of this site recently disagreed with something I wrote about American foreign policy. He wrote: “It’s interesting to have foreigners telling us Americans what WE ought to do. Why don’t you confine your efforts to mobilizing the British military to do your international crusading for you?” Well, the reason is that I don’t want to. In a free society, individuals are free to express their viewpoints as often as they want. Clearly, there are times when it is best not to voice an opinion (especially when in the company of people whose fists don’t value negative rights!), and individuals should also be free not to take any notice of opinions expressed, but there is nothing inherently immoral from a libertarian standpoint in telling others what to do.
Ah but there might very well be. It all depends what you tells them. Libertarianism says that Alex should be legally allowed to say what he wants, but not that anything he says is therefore morally right or even excusable.
This distinction constantly gets blurred. Phoners-in to the radio shows I’m sometimes on routinely glide from the claim that something is wicked to the claim that therefore it should be illegal, no further argument being regarded by them as necessary. Insisting on this distinction, as I always try to do, is central to libertarianism, not some merely incidental nitpick.
This distinction applies also to my somewhat frivolous potato crisps dilemma. Commenters reassured me that I don’t have to like, or even morally defend, everything that I nevertheless think capitalists should be legally free to do. Quite right.
My worry, however, is that Walkers Crisps are straying – I agree only a very small step – beyond mere tastelessness into the realms of compulsion. If the children that Walkers are aiming their crisp adverts at were totally free to ignore them, fine. The trouble is that Walkers are doing their business not just with the children directly, but with their school as a whole. The children are unfree. I agree, they’re not very unfree (not when it comes to ignoring adverts), and I don’t actually believe that Walkers and the schools in question should be forbidden to do this kind of deal, just jeered at. Nevertheless, somewhere between selling crisps to rather unfree children and selling poison gas to Adolf Hitler, a line gets crossed. To take more up-to-date examples, if someone is selling armaments to Mugabe or to Al-Qaeda, would “but I’m just a capitalist doing business” count as a complete defence in our eyes? Clearly not.
I’m appalled. Yesterday morning (and my excuse is that it must have been very early in the morning) I read a posting on Freedom and Whisky and then later that morning I here accused David Farrer of responding to the whole griefometer thing very tastefully and seriously, to make some portentous point about, you know, how terrible communism was. But in the paragraph just before the ones I re-posted here, he did do all the cuteness, Dando, Diana calculations that I accused him of neglecting, just as if he were a Samizdata writer.
Nobody told me this. There were comments on what I put, but none that noted this elementary blunder. I found it out when I looked at F&W again just now. That’s when huge cock-ups are really humiliating. When no-one notices them.
As soon as you have read the above either burn or eat it and speak of it to no one. Perry: kill the comments.
One thing I have learned from this horror: that when those big bad mainstream media get things totally rectum over mammary, as they do, a lot, I am now even readier than I was to believe that it’s incompetence rather than malevolence. (This paragraph reflects the American influence on us Samizdatista. What we in the UK call a cock-up is called in America a “learning experience”.)
The party last night was excellent. I did lots of pleasure and also some major blog-related business, which I’ll tell you about when it’s ready to tell about which it isn’t yet.
The Blogger Bash is tonight, so I got myself in the party mood this morning by reading how David Farrer of Freedom and Whisky had responded to Adriana’s griefometer posting.
He tried it on Soviet Communism, but deliberately took it all a bit seriously and tastefully, ignoring for example how very uncute lots of the victims of Soviet Communism were.
Now, this griefometer is just a silly game, isn’t it? A bit sick perhaps? Well, consider this: 100 million killed over 80 years is about 3,422 per day.
Or one “World Trade Centre”.
Every day for 80 years.
What’s really sick is that the communists’ ideological soulmates infest almost every academic institution in the western world. And I am still waiting for them to apologise.
Have a nice weekend.
I can’t remember exactly when it was, but one evening something like a fortnight ago, David Carr, Adriana (I think she was there), Perry and I were gathered at Perry’s in the small hours of a morning and we were discussing that newly erupting Transnationalism article. The various properties and qualities and signs of Tranzis and Tranzi thoughts (we were already using David’s word, I seem to recall) were itemised. I offered the thought that Tranzis probably prefer Linux to Microsoft, but was squashed by the assembled majority. Linux is libertarian and the Tranzis don’t like that do they? Course not. I said no more.
