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]
Just thought I would share an extract from a letter I wrote to someone asking if I was ant-war or not:
Not all the contributors to Samizdata support the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not an ‘editorial policy’. Some of us do and some of us do not.
I am no more anti- or pro-war than I am anti- or pro-knife. It rather depends what it is used for. There are justified wars and there are unjustified wars and in this imperfect world in which we live there are wars which are shades of both.
I am not a neo-con who supports anything the US or UK state does overseas because it is the US or UK state doing it. I spent a considerable time in Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990’s observing the war there at very close quarters indeed. That experience well and truly cured me of any residual pacifism or squeamishness about the fact there are many truly evil people in this world who need to be confronted with violence. In fact there are some people with whom the only reasonable form of interaction is to put 8 grams of copper jacketed metal through their skulls at 710 metres per second.
However I suspect that is not what you are asking me…if you want to know do I have a problem with just shrugging my shoulders at the fact a homicidal mass murdering tyrant with a history of invading neighbouring countries had controlled Iraq for two decades with some help from my tax money … well, I do have a problem with that and so I did support the drastic remedial action of ejecting Saddam by force on the basic and rather non-purist notion “the bastards are going to tax me to fund the volunteer military regardless, it might as well be used for something that actually reduces the sum total of evil in the world even though that is going to be messy as hell”.
Afghanistan on the other hand was a no-brainer: the Taliban governed state supported a direct attack on the USA, ergo the Afghan state was the one who actually initiated the war, not the USA.
Unlike many, I did not expect the aftermath in either Iraq or Afghanistan to be pretty but I did not (and still do not) see that as an excuse for giving the Ba’athists a free pass to keep gassing entire villages and feeding people they do not like into wood-chippers feet first.
Ideally the Iraqis themselves should have done for Saddam, but of course when they tried immediately after Gulf War Episode I, the wonderful George Bush senior left them hanging out to dry after having previously openly encouraged them.
So yes, I supported the war in Iraq (for rather different reasons to the US and UK govts, it must be said) because I find nothing libertarian about drowning out the screams of two decades of tortured Iraqis by holding a couple copies of Murray Rothbard’s ‘The Ethics of Liberty’ over my ears.
Paul Joyal, an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin has been shot in the USA. Does this remind you of anything?
Of course it could just be another random street crime, but if not and this turns out to be another (hopefully just attempted) assassination of an overseas political enemy living in the west, then it is clearly well past time to start loudly demanding the state does one of the few legitimate things it taxes us for… protecting us all from the armed servants of a foreign government.
Could it be time to start threatening Putin in the most literal way? If he keeps killing people in the west then not only should Russian embassies be closed forthwith, those expensive security services we pay for should start motivating the Russian security services to behave via whatever means come to mind. I can certainly think of a few.
I will watch with interest to see what information comes out about this case. It could, after all, have just been a robbery.
The UK Independence Party faces a crippling demand from election watchdogs to forfeit more than £360,000 of donations. The Electoral Commission is due to announce today that it is launching legal action to recover 68 separate donations made to the anti-Brussels party by one of its main backers […] The threat has stunned Ukip’s leadership, which admitted yesterday that forfeiting the money would effectively leave the party penniless […] He and Nigel Farage, the party leader, are furious at what they say is over-reaction to a “simple clerical error”. Mr Farage, who said Ukip’s annual income was about £250,000, said: “I would have expected a rap on the knuckles.”
What seems strange to me is that UKIP actually appear to be surprised something like this could happen. They are trying to break The System and neither of the two main parties who benefit from it really has any interest in seeing the vast body of consensus they both share threatened by outsiders. The LibDems are a predictable ‘given’ that do not really threaten the status quo… UKIP on the other hand is a wild card. If the UKIP thought the risk they posed as a spoiler was going to be fought out amongst ‘gentlemen’ via the ballot box, then they are more naive than I thought.
Also a pet peeve of mine… “launching legal action to recover 68 separate donations…” Recover? The money will be gobbled up by the Treasury. Seize, confiscate, appropriate, take, perhaps, but in order to ‘recover’ the money they would have to give it back to the donor. I have always though the legal use of the word ‘recover’ was the state speaking at its most euphemistically disingenuous.
I have just discovered that I am clearly a member of the scofflaw demographic, as I suspect are a great many of Samizdata’s contributors and readers.
