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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I don’t know if this is a good way to find out about Formula One racing car racing, but this is blogland so there’s a link for you.
I’m now watching the TV re-run of the Monaco Grand Prix, which was held last Sunday and which David Coulthard won, I believe. And this has reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to say to the world for some time. Why can’t they have more racing car races in places like Monaco, which is an actual place, with hotels and houses and a sea-front with super-luxury yachts parked in it, and fewer racing car races in places like all the other places where they have racing car races, i.e. the racing car racing equivalent of out-of-town shopping centres?
I thought this was not going to be political, but as I blog the question I realised what the answer is, and it’s deeply political. In Monaco you are allowed to take your own risks. You are allowed to race a racing car at 200 mph within two yards of a concrete wall, if you’re good enough and if some insane millionaire or cigarette salesman will pay you. And you are allowed to stand just above the concrete wall in the direct line of fire of any bad driving that might occur and watch all this insanity. At most grand prix circuits you need a pair of binoculars to see what the hell’s happening, because before a racing car driver can stage a decent crash for you he has negotiate about a third of a mile of gravel and a giant wall of rubber tires.
It is no coincidence whatever that in Monaco they also allow you to keep most of your money. In most parts of the world they run your life, and tax you half to death to pay their wages. In Monaco you run your own life, almost entirely.
Two different things: low taxes and a fun racing car race track. Same underlying philosophy.
In my capacity as the Supreme Pamphleteer of the Libertarian Alliance I am assembling the next Stuffed Envelope operation, consisting of, you know, publications. Arising out of this exercise in twentieth century nostalgia, and for reasons I can’t be bothered to explain, I find myself searching, at present in vain, for the exact chapter and page number of the following quote, probably from The Fellowship of the Ring, and probably from Chapter 2 (“The Council of Elrond”), said, I’m told, by Gandalf (good) about Sauron (bad):
“That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind.”
A magnum of warm virtuous feelings for the first person to tell me the answer and put me out of my editorial misery.
Update: [Editor: Ah, the power of the blogosphere…Thanks for the help, the information is now safely lodged in Brian’s head]
No, they cannot touch me for coining. I am the King himself.
-King Lear (King Lear – Act IV Scene 6)
Freedom works. You know that from your own life. Give it a chance to work for everyone else as well.
-Charles Murray in What It Means To Be A Libertarian
Despite Perry’s recent preoccupations, Samizdata seems to be bowling along nicely, doesn’t it? The pattern is, there’s an eight hour silence, Perry is out on the town trying to sign up more Samizdatans and getting somewhat “tired”, I decide it’s up to me, I post a page-and-a-half of waffle about whatever comes into my head and other Samizdatans read it and say to themselves we can’t have all those Americans thinking all this is is Brian waffling we’d better do something. So they do. And I now have some rambling to do in reply.
I liked Paul Staines’ bit about Britain’s growth rate having sunk like a stone. What this confirms is that British government income is now as high as it can be. Increasing the percentage rate of taxation doesn’t increase government tax income, it merely slows the economy down and causes government income to remain static. Similarly, if the government were to reduce the percentage rate of tax, government income wouldn’t decrease. This would merely cause the economy to surge forward, and the smaller slice of a bigger cake would end up being the same size as the bigger slices of smaller cakes. Britain is now at the top of the Laffer Curve. Isn’t that exciting? In plain English, the bastards are taking us for the absolute maximum amount they can, and if they get any greedier we stop coming through their bit of the forest.
If they truly want to spend more on the British National Health Service they are going to have to spend less on other things.
Aaron Armitage liked my ramble about gun-control, but wants to add that: “… people who are more likely to be shot are more likely to buy guns for self-defense. In other words, the risk of getting shot causes the gun ownership, not the other way around.” Quite right. Capitalise the P, take away “in other words”, and we have another anti-gun-control aphorism for the collection.
I didn’t pay much attention to that David Caruso movie, but by the end Marg Helgenberg was making excellent use of a gun to kill a bad person. David Caruso, if I understood matters correctly, continued to disapprove and instead of remaining with Marg like a Real Man and having some more sex with her in her swimming pool instead buggered off to Rio de Janeiro. Good riddance. Whatever happened to David Caruso? (E-mailers: I do not care what happened to David Caruso.)
I was delighted that Alice Bachini responded to my bit about pram design. I feared that this pram posting had disappeared into the oblivion bucket labelled Things That Belligerent Men Of A Certain Age In T-Shirts With Jobs In IT Don’t Care About. “Prams? Prams?!?!?!?! We want threats to H-Bomb the Middle East, girls in black leather on motor bikes, GNP statistics, guns, jet planes, pictures of Kylie Minogue in see-through clothing …” [stay tuned gentlemen]. “We may not be Real Men, but at least when we’re sitting at our computers allow us to pretend that we are.” Etc.)
