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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Today I went for a wander around Camden in London, visiting Camden Market, Camden Lock and The Stables, contiguous areas filled to overflowing with small shops and open air stalls selling exotic Goth clothing, lampshades made out of old computer motherboards, Tibetan jackets, New Age crystals, Latex fetishware, fur-lined handcuffs, AC Milan supporters posters, weird furniture made out of tree stumps, flashing clothes with fibreoptic weaving, magic mushrooms to go, bongs, ‘No one knows I’m a Lesbian!’ tee-shirts, and food from West Africa, Morocco, Japan, Indonesia, Lebanon, Korea, Venezuela, France, Italy, China, Jamaica, Thailand, Holland, Scotland and even England.
The political content was endless racks of tee-shirts emblazoned with Che Guevara, Bush=Hitler and McShit Hamburger logos and stands owned the Socialist Worker’s Party and various other fringe folk manned by quixotic and very earnest folks handing out “Bush is the biggest terrorist!” posters.
Now my guess is that 75% of the people who thronged around Camden (the crowds were dense over a very large area indeed) are more or less completely indifferent to those particular the messages and certainly 95% of the stalls and shops were not selling politically oriented things at all. Yet what was available was entirely of the left and almost all of it was either Communist (Che Guevara’s image was widely seen) and/or anti-American.
Right in the centre of the large shopping area called The Stables is a Cuban Restaurant called rather unambiguously The Cuban. Giving it the benefit of the doubt, I stuck my head inside as for all I knew the place was owned by some Cuban refugee who had fled Castro’s communist dictatorship. But no. The first thing I see is a large image of Che Guevara. The outside of the building has a sign saying this place brings “The Spirit of Havana in the heart of Camden”…
…which presumably means that criticizing the restaurant gets you dragged off to jail by uniformed thugs as that is truly the spirit of Havana.
Now if someone wants to portray a benign fantasy version of Cuba (“Castro chicken tenders!“), well that is entirely up to them. But the moment I see that Che image up on the walls, The Cuban takes a position on who ‘the good guys’ are and it becomes more than just a Cuban restaurant. Too harsh? Well imagine a German restaurant. Now put a picture of Himmler on the wall of that restaurant and suddenly the entire context of the place changes. I wonder how people would react to a Cambodian restaurant which offered a “Pol Pot Roast” or a “Killing Fields Kocktails!” whilst a smiling image of Pol Pot looked down on the gorging clientele. My goodness what fun that would be. Still, perhaps a closer examination of The Cuban’s menu may reveal such dishes as “Jailed Journalist Jambalyah” or “Dead Dissident Daquiris” whereupon my views of the place would have to change somewhat. I have not looked but somehow I doubt it.
But it got me pondering. I wonder how many of the anti-globalisation activists who probably regard areas like Camden as ‘home turf’ and perhaps even eat at The Cuban realise how the area only looks the way it does because of the global movement of goods within a market economy. Do they seriously think that there is a place like Camden anywhere in Cuba? Do they think the new Age crystals, the fetish shops, the Goth gear purveyors, the mountain bike shops and, hell, even the clothes they wear, the mobile phones they all carry, the iPods they listen to, would all be available in a politically directed command economy? Please, show me such a place.
The thing is, their own lifestyles and environments are examples of the benefits of what they profess to reject. Quite funny really if you think about it.
Favouring open immigration into integrationist societies within the context of an eventual end to the welfare state and strengthening of civil society is a view widely shared in these parts. But I can also say will little fear of contradiction that not one of the regular writers for Samizdata would describe themselves as a multiculturalist.
The term did once have some appeal but in the end what it has come to mean is someone who thinks all (non-western) cultures are as desirable as each other. However I do not believe that all cultures are equally worthy and I doubt that in reality all too many other people really think that either is you dig deep enough. For all its many and varied flaws, the modern dynamic, secular and above all tolerant western civilisation of the early 21st Century is considerably superior to the alternatives. But of course even within the west, not all the societies that make up that great civilisation are as dynamic and successful as each other.
