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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It is no secret that I am opposed to conscription of any sort, be it military, judicial or educational. I am all for having armies, juries and schools, but not ones which depend on forcing the unwilling to become chattels of the state. Not only do I think it is morally indefensible, it produces strange results when people are compelled to do things they never agreed to do.
Most people can be convinced that getting an education is a good thing, but to force who cannot see that to attend a school just means that they will disrupt the education of those who are willing to be there. You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink. Moreover, state schools seem to bring out the most control obsessed aspects of people who run such places.
Pupils at a new £46 million flagship school will not be allowed break times and will have no playground to run around on, leading to fears for their behaviour and health. […] But parents, educational experts and health campaigners believe banning teenagers from letting off steam during the school day will increase their risk of becoming obese, and could damage their attention spans during lessons. […] Dr Alan McMurdo, the principal of the academy, said: “Research has shown that if children concentrate on lessons throughout the day, then their work improves. “We are not intending to have any play time. Pupils won’t need to let off steam because they will not be bored.”
So children are going to be dragooned into coming to this place under threat of law but “Pupils won’t need to let off steam because they will not be bored”. Might I suggest arrogance and stupidity in equal measure. Might I suggest that they will indeed be bored and the way they will let of steam will be to trash this nice new school and run wild in classes… I sure as hell would.
France has elected Sarkozy and I must say I am curious to see what happens next.
In the short term, will the anticipated riots in the banlieue happen? In the long term, will Sarko be France’s Thatcher and solve the serious structural problems created by decades of intrusive statism? Or will he be a disastrous Ted Heath, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic with no real understanding why things are so bad? Does he even have the perspectives needed to change the right things and move France in as more market/liberty oriented direction? And even if he does, will the System simply defeat any attempt to change it? I am dubious to say the least about the willingness of French society to break its addiction to other people’s money but we will see.
What do you think? 
To have a free and prosperous country, it is important to have strong institutions underpinning things like contract and property rights. Yet all too often we forget the roll of social attitudes and world-view in creating wealth and its handmaiden, liberty.
There are two interesting articles in The Telegraph today (on the same page in the print version in fact) that shows that places like Russia and China may be vastly wealthier and freer than they were under the darkest days of Communism, but both those places have yet to develop either a culture that expects liberty, understands the implications of state money (they are hardly alone in that) or accepts the usefulness of profound outside influences.
The Chinese government is trying to lure foreign educated Chinese back to China, which suggests at least the people at the top are aware that there is value in the way the rest of the world does things..
Under the government’s new incentives, returnees will be able to work wherever they like, regardless of which city they have a residence permit for, and will be offered higher pay, while their families will receive preferential treatment.
Which is interesting as that means most people still cannot live and work where they like, requiring internal passports and state residence permits. How can a place with such restrictions on a person’s ability to sell their own labour ever hope to become affluent and truly dynamic? Can they not see the link between the ability of individuals to make fundamental choices and the effectiveness of markets?
Those graduates who return, expecting their foreign education and work experience to be a passport to a glittering future in the new China, frequently face discrimination rooted in a deep-seated distrust of those who have left the motherland for the West.
Which makes me wonder, do most Chinese people not realise how much more affluent the First World is than they are? I am guessing they do but this is trumped by the cultural imperative for Chinese-ness… the sort of mindless nationalism that is thankfully largely dead in much of the Western world. This suggests to me that regardless of how China’s leaders tinker around, if Chinese culture is that obsessed with China-is-always-best attitudes, there are serious limits to their ability to grow into a prosperous and civil society.
Also in Russia, most of the institutions associated with advanced nations (courts, property rights, contract law etc.) are not known for their robustness or independence from politics. But also I wonder how much the culture in Russia allows people to imagine things any differently?
Russia’s ageing but revered scientific geniuses are on a collision course with Vladimir Putin after the 1,200-member Academy of Sciences rejected Kremlin proposals to end its unique independence from state control […] Now, however, its autonomy is threatened by a proposed new charter which would give the government control of its management, funding and multi-billion pound property holdings. Kremlin officials claim the institution needs dragging into the modern world to harness its members’ brainpower for lucrative scientific patents and commerce. But critics fear it will fall victim to Mr Putin’s appetite for control and his distrust of free-thinking institutions.
Which is interesting. But then…
The Academy receives £870 million in federal grants, owns about 400 affiliated institutes and employs around 200,000 people across Russia. Prof Valery Kozlov, 57, its vice-president, said: “This is simply an attempt to seize control of our finances and property.”
I am sure Professor Kozlov is a very smart man, yet I wonder if it even crossed his mind that perhaps his Academy should respond to Putin’s power grab by refusing to take any more state money. If they are a centre of excellence as claimed, surely there must be companies and institutions around the world which would love to fund them and allow them to be truly independent of the state.