Anyway Alice, thanks. You caught me committing an error I’m fond of denouncing others for, which is another Fixed-Quantity-Of fallacy, in this case the Fixed Quantity of Infant Attention fallacy. Your point being: outside stimulation increases the total capacity of infants to pay attention to things in general, such as and including Mum. They don’t either attend to the outside world or to Mum. They pay more attention to both. Makes sense.
That’s enough rambling for now. I’ll get to Antoine later. As usual, most of what he’s saying I agree with.
Perry’s internet connection has been on the blink all day, on account of it being cable-based. That little power cut (see my previous post below, end of) apparently deranged his cable company. (His cable TV was out also. I hate that. Always keep business and pleasure on separate kit, I say. That way, when one fails you can still do the other.) Anyway the upshot is I promised Perry I’d shove something onto Samizdata tonight. Which is now.
Well the blog fairy has spoken, and I have my topic. It’s one of those mildly entertaining American movies (I’m combining blog pleasure with the pleasure of late night junk TV) about decorative but badly behaved people with nicer houses and swimming pools and weather than they deserve. It stars David Caruso and Marg Helgenberger and is called Elmore Leonard’s Gold Coast. And the David Caruso character has just said something calculated to annoy Samizdata and just about all its friends and readers everywhere:
“People who don’t own guns don’t get shot as often as people who do.”
That sounds like one of the big pro-gun-control mantras to me. Now most anti-anti-gun-controllers are no doubt familiar with all the wrongnesses of this mantra, but indulge me. It’s a somewhat new claim to me, and I want to explain (basically to myself) what’s wrong with it.
Error One – that the only bad thing a person with a gun can ever do to you is shoot you. But of course there’s something else, in fact a lot else. He can threaten to shoot you, and then without actually shooting you he can do lots of other bad things to you, or that you would otherwise have stopped him doing. So even if owning a gun yourself might have got you into a gun fight, the risks of such a fight might easily have been preferable to what happens as a result of you not being able to even threaten such a fight. Not getting shot is not a guarantee of happiness. You may not get shot, but you may be raped, or robbed, or powerless while your family ditto. There are worse things than getting shot, even than being shot dead.
Error Two – most of the above applies also to when you are attacked by someone physically stronger than you, but when neither you nor he has a gun. It all applies if, for example you are an averagely strong male who is not good at hand-to-hand combat, while he’s an above averagely strong male who is. In those circumstances you brandishing a gun makes all the difference (provided you’re willing to use it), even if you do take the risk that the physically stronger attacker does have a gun after all and waves it back at you in “self defence”.
Error Three, and I think this is my biggest objection – the benefits of widespread gun ownership among non-criminals for the purpose of self-defence are dispersed throughout society. Even if it were true that “people who own guns don’t get shot as often as people who do”, and even if getting shot was the worst thing that could happen to you, and the risk of getting shot was the worst risk you could take, that still wouldn’t mean that non-criminals being forbidden to own guns (the real world effect of gun control laws) is a good public policy. The widespread existence of non-criminals willing to take the risks alluded to by the David Caruso character may not make life safer for each non-criminal gun-owner, but between them these people sure as hell make for a better world. And if enough non-criminals can be persuaded to accept these burdens, the criminals pretty much give up, and the guns need never be fired, just owned. Think of the non-criminal gun-owners as soldiers in the war against crime, a war which they and only they can win. And think of David Caruso as the guy who says, don’t be a soldier, you’ll only get yourself shot at. That may make sense, even if the “only” is overstating things. But pacifism as a public policy absolutely does not make sense merely for that reason.
As for the claim that it’s the job of “experts” – like the good police – to do all the good gun-fighting against the bad criminals, and not the good civilians, well that seems to me like saying that you can win a land battle with the massed ranks of your own infantry stripped of all their weapons, but backed up by “expert” air power. Tell that to the Marines.
That last little metaphor might actually have contributed something useful to the argument, in the form of an aphorism worth copying and pasting to other places. Keep writing for long enough, and eventually you find yourself being brief, and to the point.
My speaker at my fast approaching last-Friday-of-the-month discussion evening for this May (the 31st) will be Gerald Hartup (who has just started something called Liberty and Law – no website as yet – which sounds interesting). The subject, a tricky one, will be “How to Talk About Race, Culture, Immigration, Asylum, etc.”. I don’t want the evening to degenerate into a nitpick about the current British government’s current asylum policies, from the point of the view of the current British government, and with the assumptions that underpin the current British debate about these matters. What I want us to think about is: What should those assumptions be? I want us to think about meta-context, to coin a phrase. We’ve had plenty of discussion along such lines here, as you may have noticed.