But what is a society? Definitions vary. In the crudest sence it is a group of people who interact with each other by simple virtue of their proximity (something the internet may change), and as a result follow broad (but often loose) cultural norms which have evolved to facilitate interaction and order. So by this very simple (prehaps even simplistic) definition is also pointless to pretend that having long term un-assimilated communities with certain key antithetical values within western societies is anything but a recipe for catastrophic strife.
The stunning and very under-reported race riot by Arabs and North Africans in France last month shows what happens when the state interferes for decades by subsidising parasitic behaviour based on identity politics and pretending that state fiats can either enforce or obviate the need for integration. When the French state bans chadors and all other religious symbols in French educational conscription centres (schools), it is not a case of France ‘defending western culture’ but rather admitting that civil society has so decayed under the weight of generations of politicization that natural social mechanisms no longer exist to integrate newcomers as effectively as once was the case. In the end nothing gets done in France without it being planned and implemented politically by the enarques in Paris and racial no-go areas are the result.
The solution in the end may be less government so that civil society can actually regenerate but in the short to medium term it is hard to see how the French political class, not a group known for frank introspection and honest analysis, can prevent France gradually sliding into ever more atavistic violence. Even Britain, which has far better race relations than France, learned in 2001 that playing identity politics and handing out other people’s money based on ethnicity is a dangerous thing to do. But whereas in the USA the 1992 Los Angeles riots spurred some soul searching in the USA and the emergence of excellent bipartisan social organizations aiming at economic and social integration, in France a significent race riot barely makes it into the press and in Britain, far from looking to enhance integration and the adoption of western cultural norms, we find that we now risk prosecution for making critical remarks about Islamic culture.
Is it any wonder so many Americans react to the European political classes’ pretensions of moral superiority with little more than a contemptuous and well deserved sneer?
Michael Totten has been putting some rather compelling articles up on his blog from Lebanon. That Michael, who is clearly a ‘glow in the dark American’, should wander into the ‘Hezbollahland’ section of Beirut with a camera suggests to me that he has some serious stones.
Make the strangely named ‘Spirit of America’ Lebanon blog part of your daily bloggage because it is extremely interesting stuff reported from the sharp end… and maybe even drop a dime or two into the plate to help him out.
The British Army is making a new regiment operational with a dedicated anti-terrorist mission in mind, called the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Much of the manpower will come from 2 Para bn and 14 Intelligence coy:
CGS statement 1st April
The SRR will draw personnel from existing capabilities and recruit new volunteers, both male and female, from serving members of the Armed Forces where necessary. Officers are keen to recruit those of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean appearance, as well as Muslims and members of ethnic minorities. Priority at recruitment must be given to those able to infiltrate or blend in with Islamic terror groups, rather than to their fitness or fighting capabilities.
There has been chatter about the unit from irrepressible insiders since the middle of last year (the name Reconnaissance and Surveillance Regiment was mooted) but the firm news is hitting the mainstream media now that the unit is going operational.
The badge seems to me to be referencing the Artists’ Rifles insignia, which seems appropriate give the Artists’ Rifles special forces lineage.
Now that the animated corpse of Terri Schiavo has finally been allowed to die, some of the fault lines of American conservatism have been brought into sharp focus. The behaviour of quite a few on the left has not been very edifying either but certainly it is amongst the Republicans that the most remarkable behaviour has occured.
The term ‘pro-life’ may be a reasonable description for those who oppose killing late term foetuses but the broad political church of pro-lifers (with whom I actually share many positions) includes a section of conservatism which is so obsessed with the physical trappings of life that they have stretched the definition of human existance to the breaking point.
The origins of this conservative faction are not hard to see. It came about in opposition to those on the socialist left who treat abortion as not so much something to be tolerated but rather a sacred sacrament which they venerate with cult-like obsessiveness and even demand it should be supported by the tax money of people who abominate the practice. In resistance to this we now see some conservatives developing an equally extreme cult to whom being ‘pro-life’ means treating the intentional death of a fertilised egg as tantamount to murder and demanding the removal of the customary fiduciary role of a spouse in decisions such as the Terri Schiavo case when the spouse does not follow the ‘pro-life’ party line. Moreover these people describe courts which does not intervene in such a civil matter as ‘activist judges’ who should be opposed with force by the executive if they will not buckle under and act like a, well, activist judge. → Continue reading: The American Zombie Cult
There is an excellent article on the Social Affairs Unit blog called Civil liberties cannot be defended selectively, by Joyce Lee Malcolm.
