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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India Knight has written an article in the Sunday Times about the realities of life for Muslims and decrying ‘Islamophobic’ views like Jack Straw’s dislike of the Islamic veil. Many of the points she makes are fair ones but I think the underlying premise of her article is completely mistaken.
I am particularly irked by ancient old ‘feminists’ wheeling out themselves and their 30-years-out-of-date opinions to reiterate the old chestnut that Islam, by its nature, oppresses women (unlike the Bible, eh,?) and that the veil compounds the blanket oppression […] That perhaps there exist large sections of our democratic society, veiled or otherwise, who have every right to their modesty, just as their detractors have every right to wear push-up bras?
Fine, but Muslim women wearing veils is hardly something new: they have been a common spectacle on British streets for a good twenty years, so something has changed. The reason why people who were previously tolerant of the more outwardly outlandish Islamic ways was that there was no sense that Muslims were trying to impose their sensibilities on others outside their narrow community of religious believers.
I am not saying there are widespread calls amongst Muslims in Britain to force all women to wear veils, but if Jon Snow (who is certainly no Islamophobic reactionary) is to be believed, there is indeed widespread Muslim intolerance for any exercise of free speech which they find offensive… and by intolerance I do not mean dislike or disrespect (respect is never a right) but rather support for the use of force (legal or extra-legal) to prevent people ‘insulting’ Islam.
Tolerance is a right, but it is one entirely contingent upon it being reciprocated, because tolerating intolerance makes no sense whatsoever. Simply put, because so many Muslims refuse to tolerate non-Muslim criticism of their ways, that inevitably means that fewer and fewer secular (or Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Confucian, Buddhist) people in the UK are willing to tolerate adherents of a set of beliefs in which intolerance of others appears to be endemic.
As I have said before, I have little time for any religion but if people want to live in ghettos with their co-fantasists so that their weird values are the local community norms, I regard that as a problem, but a manageable and tolerable one. It is when they want to extend their influence over others by force that I stop tolerating them. So even if what India Knight says about the realities of life for most Islamic women is true… so what? The nature of life for people who choose to be Muslims is not the root of antipathy to Islam by non-Muslims. Islam is not a race, it is a set of beliefs and therefore it is a choice. As it is something people choose to believe in, it is therefore something upon which they can and should be rightly judged by others. When someone wears the outward trappings of a set of beliefs (such as a hijab, a KKK outfit, a crucifix, a Hammer and Sickle, a Nazi armband, an Ayn Rand tee-shirt), it seems strange they should not expect to be judged on the basis of what those beliefs mean to others.
I dislike the Islamic veil for much the same reason I dislike people who wear pictures of a Hammer and Sickle upon their shirts, not because of what they are (they are just bits of coloured cloth after all) but because they represent a set of beliefs which are incompatible with post-Enlightenment civilization itself and also indicate the wearer will probably not be willing to tolerate me expressing what I think of them if they are true to their beliefs, regardless of how politely I phrase my remarks. That is what I find intolerable.
One of the key rights that makes civil society possible is the right to free association: the right to deal with people who want to deal with and the right to dis-associate yourselves from those who (for whatever reason) you disapprove of without threat of force being used against you.
As a result it should be no surprise that in the ongoing struggle to replace the interactions of civil society with entirely political mediated interactions, that the right to free association is under attack yet again. The right to decide who you must to do business with is being fought for by Catholic and Muslim institutions who do not want to be forced by law to deal with people who are homosexuals (i.e. people acting sinfully according to their beliefs).
Yet no one is even discussing the fact that individuals, such as shop owners or landlords for example, might also want the right to free association Why is this right being discussed only in terms of ‘group rights’? The right of Catholic or Muslim institutions not to have people forced on them by law? What about the rights on everyone else to make their own minds up who they will or will not associate with and do business with?
There is an excellent bit of reportage in The Guardian by James Meek, covering the experiences of British troops in Southern Afghanistan that gives a good troop’s eye view of things.