I think I already know one of the rules for such discussion, which is that you should always talk about these matters with the mind-fix in place that maybe there’s an actual, honest-to-God asylum seeker listening to what you’re saying. This is one of the big facts behind Political Correctness. “Now we have to worry about the feelings of Afghans and Somalis and Slovaks.” Damn right we do, and a good thing too. Part of the `right wing’ thing is that you don’t have to do this and shouldn’t have to do this. But you do now. One of the things I most like about writing for something like Samizdata is that, what with all these hundreds of hits we have every day, this mind-fix isn’t entirely artificial. Such people really might be reading in, such is the potential reach of the blogosphere. And someone might definitely be reading in on this who falls into the category of those who can say in all honesty: “Some of my best friends are asylum seekers.” I really like that.
Example. Another speaker I’ve already fixed is the estimable David Carr, who’ll be doing September of this year (the 27th), giving us an update on what’s happening in the Middle East. One of the reasons I fixed this event with such enthusiasm was that David’s talk last year on the same subject was good in particular in the exact way I’ve just referred to.
David’s sympathy – his “bias” you could say – is with the Israelis, but there is bias and there is bias. There’s the kind which causes you to be blind to facts or to conceal facts or even to just make up non-facts, and to be blind to the feelings of anyone except your own folks. And then there’s the kind of bias which consists of admitting that yes, this is where your “bias” is, but nevertheless managing to describe things accurately and fairly. I recall with particular pleasure that present at that meeting which David addressed was another British guy who had spent quite some time in the West Bank, among the Arabs there. His “bias” was a very different thing to David’s. Yet when it came to the facts of the matter – who did what when, what all the biases of the various actors in the drama were, and so on – this Arab-friendly man and David were in complete accord. I can’t say we managed to actually solve anything Middle-East-wise that night, but that particular degree of agreement I found very pleasing.
If this coming Friday is as good, I’ll have no complaints. Email us if you are interested in learning more about these meetings. The London SWPosh area has just had a mysterious power cut lasting a quarter of a second (a phenomenon I’ve never experienced before). I’m all okay, but Perry’s phone connection has temporarily collapsed, so send emails to me at if you want to be sure of getting through.
Yesterday at Instapundit, just in case there are any Samizdata readers who read this but not that, there was a link to a story in the Boston Globe about the failure of anti-gun laws to control crime, in Britain. Depressing. The story. And the fact that the story seems only to be being told in America.
Believers, show discernment when you go to fight for the cause of Allah, and do not say to those that offer you peace: “You are not believers,” – seeking the chance booty of this world; for in the world to come there are abundant gains. Such was your custom in days gone by, but now Allah has bestowed on you His grace.
-The Koran 4:93
This is typical, absolutely typical … of the kind of ARSE I have to put up with from you people. You ponce in here expecting to be waited on hand and foot, well I’m trying to run a hotel here. Have you any idea of how much there is to do? Do you ever think of that? Of course not, you’re all too busy sticking your noses into every corner, poking around for things to complain about, aren’t you. Well, let me tell you something – this is exactly how Nazi Germany started, you know. A lot of layabouts with nothing better to do that cause trouble. Well I’ve had fifteen years of pandering to please the likes of you and I’ve had enough. I’ve had it. Come on, pack your bags and get out!
-Basil Fawlty, to a group of Fawlty Towers guests.
World trade could be a powerful motor to reduce poverty, and support economic growth, but that potential is being lost. The problem is not that international trade is inherently opposed to the needs and interests of the poor, but that the rules that govern it are rigged in favour of the rich.
-Oxfam, from the Introduction to their Report Rigged Rules and Double Standards: Trade, Globalisation, and the Fight Against Poverty. See their Make Trade Fair campaign website (but don’t expect the rules to be any less rigged by the time they’ve finished with them).
Here’s an observation which I think deserves wider currency, which I got – very appropriately considering the nature of the observation – from my mother.
Prams. Which way do they face?
In the olden days, prams faced inwards. Babies, when being walked by their mothers, or nannies or au-pairs or whoever, faced backwards, back to whoever was doing the walking. Prams were also quite bulky, and babies were shielded (cut off?) from the dramas of the outside world. Now, most prams are far smaller and skimpier, and they mostly face outwards, away from whoever is doing the walking.
Given what has been learned about the truly astonishing rate at which the growing brains of babies suck in information from all around them, is this not a quite important change of social custom? Does it somehow portend a world of looser and less intimate family relationships, and greater (and maybe also earlier) engagement between growing children and the outside world, beyond their little family households?
My mother disapproves of this change, because she considers the relationship between children and their mothers to be of crucial importance. (She was one of the Founding Mothers of the National Childbirth Trust.)
Me, I don’t know. I think there’s much to be said for getting to know about the world early on and feeling at ease with its excitements, opportunities and complexities, and not just getting acquainted with your mum. But I think my mum is definitely on to something. I completely agree with her that this is a fascinating little fact about the modern world.
Thoughts anyone? Does Natalie Solent have anything to say about this, what with her being a mum herself?
Incidentally, when checking out the link to the NCT, I noticed that they still use the same logo, based on an Eskimo wood carving that my mother brought back from a trip to Canada. It’s of a mother and child. It may even be Mary and Jesus, I can’t remember. And the child? It’s facing mother.
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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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