As the culture and meta-contextual assumptions of liberty have decayed amongst the intellectual and activist elements of British society, the institutions supporting liberty for so long have been revealed to have no foundations and are thus unable survive the torrent of events such as Hungerford or even the 9/11 terrorist attacks in another country.
As the Joyce Lee Malcolm article points out, the so called ‘opposition’ and even the vast majority of the media have abdicated their role in seriously questioning the disassembly of ancient civil rights for decades, whilst the rights to self-defence, trial by jury and double jeopardy are steadily abridged. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the British system, which for so long survived and thrived by using the custom of liberty as its bedrock, has shown its fatal weakness. Defending civil liberties in the UK is becoming harder and harder because not only have the institutional means for doing so been effectively swept away, so few British people even understand upon what their now largely illusory liberties were based.
On The Voice of Reason (slogan: “A penny saved is a government oversight”), there is a pretty clear headed little essay of what I think is most the reasonable position on this absurdly emotive case.
For many Americans who see the state as being the central and most important institution there is, the axis around which civil society orbits, the whole idea of ‘dual nationality’ is deeply disturbing. A person born in a different land can assimilate into civil society, adopt the mores, trappings and affectations of the place in which they now live and even accept being marked as a political subject of the government (become a citizen) but if they do not in fact repudiate being a subject of their previous home, to a statist American the question often asked is “can that person really be an American?”
I have heard people in the US say that of the many Jewish Americans who also hold Israeli passports and now increasingly that question is asked of Mexican Americans who retain ties to Mexico. Cosmopolitanism is seen as somehow dangerous and almost wicked. That dual nationality is particularly disturbing to some Americans is not surprising seeing as how the USA claims a proprietary interest in Americans nationals even if they do not live within the lands within which the US state claims sovereignty over (to the extent that even foreign people with US green cards who are not US subjects and who no longer live within US territory are still supposed to make US tax returns and incur US tax liabilities!). In most of the rest of the world, the moment your cross a national border, the nation you lived in generally looses interest in most of your economic and political activities, making dual nationality rather less emotive an issue other than in times of war between the two nations in question. Being a US ‘citizen’ is like having a big brand on your arse which stays with you regardless of where you go, making claims that US citizenship is somehow superior because it is not ‘ethnic based’ somewhat odd… it is more analogous to creating a new ethnicity, at least politically speaking, called ‘American’.
But for many, probably more who hold dual nationality, it is just a means of being able to live where they please and cross borders to places where they have friends and family without being harassed by the state’s border guards and pettifogging officials. The truth is that for the great majority of people the state is not the axis around which their life revolves and the bit of coloured cloth that flaps over them is really not a big deal.
As a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ myself, I make no secret that I see collecting as many citizenships as possible as useful way to dilute the influence that states have over people. That does not mean I am blind to the possibility of political leaders in one country making mischief in another country by appealing to notions of ‘Volk’ or ‘La Patria’… yet political antics can be trumped by simply allowing the natural (yes, natural) process of assimilation to run its course, rather than distorting and delaying that process with crazy ‘identity politics’ which reward primitive tribalistic attitudes, and social welfare programmes that invert the traditional motivate for people to become immigrants in the first place.
…no, not as in ‘Hollywood sucks’. Far from it in fact.
Our favourite lefty in Los Angeles, film producer, cigar addict, gun-owning pinko, O.G. blogger and all around gentleman Brian Linse kindly made his severely cool house in the Hollywood Hills available to me and fellow Samizdatista Jackie so that we would throw yet another blogger party for many very interesting people connected to the blogosphere…
Mickey Kaus demonstrated his improvised vampire repellent technique to a hushed audience
Many people stampeded into the bedroom when Amy suggested a game of ‘spin the bottle’
Eugene Volokh gave Jackie some legal advice in return for the famous Chilli Con Chelsea recipe
Arianna was described as a ‘once and future blogger’ but she seemed pretty blog-savvy right now Update: More reports and pictute of the latest LA Blogger Bash can be found here, here, here, here, here and here.