There are some similarities in the USA and UK with the convergence of practical politics into a ‘radical centre’ of regulatory big government statists, whose ‘left’ and ‘right’ labels are rather like those of Coke and Pepsi… sure there are differences, but in the end they are still selling sweet brown fizzy drinks… or selling a vision of state in which the mainstream ‘right’, be it Dave Cameron or George W. Bush, are not talking about shrinking the state (even a bit) and freeing the individual (or even the community) but rather just increasing the pace of regulation a bit slower and in different places than the ‘left’.
Similarly the mainstream ‘left’ like Tony Blair or Al Gore are not selling wholesale paleo-socialist nationalisation of businesses as they did in the past, because they, like the mainstream ‘right’, now follow a more (technically) fascist economic model in which property can be ‘private’ but control of it is contingent upon being in accord with national political objectives and permission from some local political authority.
The ‘left’ and ‘right’ use different metaphors, different cultural references, different symbolism, but in truth they are selling much the same product. They put huge effort into fetishising their product differentiation precisely because there is so little difference in their core beliefs. In the USA, even the issue of self-defence and opposition to victim disarmament is less than solid with the Republicans than it once was as Bush made is clear he was ‘flexible’ regarding anti-gun legislation and needed hard lobbying to not renew the so-called ‘assault rifle’ ban (i.e. semi-automatic rifles which look ‘scary’). Put simply, all mainstream political parties (at the moment) are statist centrists, neither in favour of overt nationalisation nor of individual autonomy, regardless of their sales schpiel.
Why this is true is not hard to glean. Professional politicians are people who have the psychological disposition to both meddle in other people’s lives and to use force to have their views imposed. They are people who value having power over others above all else and the more aspects of society that are subject to political direction, the more important politicians become regardless of their hue.
So the natural order of things, if you are a person who makes their living out of being a politician, is to work to extend the state into more and more areas of life because the state is what you have influence over, thereby making yourself more important to ever more people. → Continue reading: The folly of always voting for the lesser evil
Brian Micklethwait is going on ‘internet TV’, which should be interesting. I recall Brian once telling me that he thought he had a ‘good face for radio’. Check it out and hear what he has to say.
Sorry, but the comment system is acting weird… we will try to get it fixed as soon as possible.
It seems to be blocking things it should not and has posted most of the comments entered today dated… some time tomorrow!
This year’s Libertarian Alliance Conference will be on Saturday 25th and Sunday 26th November 2006, at the rather splendid National Liberal Club in London. Details and on-line booking can be found here, but a word of warning… the event is filling up quite quickly this year and the number of tickets is finite so if you want to come, book soon to avoid disappointment.
But not the usual suspects it appears. I just came across this story more less by accident.
David Bolais Jackson, 62, of Trent Road, Nelson, was arrested on Friday in the Lancaster area after leaving his Grange practice for the last time. Jackson was charged with being in possession of an explosive substance for an unlawful purpose. However, it is unclear who or what the intended target might have been.
Police found rocket launchers, chemicals, British National Party literature and a nuclear or biological suit at his home. The find came shortly after they had recovered 22 chemical components from the house of his alleged accomplice, Robert Cottage, a former BNP election candidate, who lives in Colne. The haul is thought to be the largest ever found at a house in this country.
Some BNP members stockpile the largest ever haul of explosives found at a house in the UK and this does not make the front page of the national media? Did I just somehow miss the articles about this in the Telegraph, Guardian and Times?
I was mildly amused to see that there is a book published in the USA called ‘Why mommy is a democrat’.
Presumably it teaches children that just as ‘Mommy’ looks after Junior and makes him share his toys with the kid next door, if the kid next door refuses to share his toys with Junior, Junior should threaten to lock him in the attic and take the toys he wants by force… just like the nice Democrats use the threat of jail for people who do not ‘share their toys’ like they are told.
Just a guess.