What scofflaws need now, and what the majority of our population will wish for in the future, probably at the point where the government finally does try to seize every handgun or require every citizen be fingerprinted and have his or her DNA sequenced and recorded in a permanent database, or when every financial transaction, no matter how trivial, must by law be processed electronically, by a credit card company, or when traffic at lighted intersections is tracked by remote cameras, or when our employers begin forcing us to piss in cups as a condition for keeping our jobs (wait a minute…), is a refuge from the unrelenting psychological, political, legal, religious, economic and physical coercion we are daily subject to at the hands of our employers, our governments and everybody in-between, and from the over-politicization of every facet of our lives.
Here on Samizdata, we do not have a single ‘editorial line’ and therefore we sometimes disagree with each other. And this is a case in point. Midwesterner has stated that:
There are very few rationalizations for supporting unilateral global free trade…
Actually there are loads of them.
If a foreign state wants to subsidize (say, mp3 players) that I buy at the expense of their hapless taxpayers,well, more fool them. In the long run it is unsustainable and if at some point their wicked government stopped the export of said products, then the glory of capitalism is that domestic producers will simply re-appear or an intermediary market for importing them via a third party will pop up, but in any case it is hardly a tragedy for the overseas people purchasing said products. Is it ‘fair’ to the mp3 player manufacturers elsewhere else? Wrong question because trade is not about fairness in that sense.
If it is ‘unfair’ that a country (say, Taiwan for example) subsidies a product to make the price lower, why is it not ‘unfair’ that a western state makes me pay more for my mp3 player because they have forced domestic mp3 player manufacturing companies to expend vast sums on welfare payments and other labour cost increasing regulations and hence making them uncompetitive? As the USA is generally less regulated than most other countries, by the logic of ‘fair trade’, no one else should allow the US to import ‘their’ unfairly under-regulated products into their over-regulated markets.
If you follow the logic of ‘fair trade’ rather than ‘free trade’, a nation-state should not allow its subject people to trade with anyone not subject to that nation-state’s laws (i.e. there should be no international trade at all), otherwise it is bound to be ‘unfair’ in some way. Labour costs, raw material costs, ease of market entry, etc. etc. are always going to vary.
Moreover, it is a mistake under most circumstances to accept that buying a product from a foreign company is trade between (say) the UK and US. Unless a state of war exists or I am trading with a state owned company, trade occurs between me and a company, not ‘my’ nation and some other nation. Unless the company I trade with is largely an adjunct of a foreign government, it is just trade between private people. To think otherwise suggest accepting that the state has a controlling interest in every economic action you make, even if the other party is not subject to its sovereignty. From both moral and utilitarian perspectives that is a serious mistake.
The continuing story of Samizdata people meeting in the USA in order to conspire, drink, shoot and eat…
The poison of the evening was both delicious and lethal in equal measure, which eventually necessitated…
…the development of some innovative instant sober-up techniques…
… which proved surprisingly popular
The following day, we took out our hangovers on the surrounding environment…
…and scared local wildlife by creeping around and pointing basters at them…
…large quantities of .40 were expended at metal objects…
…although we did not end up eating a local turkey, we had a sublime lamb dinner
I am not a believer but if there is indeed a ‘happy hunting ground’ in the hereafter, I think it will look something going shooting with your close friends followed by a meal of epic quality.
As Michael has posted some interesting pictures from sunny Mozambique, I thought I would contrast that with a picture out of my window of the freezing USA…
… I am here to do some shooting and maybe some skiing in the Land of the Free(ish). More later.
Vladimir Putin, the former KGB member who runs Russia as if the Soviet Union was still alive and well, does not like the fact the US is prone to take military action outside its own borders, claiming it is causing a new arms race.
Arms race? With who? China is certainly arming itself but sclerotic Russia? I would love to see some figures for Russian arms procurement over the last ten years to get some insight into the true strength of Russia as a serious military power. The Russian GDP is about $1.7 trillion… i.e. slightly less than Italy… and does anyone really loose much sleep over what the President of Italy thinks?
Still, it seems a bit perverse for a man who seems keen to sell technology to Iran to be complaining about all those things the pesky Yanks are doing which are not in his interests.
This is especially interesting since it [the IPCC report] fundamentally rejects one of the most harrowing scenes from Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. In graphic detail, Mr Gore demonstrated how a 20-foot rise in the sea level would inundate much of Florida, Shanghai, and the Netherlands. The IPCC report makes it clear that exaggerations of this magnitude have no basis in science – though clearly they frightened people and perhaps will win Mr Gore an Oscar.
All credit to the Guardian for risking accusations of heresy for publishing such impious sanity.
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.
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa
