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]
|
If you have not checked out the Dissident Frogman‘s groovy new multi-lingual blog, then now is the time to rectify that oversight. However be careful not to push the red button.
Dissident Frogman is one of the best pro-liberty sites on the internet and is a reminder than there is more to France than Weasels. Just remember not to push the red button.
The Frogman is still working on the site so updates are a bit patchy at the moment; however it is worth checking it out now just to marvel at the sheer technical virtuosity of his graphic design talents. Note the ‘Busted Beards Al-Qaeda Fragboard’ in the sidebar…
…it adds a whole new meaning to the term ‘hit counter’
BUT DON’T PRESS ANY RED BUTTONS!
Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
It is interesting to note that the pseudonymous Baghdad blogger Salam Pax is considering supporting the secular Iraqi Communists in the aftermath of Ba’athist Socialism:
[May Day], workers of the world unite. The Iraqi Communist Party and the Iraqi Communist Workers Party are covering a lot of walls with red posters. I have not heard that Nadia Abdul Majeed of the Communist Workers Party is in Baghdad. I am still offering to volunteer if they do some cosmetic changes to their name. They have their hearts in the right place, unlike most other parties who have their hearts near their wallets.
Now as he is a member of a minority by virtue of his private and personal lifestyle choices, I am amazed he finds the slightest intellectual or emotional pull towards any system which takes a collectivist view of the world. To be a collectivist is to have a vision of society which argues that not only should ‘society’ have the right to decided what you (and I do mean YOU as an individual) and a willing other person can do together peacefully, be it exchanging good, money, ideas or bodily fluids, but that ‘society’ also has the right to use violence (i.e. law) to compel you to act as the state wishes. This should logically be a hard sell to any group which by its’ very nature will always be in the minority and hense always politically vulnerable.
Islamic collectivists will not tolerate things like homosexuality or charging interest on a loan, even between willing participants, and will use The State to enforce their views… Communist collectivists will not tolerate exchanging goods or even your own labour privately, even between willing participants, and will use The State to enforce their views. But the core principle underpinning all collectivism is that agreements between consenting adults, be it in the market place or the bedroom, are not something that can be allowed without the ‘political community’ accepting it: in other words, regardless of endless claims to the contrary there is no such thing to a collectivist as civil society, just The State, which is to say, everything is political and politics is about the use of FORCE.
Nothing is private and personal under a collectivist system because everything is subject to politics. It is not a survival trait to be a quirky eccentric or outsider in a collectivist system. Under a non-collectivist system you are free to form communes, pray to Allah (or not), have sex with anyone who is willing. But under collectivism, interaction means politics and politics means laws and laws mean force… and as laws are not optional, you cannot just opt-out and pursue an alternative lifestyle.
If the Iraqi Communists, unlike the Iraqi Party of God, will not persecute someone for being gay, that is not because they think such matters are a private issues… there are no private issues under collectivism… it just means they will allow you to do this or that, not that they think you have the right to do as you please. Remember that before you start sticking up pro-collectivist posters in Baghdad, Good Mister Pax.
I would not presume to tell Salam Pax who to vote for but I have no hesitation telling him what to vote for: What you need after Ba’athism is not just a different government but less government.
It has been a while since I tripped over one of these. Let me state up front that I have no reason to think Richard Poe is a member of the tinfoil hat and black helicopter brigade, so I read his stuff with rather more respect that I do on some other sites I could mention. Thus I will try to examine his thesis without the usual clothespeg-on-the-nose I use when looking at conspiracy theories. He has written an article called The 9-11 Conspiracy: We Need a Truth Commission, in which he suggest that that:
Though cautiously worded, Judge Baer’s decision has implications beyond the 9-11 case. Dissident experts ranging from former CIA director James Woolsey to Yossef Bodansky, director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, have long alleged that America may be under “low-intensity” or “asymmetric” attack by foreign powers hiding behind “false flag” operatives such as bin Laden.
[…]
Through the Clinton years, Big Media and Big Government systematically suppressed evidence of foreign involvement in such operations as the 1995 attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the downing of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 (probably by a missile). But the evidence continues to grow.
[…]
Moreover, the number of America’s enemies abroad may be larger than we have been led to believe. The alliance which George Bush named the “Axis of Evil” — minimally defined as Iran, Iraq, North Korea and their “terrorist allies” — may itself be a false flag operation under whose cover such envious powers as Russia, China — and perhaps even the European Union, under French and German domination — may have secretly cooperated to oppose what they see as the threat of U.S. global hegemony.
I will not even attempt to address Richard’s domestic issues as I cannot get to grips in my mind with his theory on why both the previous and current US governments would cover up what he is suggesting they are covering up, so I will just look at the other main thrust: the asymmetric attack by foreign powers.