But now have a read of this article by Steve Lohr, and then tell me I was wrong. Anti-American governmentalists everywhere (especially from the Tranzi heartland: the EU) queueing up to support the Penguin and to trash the Evil Gates, whom they regard as the personification of US corporate imperialism.
I think personal computer software is a natural global monopoly, if you’ll pardon the expression. What I mean is that at any moment there is a global winner which it makes sense for nearly everybody to use – Tranzis, anti-Tranzis, Americans, anti-Americans, everybody – simply because everybody else does. And any year now, it would seem, the world may do a switch. But I confess to being biased about this, because I placed a sort of bet four years ago in a Libertarian Alliance piece about Linux!, and if Linux ever does topple Big Bill I will look very prescient.
I share Perry’s high opinion of Alice Bachini’s Libertarian Parent In The Countryside blog, provided only that she is able to keep it going, which it looks like she might.
Even if she doesn’t she’s already supplied many good blogules, of which my favourite so far is this, the best short explanation of the exact place of “spin” in British politics that I have yet come across:
… New Labour’s gift for spin was never what enamoured them to the British public, it’s more complicated than that; in fact, we just thought spin was what professional politicians did, and we wanted a not-totally-incompetent government to manage the economy for us, so we voted for the one that spun competently thinking maybe they were capable of adding up a few numbers as well. Or at least that they would actually be in their offices looking at a few numbers now and then instead of just hanging out in brothels wearing football shirts and hiding brown paper bags of money about their persons. Anyway, spin was the price for competence, we thought, which is why we’re still paying it.
The hangers out in brothels etc. are Britain’s Conservative Party, in case you live on the far side of the moon and didn’t recognise them. I’ve been saying something along these lines in conversation for years, but never got around to telling the universe.
The entire quoted paragraph above was in brackets in the original, a flying-off-at-a-tangent in a piece that was basically aimed at Tony Blair’s dress sense, body language, etc., provoked by a Telegraph photograph of the Great Leader.
The comedian Alexei Sayle once said very wisely that he objected to the use of the word “workshop” in any connection other than light engineering. I now feel similarly about the phrase “limited edition”, which should, I believe, be confined to publishing. Sadly, this phrase is now applied to cars, clothes, portable telephones, in fact to any manufactured product where they have to decide beforehand how many they’re going to make in each little burst of manufacturing. In other words to all manufactured products.
The latest manifestation I have observed of limited edition feaver is: limited edition potato crisps. That’s right, Walkers Crisps have just produced a six-pack “limited edition” bag, containing two Heinz Tomato Ketchup flavoured crisp packets, two Branston Pickle flavoured crisp packets, and two Marmite flavoured.
In my opinion the Marmite crisps are very nice (as are the crisps flavoured with Marmite’s deadly rival, Bovril, which have long been available), the Tomato Ketchup crisps are okay, and the Branston Pickle crisps are disgusting.
Talk of limited editions raises the question: are there potato crisp collectors? If so, do they collect their crisp packets unopened, or do they merely preserve the wrappings? If they do collect the crisps unopened how do they ensure that the crisps do not get broken inside the packet, even as the packet remains unopened, and if the crisps are preserved in mint condition, how can the crisp collector tell?
It was with questions like these in mind that I consulted the
Walkers SHOWCASE website mentioned on all the crisp packets.
At this point my posting takes a sudden lurch away from harmless frivolity and towards seriousness, because this is what I found:
Welcome to Walkers SHOWCASE!
Walkers has invited every school in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Eire to post their students’ best work on the Walkers SHOWCASE online gallery. What better way to show off the children’s talents – not only across the school, but to children’s friends and relatives – and to everyone with an interest in education around the world?
If you have been chosen as your school’s SHOWCASE Co-ordinator, your first step is to register your school. This takes just a few moments – but one part of it is your agreement to keep to the SHOWCASE Charter. You can review the Charter before proceeding with registration by clicking on the SHOWCASE safety button on the left. As soon as you have registered you can start uploading exhibits – everything from collages created in Reception to interactive games devised in a sixth form project.
Have fun!
I hate this. These people take no pride in their product. I expected – well, I was looking for – testimonials from satisfied crisp eaters, discussions of the relative merits of Marmite and Bovril crisps, intricate analysis of just why it is that the Branston Pickle crisps are so horrible, news of other Walkers products. Instead we observe what is now called a Public-Private Partnership, and of the most vomit-inducing kind. If I was a teacher and they made me the school’s SHOWCASE Co-ordinator, I’d feel like a whore.