Muslims in Britain should start taking a good look at the auguries. Windsor, a town known for its genteel (and tourist infested) tearooms, has been playing host to low level riots and violence by enraged English youths for several nights now, sparked by Muslim thugs attacking a mother and daughter and by aggressive demands for a mosque to be built in the overwhelmingly non-Muslim town.
At the same time, Leader of the Common Jack Straw has been saying publicly that he would rather that Muslim women not wear veils as it is deeply divisive socially.
The Blackburn MP has come under fire after he said the veil could be seen as “a visible statement of separation and difference” […] Writing in yesterday’s Lancashire Telegraph, Mr Straw revealed he had asked Muslim women visiting his surgeries to remove their veils because he values “face-to-face” contact.
He is not calling for state imposed dress codes (which I would strongly oppose) but he is making a self-evident statement about Muslim non-assimilation. Quite rightly he has not made this a broader contention as I have yet to hear anyone voice concern over Hindu women wearing saris or Chinese women wearing cheong sams (I should think not!), because although some Chinese and Hindus choose not to assimilate (but of course many do), they are not calling for their cultures and beliefs to be legally off-limits from criticism or ridicule. It is only Muslim non-integration in the UK that is really a problem because of an apparently widespread Muslim unwillingness to reciprocate tolerance for tolerance.
The bigger point here is, of course, not that Jack Straw personally thinks it is unwise that Muslims make themselves so visibly separate from broader British society but that the Leader of the Commons should feel it appropriate to say something that was obviously going to upset a body of Muslim opinion in the UK. This was not an off-the-cuff remark and moreover, he has repeated it and elaborated on the point.
I would say that elements of the political class are starting to notice that increasing numbers of the fifty eight million non-Muslims in Britain are growing a great deal less tolerant of intrusive Muslim demands on their tolerance. There comes a time when people start to think enough is enough. In the end, democratic politicians stay in business by positioning themselves to be on the right side of that sort of ‘mass market’ issue and that is something Muslim ‘community leaders’ would do well to ponder when they do a little projecting into the future, assuming they actually want Muslims in Britain to have a future.
I am so tired of having to roar about the latest provocation-of-the-day from some Islamic barking moonbat that I really need to write about something else… so how about a paean to one of my favourite artists?
As a big, no, huge Frank Miller fan, delighting in the way he has darkened up an entire art form, rescuing it from both Disneyfication and political correctness, it is interesting to see how his influence has started to spread into other areas of the arts. However I was apprehensive that when I heard that Sin City was going to be turned into a movie… “unfilmable” was all I said when I heard. I was completely wrong and Sin City was a tour de force, unlike the attempt to translate Miller’s Elektra onto the screen, which was a disappointing mess inspite of featuring one of my favourite actresses.
So with the debacle of Elektra in mind, my reaction was rather dubious when I heard they were going to make 300 into a movie… oh me of little faith… having just watched the trailer, well, I am not used to having a film clip lasting 1 minute and 46 seconds sent a shiver up my spine quite like that. This is clearly one to watch on the largest screen possible.
Frank Miller has been one of the leading people adding a harder edge to US comics since the 1980’s, reclaiming a place in a medium in which I have always felt France and Japan lead the world. That he is now proving a source of interesting movies for Hollywood just increases my admiration for the man.
A Muslim police officer has been allowed to refuse to guard the Israeli embassy in London.
A spokesman for Scotland Yard said Sir Ian had ordered a rethink of the service’s policy to consider special dispensations on moral grounds
A ‘rethink’? When ordered to carry out his job and protect a location within the United Kingdom from unlawful attack, PC Alexander Omar Basha took the view that it would be immoral to protect that place (in other words, he refused to enforce British law regarding possible acts of violence because of who the potential target was). The only ‘rethink’ needed is why was he not fired on the spot? I wonder… has a Jewish policeman in the UK attached to the Diplomatic Protection Group ever refused to guard the embassy of a Muslim country in Britain?
So tell me, if a policeman who was a member of the BNP refused to protect an African embassy, do you think the Metropolitan Police would need even ten seconds for a ‘rethink’?
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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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