Kudos to German media watch blog Davids Medienkritik for getting Stern magazine to change its text describing the Italian intelligence officer killed at a US military vehiclular checkpoint as having been ‘murdered’ by US soldiers.
The fact this powerful magazine reacted quickly to David’s sharply critical remarks shows that more and more of the mainstream media are now well aware of the blogosphere’s ability to shine an uncomfortable spotlight on such things.
Nice one, David!
“To permit an entire class of political communications to be completely unregulated… would permit an evasion of campaign finance laws…”
The American regions of the blogosphere has been reverberating after Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly stated that blogs must be regulated in order to comply with US campaign finance laws.
However I do not propose to add my voice to the myriad of other commentators decrying this or explaining why it is such a bad idea, as regular readers of this blog can pretty much join the dots to guess The Samizdata Position on that issue. What I will do though is point out that as well as being a threat to freedom of expression, this has huge positive potential as well.
There are few things more corrosive to the power of the state than for it to decree something and then be seen to be unable to enforce its writ. So let Colleen Kollar-Kotelly do her worst. You want to link to a Democratic or Republican campaign site regardless of what regulations say you can or cannot do? Simple… off-shore hosting. Host your blog outside the USA and post using a pseudonym (like maybe “Tom Paine” or “Ben Franklin”) and then link to whoever the hell you want to. Moreover put a banner on your blog saying “This Blog is in wilful violation of US Campaign Laws and there is not a damn thing you can do about it”.
Hell, my ‘inner capitalist’ is whispering in my ear as I write this… I just might talk to some chums of mine who are hosting experts with a view to setting up Samizdata.net branded non-US based hosting, available for bloggers across the political spectrum who want to stick their thumb in the eye of those people who want to control free political expression. Anything which weakens the authority of the state, shows the limits of political power and makes enterprising folks some money whilst helping people to do all that is too good for me to pass up. Yeah, I really hope this travesty becomes law in the USA… stay tuned <evil laugh>
There is an interesting article in The American Conservative by Robert Locke called Marxism of the Right, by which he is referring to libertarianism. The ‘money quote’ being:
If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function.
Like most right-statist (conservative) criticisms of libertarianism, this one fails on several levels. In this article’s mitigation, libertarianism (like conservatism) means different things to different people and so no doubt some self-described or de facto libertarians believe that ‘pure’ selfishness and individualism are all a society needs to function (that said, I reject the implied semantics suggesting that selfishness and altruism are mutually exclusive as I do not accept the Randian definition of altruism that Locke rather amusingly seems to use). Yet most well considered libertarians do not really take such a simple view of things as Locke suggests.
He asks libertarians many questions:
What if a free society needed to draft its citizens in order to remain free?
Then is it in fact a ‘free society’ to start with? Or is it just ‘less un-free’ that some alternative? More correctly however ‘society’ does not draft its ‘citizens’ (and I prefer the more honest term ‘subjects’), only states do that… and the two are not the same thing at all.
What if it needed to limit oil imports to protect the economic freedom of its citizens from unfriendly foreigners?
But whose ‘economic freedom’ is really being talked about here? I find it bizarre that in 2005 this argument is still being made about a fungible globally traded commodity.
What if it needed to force its citizens to become sufficiently educated to sustain a free society?
I would be curious to know if Locke feels that society in the United States was hugely less free before the introduction of educational conscription. I also wonder if he feels that the low quality state education imposed on children in the blearier parts of many large US cities has made those people more free and if so, why?
What if it needed to deprive landowners of the freedom to refuse to sell their property as a precondition for giving everyone freedom of movement on highways?
And yet Japan, a nation of extraordinarily high land prices, manages to create a rail system vastly superior to that in the USA without legal powers of compulsory purchase. There are always alternatives.
What if it needed to deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap foreign labor in order to keep out poor foreigners who would vote for socialistic wealth redistribution?
But surely here the problem is not the origin of voters but rather unconstrained democracy. This is not an argument for controlling immigration but rather for sensible constitutional constraints which set the acceptable limits of politics. → Continue reading: Marxism of the Right?
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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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