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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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.
Be very suspicious when you hear the phrase “gap between rich and poor”. In the print version of the Evening Standard (I could not find a link to the article), Financial editor Anthony Hilton writes an article that makes a lot of rather questionable unspoken assumptions.
Gordon Brown will not change the rules that attract tax exiles to London. he is right to want the super-rich to stay but we must be aware the increasing gap between rich and poor
…and…
The British economy could be about to enjoy another 50-year boom but the major challenge remains the division of the spoils
…and…
The unwritten deal is that they pay little tax in return for adding to the general prosperity of the nation. It may be unfair to normal British taxpayers, it may be unfair competition from the perspective of foreign competitor countries, but it is pragmatic and it has worked
Although this article goes on to say that it is now the uncontested view that market economies are the only way to go, Anthony Hilton’s words are redolent with an assumed underpinning Marxist meta-context, to use Samizdata-speak. The fact that there is a gap between rich and poor is bad is a given to him. Why is it bad? He does not say because his meta-context takes it as a given that such a notion will be shared by his readers.
And that an economy is something that must be ‘divided as spoils’ is very strongly indicative of the fixed quantity of wealth fallacy. It suggests that for someone to get richer, someone else has to get poorer, which is perhaps the single most important underpinning notion behind almost every form of command based economics. Wealth is seen as something “we” have to divide, rather than something which is created.
Finally, for it to be “unfair” for someone else to have less of their money taken by the state even when that person can bring a quality of economic value beyond that of “normal British taxpayers”, seems to indicate that Anthony Hilton thinks the person being taxed more (in relative terms) should feel aggrieved against the person being taxed less rather than feeling aggrieved against the state which is taxing them more. Of course Anthony Hilton might not mean that but somehow I suspect he does.
Make no mistake, Anthony Hilton is not some poisonous Polly Toynbee style Stalinist as he does accept that market economies are the way to go, yet in almost everything he writes there is a large (and often unspoken) ‘but’ implicit in notion after notion… which is why I do not actually think he really does like the idea of market economies when it really comes down to it.
There is an interesting discussion point in the Telegraph called Should we be looking for a new England?.
And my answer would be yes. Ideally I would have liked to preseve much of the old England but I fear that is no longer a realistic option. I used to support the idea of an unwritten constitution because of the importance of unenumerated rights, but the Major and Blair years have shown that Britain’s unwritten constitution was not worth the paper it was not written on. We have been disarmed, we have had our rights to free speech greatly curtailed, our rights to trial by a jury of our peers abridged, our underpinning civil society regulated out of existence in area after area, our right to property vastly infringed upon.
In short, there can be no pretence whatsoever that The System has worked to protect us from our political masters. The British system survived for a long time because enough people wanted it to survive. As most are now willing to allow themselves to be herded and bought off with their own money, the system is now little more than populist authoritarianism.
Yes, we very badly need a new England.
(Kindly spare us any jokes about New England.)
Blogger Rurrik at The Whims of Fate has a terrific collection of photos of the anti-Putin marches in Russia (including Kasparov being detained). There are so many images that I will not link to a specific article, just check out the whole blog (do not just look at the first page).
The sidebar statement about the Russian Federation on The Whims of Fate is:
- Brutally Suppressed Opposition
- Bureaucratic, Corrupt, Backwards Government
- By the Grace of God, Emperor Tsar
- Byzantine Justice
- Censorship
- Church as Arm of the State
- Extravagant Ruling Elite
- Huge Unwieldy Army
- Political Assassinations
- Powerful Secret Police
- Subservient Parliament
- Widespread Abject Poverty
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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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