It is very unclear what the objective of these shadowy people behind the ‘false flag’ gig would be, given the nature of the actual and putative attacks. Blowing up a US government building in Oklahoma City, of all places, would gain what for whom? For a born-in-the-USA individual such as Tim McVeigh, who may feel Oklahoma City actually features in the grand scheme of things, perhaps the attack made perfect sense as a strike against tyranny and day-care centres. But who outside the USA could find Oklahoma State on a map without considerable squinting, let alone Oklahoma City, or see attacking it as a stepping stone to overthrowing the hated hegemonic power? Did mission planners in Moscow, Paris or Peking know something about the importance of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building to the global geo-strategic balance of power that is hidden from the untutored eye? I cannot see how blowing up a bunch of run-of-the-mill bureaucrats was going to bring Oklahoma to its knees, let alone the United States. → Continue reading: Ah, conspiracy theories!
Our chum from Baghdad has some new stuff up, so check it out.
If the blogger archives are still phuked, just go here.
Although I have never met the guy, would not know him from Adam and I doubt we see the world in the same way, I am unaccountably delighted he made it through the war in one piece and is once more blogging.
Once upon a time, there was a group of states within a larger nation who did something terrible…they allowed slavery. Eventually there was a dreadful civil war between those states and some other states who did not approve of slavery. Although the war was only incidentally about slavery and rather more about centralised versus decentralised power, it did at least have the happy effects of ending slavery.
The National Flag of The Bad Guys: The Stars and Bars!
The flag which The Bad Guys flew in battles
How do we know they were ‘The Bad Guys’? Because of slavery, of course, but mostly we know this because they lost and the winners get to write the history books.
So much later, after the war was over, one state used a flag which harked back to the old battle flag. They argued that most of the people who fought in that war from their state were just fighting for hearth and home and very few of them actually owned slaves anyway. Regardless, those days were part of their history and they rather liked their old flags.
Oh no…Echos of The Bad Guys!
This upset some people mightily and they threatened economic boycotts and all manner of other nastiness if the state did not change their flag to remove the symbolism of The Bad Guys of Old.
So the governor said people could vote on this, but then decided that no, actually, they couldn’t, or maybe they could… but in the mean time, here is a splendid new flag and will you leave me alone now?
The Flag Spangled Banner?
So folks stopped for a moment, looked at this new flag and agreed that it was just about the dumbest, ugliest dish-rag to flap over the state capitol ever. “Screw that!” they all cried, and so the arguments continued to rage.
Eventually however, they agreed to another splendid brand new flag and everyone was happy because this new flag does not look anything like the flag used by The Bad Guys of Old, right?
The State Flag of the Good Guys: The…er, um, ah…Stars and Bars
Those Americans… who says they have no concept of ironic humour? You just gotta love ’em.
A United States federal judge has ruled that Iraq provided material support to Osama bin Laden and his terrorist group al-Qaeda for the September 11, 2001, attack and is liable to pay $US104 million ($163 million) in damages to two victims’ families. The ruling, by Manhattan District Judge Harold Baer, is the first court decision stemming from the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Where does one begin? Cretinous? Idiotic? Ludicrous? Laughable?
The notion a US court would think it had any standing or authority to order Saddam Hussain’s Ba’ath Party, let alone the future post-Ba’athist government of Iraq, to do anything whatsoever is almost beyond belief. How divorced from reality is this? Judge Harold Baer and the people involved in this case must be suffering from serious metal delusions. I filed this article under the category ‘North American Affairs’ and ‘How very odd!’ because is sure has hell has nothing to do with ‘Middle East & Islamic’.
And if you read through this Programme Complaints: appeals to the Governors (pdf file: go to page 8 for the best bits), you can find exactly how they do see it. I love this little gem:
- [E]ven if the two men were involved in terrorist acts, it did not follow that the BBC should necessarily have referred to them as “terrorists” rather than “militants” […]
Read that again… slowly. And again. Once more. Okay? 
Now substitute the words ‘rape’ and ‘rapists’ for ‘terrorist acts’ and ‘terrorists’, and then replace ‘militants’ with ‘sexually forceful’. Read the whole document to get the context of the actual remarks, but do you see where I am going with this?
I would care a whole lot less if these ‘gentlemen’ were not being funded with my appropriated money.
Tony Martin will not be released from jail. He will remain inside for the crime of defending his property for the full five year period of his sentance (he was initially sentanced to life).
The people who make up the parole board which has just decided that he poses an unacceptable threat to people who may in the future break into his home are wonderful examples of what Sean Gabb describes as The Enemy Class.
I strongly suspect their treatment of Tony Martin, found guilty of shooting dead a serial burglar in August 1999, has more to do with the fact he refuses to apologise or acknowledge any wrong doing in his act of defending his property from predators. That a group of parole board members whose salaries are paid by the state predating taxpayers should think that way is perhaps not such a surprise.