Yet the notion that everything must happen top-down with the blessing of the state is probably so deeply ingrained that the reality of what is involved with making yourself independent does not track at all.
There is a very interesting article in The Weekly Standard by Stephen Schwartz called The Balkan Front, describing the struggle between Saudi backed Wahhabi Islam and the very moderate Bektashis and Rumi Sufi traditions in various parts of the Balkans.
These are forms of Islam antithetical to the Wahhabis, and they are in the majority in places like Bosnia-Herzegovina (I have gotten drunk with enough Bosnians to know). Supporting them politically, financially and militarily, plus encouraging them to evangelise in areas infested by the Wahhabi pestilence, is surely a strategic move that should be supported by anyone who sees the spread of intolerant radical Islam as one of the major threats to civilisation in the world today.
This is a subject on which the Serbian, Bosnian and Albanian governments, not to mention peoples, should be making common cause. It is in the interests of everyone who wants stability in the Balkans to oppose the presence of corrosive Wahhabi Islam and the Islamo-fascist politics that come with it. Tolerating Saudi money flooding into the region is like someone prone to cancer smoking cigarettes but given the areas fratricidal recent past, perhaps the malign Saudis can do a service by providing the Balkans’ fractious factions with something long needed: a legitimate and loathsome common enemy.
It is understandable that many Russians view World War II era war memorials as being about resistance to the Nazis. Yet it is equally understandable the monuments to the Red Army have altogether different connotations in the countries conquered by the Soviet Union.
The fact that Estonia has removed a statue of a Red Army soldier from downtown Tallinn, leading to violence and intimidation by ethnic Russians in Estonia and the Estonian embassy in Moscow being placed under a state of virtual siege, it does suggest a lot of Russians have not reconciled themselves to the fact the Soviet Imperium is a thing of the past.
How can any of Russia’s neighbours ever trust Russia and allow mutually beneficial trade relations to develop if the Russian state feels it has any legitimate role in telling the former victims of Moscow’s rule what sort of symbols are appropriate for displace in a city centre?
It is not hard to see why trade between the Baltic Nations and Russia has so quickly diminished in importance and been replaced by rapidly expanding commercial ties with the European Union.
“The British admitted defeat in North America and the catastrophes that were predicted at the time never happened. The catastrophes that were predicted after Vietnam never happened.”
– former General Michael Rose, urging a retreat from Iraq.
Ok, so the defeat in North America in 1782 did not result in catastrophe (unless you happened to be an American Tory of course) and that somehow tells us something about Iraq circa 2007 according to the former General. But Vietnam? Thirty years of communist totalitarianism are not a catastrophe? Presumably the Boat People were just Vietnamese tourists looking for Disneyland and everything was really just peachy after the fall of Saigon in 1975.
What would constitute a catastrophe, I wonder?. A couple Croatian chums of mine had the dubious pleasure of meeting Michael Rose in Bosnia (which is a story I would love to tell but do not feel I can) and they told me some rather uncomplimentary things about him and they certainly felt they got the better of him ‘professionally’. If that is his ‘take’ on Vietnam, he does not sound like someone whose judgement I would much care to rely on, that is for sure.
I wish I understood Turkish politics better than I do. There was a large pro-secularism rally in Ankara, which is surely a good thing. The fact these people are backed by the army is an even more encouraging sign.
On Friday evening military chiefs said in a statement they could intervene if the election process threatened to undermine Turkish secularism.
EU politics however, I understand just fine. The usual halfwits have moaned that the Turkish army is interfering with democracy because they made it clear they will not tolerate Turkey becoming an Islamic state. Yet strangely all manner of constitutional limitations on the democratic will of the majority exist in many countries (the USA and Switzerland, for example) and yet that does not seem to attract the displeasure of the fools who live off our tax money in Brussels.
In Turkey, the army is probably the best bulwark against Islamism and the fact the same €uro-spokesmen allegedly responsible for working towards integrating Turkey with the EU want to weaken the role of the main opponent of Islamist political aspirations in the country is… astonishing.
Sean Gabb has written a fine piece called Defending the right to deny the Holocaust, stating why censorship undermines our ability to decide what is and is not true.
With regard to the holocaust, I have – broadly speaking – two options. I can believe that it did happen roughly as claimed. Or I can believe that it is a gigantic conspiracy of lies maintained since the 1940s in the face of all evidence. Since debate remains free in the English-speaking world, it should be obvious what I am to believe. I believe in the central fact of the holocaust. On the secondary issues mentioned above, where my authorities do not agree, I suspend judgement.
Take away the freedom to argue with or against these authorities, though, and my assurance that they are right must be weakened.
Read the whole thing.
Groups like ‘Alcohol Concern’ like to use the force of the state to make people act the way they want. They do not care about making an argument and convincing people to act a certain way, they want prison and truncheons to make people tow their particular highly debatable line.