I realise that as a good little libertarian, I ought to be willing to defend everything that capitalism does however tasteless (including whores, of course), but when it comes to capitalists stalking the wastes of the public sector in search of captive juvenile audiences for junk food adverts, I’m sorry, I just can’t do it. I wouldn’t want a law against it, but surely no self-respecting school would do this.
Perhaps I should overcome my dislike of such things. I don’t know, I really don’t. I would especially welcome comments on this.
This piece by Janet Daley in today’s Telegraph is of interest, and these paragraphs are the heart of it:
… there must be a lesson here for those who hold – and would like to proselytise – currently unfashionable opinions. How exactly has this happened? How is it that this stance, which has been travestied and traduced by the entire Left-liberal media behemoth, has still managed to win through to the hearts and minds of so many fashionable anti-establishment people?
And perhaps even more beguilingly, why are so many acerbic comedians and social satirists happy to stand up in public for a cause that has been largely associated with politicians who have never knowingly told a joke? …
Of one thing I think we can be fairly sure. Harry Enfield, Bob Geldof, Vic Reeves et al were not won over by Teresa Gorman’s ‘street cred’ or Norman Tebbit’s hairstyle. Neither the cut of Norman Lamont’s suits nor John Redwood’s demotic vocabulary made them think: “Hey, these guys are my sort of people. I like the look of them. What’s this they’re saying about the European single currency being a bad idea for Britain? I think I’ll join up.”
No, I believe not. They must have been – wait for it – persuaded by the arguments. Imagine that. They must have heard people who look and sound nothing at all like them, saying things that struck them as basically sound. …
I’ve been flogging away with ideas for the best part of my adult life so far, so you might expect me to greet JD’s piece with unmitigated reverence. However, one of the ideas I’ve been flogging away at is that persuading members of the Conservative Party to support something is not the kiss of life, rather is it the kiss of death. This is not an idea of the kind JD is talking about; it’s a propaganda idea, a focus group idea, an idea about how to win arguments by unfair means as well as by fair ones. It’s an idea about “positioning”, “associating”, about atmospherics rather than just about principles. (At the risk of getting too technical, much of the idea of being principled is itself an idea about atmospherics.) → Continue reading: “Opposition to Brussels is becoming fashionable” – Thoughts on The Divide
Alex Singleton of Liberty Log links to a Sunday Telegraph piece by Leon Louw of the South African Free Market Foundation. Louw is an actual live delegate at the Johannesburg eco-imperialist fest (eco-imperialism being Louw’s verbal coinage, not mine), and supplies first hand reportage from that deeply dangerous event. Recommended. (By the way, the above link to the FMF will now get you to another Johannesburg piece by Roger Bate.)
Louw has been one of my favourite libertarians every since he spoke at the 1984 Libertarian International gathering held here in London (far outskirts of). I loved the talk he gave then, which the Libertarian Alliance published.
I especially treasure his insight that all legal principles without exception have potential grey areas associated with them in certain cases. Property rights are often hard to clarify in particular cases, “reasonable” self defence can often be hard to agree about, when is pollution pollution?, and so on. Hence the ubiquitous need for law courts to settle hard cases.
So, never disagree with your opponent’s principles merely because it can sometimes be hard to apply them, for that will be true of your principles also. Disagree with them because they are bad principles, all the more dangerous when easily applied.
David Farrer of Freedom and Whisky responds briefly to my unbrief piece about John Gray.
As Brian Micklethwait suggests, John Gray is an incorrigible pessimist. That I can understand but it’s no reason to give up the fight for liberty.
First, I don’t suggest that John Gray is a pessimist, I bloody well say it in seventeen foot high flaming capital letters. There’s no suggesting about it.
And second, to repeat the point being made in those seventeen foot high letters, Gray’s pessimism applies to whatever is the dominant optimism. And that’s now us. We used to be pessimistic about Marxism and he agreed with us about that. But he never agreed with us about the wonders of liberty, because he doesn’t believe in the wonders of anything. He’s not giving up the fight for liberty, because he never fought for it in the first place. He merely fought with us, against Marxism. Now, there’s no need for that, because that fight is over. Now we are the enemy, with our absurd enthusiasm for the wonderful things that liberty might do, in a possible wonderful libertarian future. He is, I repeat, being completely consistent.
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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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