As I said before, the lunatics have taken over the asylum. As the political process in Britain has decayed to the point that there appears to be no political cost to the established power elite for the de facto criminalisation of self-defence (never mind that the state can gun you down in the street with scarcely a murmur), and de jure criminalisation of defending your own property, be it from the state or criminals (and the difference between them narrows daily), I wonder if people may simply start going out of their way to avoid involving the state in the aftermath of any act of self-defence.
As people seem to be unclear who to blame for the state deciding it is easier to prosecute law abiding homeowners than to go after housebreakers, and thus most seem unclear who are the correct people in need of having bricks thrown through their windows given that voting seems to make no difference, I expect sales of shovels, bin-bags, deep freezers, hacksaws and baseball bats to start increasing in high crime areas. There may even be a business opportunity for specialised discreet garbage disposal companies to assist this possible future trend.
The core of that problem is rooted in the contempt for private property found amongst the statists who make up the majority of the political class in Britain. Never forget that defending yourself is the ultimate expression of self-ownership and that is something the British state cannot tolerate, particularly the overt socialist parts: these people support ‘democratic’, which is to say political, control of the means of production and that includes your body. Just ask Tony Martin… the state is not your friend.
Somehow I missed this item yesterday… Now we have never been all that timid about slamming George Dubya when he makes a dumb move, but to be honest, if he delivers what may prove to be the coup de grace to the UN as a source of so-called ‘moral authority’, then I will start collecting memberships for the George W. Bush Fan Club!
The Anglosphere is divided over the metric system… sure, it makes vastly more sense but, damn it, it is just too damn French!
But do not despair! That scholar and wit, the inimitable Diamond Geezer, has come up with a new and vastly superior system of measures suitable for the 21st Century. For example:
Length – the freedom
Definition: the distance one tank can advance in one minute
- the distance from Basra to Baghdad = 1 megafreedom
And who says genius is dead in Britain? Oh, yeah, that was me. Sorry.
Update: As usual, blogspot’s archives are phuked up, so just go here and scroll down.
Michael Totten has written an interesting article about the difference between ‘liberal’ (in the US sense of the word) and ‘conservative’ views of the world, called Builders and Defenders.
If you want to find a person who knows the history of pre-war Nazi Germany, the Middle East during the Cold War, or the partition of India and Pakistan, you’re better off looking to the right than to the left.
I am astonished and dismayed to discover this. I’m a life-long liberal and I devour history like food. Not until after September 11 did I learn I’m a minority on the left.
But clearly as someone very well read in genuinely foreign history and affairs, Michael is a member of a pretty tiny minority everywhere, not just on the left. Perhaps he would be less of a minority amongst a certain species of neo-conservatives in the USA, but he would still be one. In my experience, Michael would also find the situation amongst American capital-L Libertarians more akin the one he finds on the left.
Which brings me to another point… Michael is certainly a thoughtful commentator but he suffers from that exasperating bipolar disorder common to those on both the statist left and statist right: there is a great deal more to the world than just ‘liberal’ (in the US meaning of democratic regulatory quasi-socialist) and ‘conservative’ (in the US meaning of democratic regulatory quasi-capitalist). That someone with a blog should fall into this meta-contextual trap is all the more grating for a libertarian such as myself, given the sheer number of neither ‘liberal’ nor conservative blogs there are within the ever expanding blogosphere. Even the mightily Sir Glenn of Instant Punditry describes himself as a ‘Whig’ rather than a ‘liberal’ or conservative.
The truth is that what Michael is describing is more of an American phenomenon than a left or right one, and even then it is only slightly less applicable to us ‘more cosmopolitan’ British and Europeans.
There is an old joke, which like so many is all the more amusing because it is essentially true…
The French think the world revolves around Eiffel Tower, the British think they own the world and the Americans think they are the world
Brendan O’Neill has been lamenting the postponement of elections in Northern Ireland, pointing out this is profoundly anti-democratic. He is of course entirely correct.
However as long as the state is allowed to have more or less unlimited potential power over civil society, it cannot be unexpected that in a tribal place like Ulster, folks in a given community are going to be terrified of The Others having their hands on the levers of power. I suspect trying to share so much power is at worst a futile hope leading to more violence and at best, a Mexican stand-off.
Surely at least part of the solution is to simply bind ALL political power in Northern Ireland hand and foot with a written constitution that places pretty much every aspect of life that really matters off-limits to the vagaries of democratic politics. Worried about those ‘dirty Fenian Tagues poisoning our schools’? So abolish state educational conscription completely and leave it to churches, community groups, socialist-group-hug-collectives, business guilds, whoever, that way the ‘Tagues’ do not have to worry about the ‘stinking Orangemen’ doing the same to their children. Just apply this to all the centralised power functions (such as planning and land use) for full juicy goodness. Once you have done that, it would seem to me that much of the reason to try and bomb people into/out of power becomes… well… pointless.
Democracy is fine, just as long as the people being voted for cannot actually do anything. Think outside the (ballot) box. Be a radical.
|
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.
|