Parents who give alcohol to children under the age of 15 – even with a meal at home – should face prosecution, a charity says today. Parents who let children drink should face prosecution, says Alcohol Concern. […] A charity spokesman said: “It is legal to provide children as young as five with alcohol in a private home. Raising the age limit to 15 would send a stronger message to parents of the risks associated with letting very young people consume alcohol.” It is illegal to buy a drink in a pub under 18, but a 16- or 17-year-old can drink wine or beer if having a meal with parents.
You know what I would like to see? Whenever someone threatens me with force if I do not modify my social behaviour more to their liking in my own damn home, I would like them get arrested and thrown in jail. And I would like to see them beaten with truncheons if they do not comply with the cops just like they want for others who do not comply with their wishes. Such people are addicted to using force to impose their will on others and so why not “send a stronger message” that threatening people via the political system is really no different to threatening them with violence via some other institution, like the Mafia, for example.
If ‘Alcohol Concern’ want to convince people that they should not allow their children to drink (which is bullshit, I might add, as I suspect that encourages alcohol abuse in later life), well fine, let them take out adverts and evangelise their views like civilised members of civil society. However when they want the violence of law to impose their views, they should be regarded as anti-social thugs calling for the destruction of yet more civil society. Such people want to see society replaced with ever more politically derived formulae for personal behaviour. And of course such nonsense is unenforceable other than by family members denouncing each other a la the Communist model, which no doubt is what a group like ‘Alcohol Concern’ would like to see happen … which is literally anti-social.
It is not enough to reject the message of groups like ‘Alcohol Concern’, people who want to impose their views on every household in the country need to be held responsible on a personal level for advocating the force backed destruction of civil society. Such people are part of the problem of modern Britain, not part of the solution.
I just heard David Cameron on the news tonight saying that under Gordon Brown, Britain will just be getting “more of the same” of what it got from Blair.
In other words, Gordon Brown is a Blairite. Just like David Cameron then I suppose.
If you are going to vote, and you want a conservative alternative to Blair’s populist creeping regulatory authoritarianism, vote UKIP.
Otherwise just expect “more of the same” from both Brown and Cameron.
I was looking at the Telegraph and saw a very odd story titled Cameroon threatens to jail urine drinkers… my immediate reaction was “ok, now that is moderately revolting, but why the hell does David Cameron feel the need to pronounce on what is hopefully a fairly uncommon activity in the UK? Is there nothing this busybody does not want to regulate?”
And then I read it more closely…
It is hardly a secret I really really do not like Dave Cameron, but I was surprised when a chum of mine called me up to say Cameron was calling for a smaller state. I found this hard to believe and soon found this article called Cameron: People must be nicer to each other.
The Conservative leader accused Labour of treating Britons like children, saying the Government’s knee-jerk reaction to any problem was to bring in laws which often discouraged people from taking responsibility. He argued that measures such as anti-social behaviour orders had been counter-productive because they allowed people to abdicate responsibility for their actions.
[…]
He called for a “revolution in responsibility”, saying that the next Conservative government was not going to treat its citizens like children, promising “to solve every problem, respond to every incident, accident or report with a new initiative, regulation or law”. He insisted that a framework of incentives would prove more effective than regulations and laws. Mr Cameron promised to strengthen the family with the reform of a tax system that he claimed penalised couples who stayed together.
The fact the regulatory state is incredibly corrosive to civil society (in every sense of the phrase) should be self-evident to anyone claiming to be a conservative, but as Dave Cameron is not a conservative, in spite of leading a party called the Conservatives, I would not automatically assume he actually believes that. So you would think I would be pleased to finally see him saying something along these lines. In truth I burst out laughing when I read that article, not because I do not agree but because I do not believe him.
He has previously spent so much time telling us he can be trusted not to ‘do a Thatcher’ and how he intends to regulate our lives just as much as Blair’s Labour party, only ‘better’, why should his sudden enthusiasm for less regulation be believable? Simply put, he is not actually promising any such thing, not really.
The default position of all politicians is to pass laws in order to be seen to ‘do something’ and there is not a chance in hell that Dave Cameron, who is really just a political hack who sees power as an end in and of itself, will seek to actually roll back the state in any meaningful way and thereby deprive himself of patronage and political tools.
So of course the mask quickly slips…
He said a Conservative government would grant councils greater control of spending, while people should be encouraged to become more involved in the ownership and operation of their schools, public spaces, and social and environmental services.
Ah, so actually he is all in favour of the state doing stuff, he just wants it to be the local state rather than the central state. Sorry Dave, the only way you will stop damaging civil society is not by allowing a town council to spend the damn money, it is by not allowing any part of the state to spend so much money. A hell of lot less. There is just as much stupidity, greed and obsession with state control in town halls as there is in Westminster.
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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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