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.
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Whilst cruising Brian Linse’s Directory of ‘left wing’ blogs, I was trying to make sense of who was listed and why.
There are the blogs of the fuzzy and cuddly ‘soft left’ such as Brian’s own Ain’t no bad dude, ranging all the way to Chomsky adoring pro-totalitarians like Blowback: two blogs seemingly as far apart as robustly anti-left Cold Fury and the joyfully idiotarian WarBloggerWatch. But there are also hard to classify blogs like AirstripOne. When ‘Emmanuel Goldstein’ of AirstripOne writes things like…
That being said, Britain has no business opening up its markets just because it will help Third World countries. The argument for free trade must come from British interests.
…it should be clear that Emmanuel’s views owe more to Burke than Marx. This is pure old paleo-conservative Tory values: free trade may be allowed as an expedient if it is conducive to ‘national’ ends but it is certainly not carried out by right between free individuals. So does AirStripOne belong in a ‘leftist’ directory?
Yes actually. And so do links to Pat Buchannan or Ross Perot, because Brian’s ‘leftist’ directory is not really a ‘leftists’ directory at all, but rather a ‘Civil Interventionists Directory’ (i.e. the opposite of a ‘Civil Libertarians Directory’) because that is the only common thread between this disparate listing. What all these folks share is the belief that it is okay for a violence backed state to forcibly intermediate itself into private people’s lives, not just in emergencies but within the context of normal civil society, in order to change how they may choose to live.
…about The Daily Telegraph.
In an article called Bags of Sense apparently the ‘right wing’ Telegraph’ thinks it is okay for the state to tax us 10 pence per plastic carrier bag at supermarkets because:
Taxes are generally disagreeable. But this case is different. For one thing, the charge was not introduced as a surreptitious way of raising revenue. Nor has it had unintended consequences. Whereas the increase in tobacco taxes has led to smuggling, and rising fuel duties have encouraged hauliers to fill up across the Channel, the bag levy has altered consumer behaviour precisely as envisaged.
And so the Telegraph, which on one hand claims to be at the crusading vanguard of defending our civil liberties against the state with their ‘A Free Country’ campaign, is nevertheless happy with the concept that it is perfectly okay for the state to impose “changes to consumer behaviour” provided the objective is not really to raise revenue.
Sorry, but most taxes are not ‘disagreeable’, they are actually immoral theft backed by the threat of violence and this one is no different. I do not want the state having any say whatsoever in my private ‘consumer behaviour’. Of course one must keep in mind that The Daily Telegraph is a Tory newspaper, and thus actually has nothing against vast acts of statism per se, just so long as ‘The Right People’ are in control of them.
Bags of Sense? Bags of Bullshit actually.
Barbara Amiel delivers a damning indictment of the New York Times, pointing out:
Super-liberalism has led the Times into a lot of nonsense. The Israeli government is routinely described in its news stories as following “hardline” policies while no such negative description is given to governments such as those of Saudi Arabia or the Palestinian Authority.
Indeed, the Saudis are routinely described as “moderates” in news stories or “pro-West” allies of America – even as they fund al-Qa’eda and their official newspapers spout virulent hatred of the West.
Amiel also points out that the New York Times recent attempt to portray Henry Kissenger as opposed to the Bush strategy on Iraq was:
The new-look Henry K was so blatant a piece of deception that, on August 19, the Wall Street Journal parted with its tradition of keeping quiet about its competitor’s editorial policies and published a leader with a damning indictment of the “tendentious” claims of the New York Times, suggesting that the paper keep “its opinions on its editorial page”.
She also links to the splendid Smarter Times website, which records the NYT’s dissembling stream of half truths and outright deceptions. The whole article is well worth a read.
However for me there is a certain resonance to it all as one does not have to look as far away as New York to see the phenomena. Samizdata.net’s own Brian Micklethwait recently had to ‘Fisk’ his own article after The Times (of London) published it ‘edited’ in significant ways that changed what he was actually trying to say. That said, what the London Times’ editors did to Brian’s article pales compared to the outright deceptions masquerading as ‘objective news’ routinely printed by the New York Times.
There is a weird article in the Sunday Telegraph about how Abu Nidal was killed by Saddam Hussain’s security services because he refused to help train Al-Qeada fighters for terrorist strikes against the West.
Sorry but my bullshit detectors are honking extremely loudly. 
Now let me nail my colours to the mast before I proceed: I want war with Saddam Hussain and his vile brood. I want Saddam Hussain dead and his supporters slaughtered in vast numbers. I want to see the laser guided hammer of God strike Baghdad and the skies filled with thermobaric fire on a biblical scale. I want passage of B-52 bombers to register on the Richter scale. I actually do think the Iraqi regime poses an unacceptable threat to me. And before anyone says ‘and by that interventionist logic, why not take out North Korea and China too?’… yes, that would be fine by me. Hell, feel free to add Saudi Arabia, Syria and maybe even Pakistan to that list. It seems to me that if we are going to turn back the tide of statism in the Western World, lets hurry up and remove the justification of ‘security considerations’ as quickly as possible (this is obviously somewhat of a caricature of my actual position, but in essence that is where I stand).
That said, is it just me or is this latest spin on the death of Abu Nidal not the most crassly obvious media plant by The Boys in Langley to justify an attack on Iraq that has ever been printed in a ‘serious newspaper’?
Face it, how the hell would these ‘intelligence sources’ have the foggiest idea why Saddam’s lads killed the psychopathic Abu Nidal? Frankly it would make political sense for Saddam to publicly say “Look guys, I just blew away the odious Abu Nidal cos he was playin’ footie with those awful Islamic fundamentalist Al Qaeda fruit loops, so as you can see, it makes no sense whatsoever to attack me, a secular socialist in the Ba’athist tradition”.
I mean, how stupid is this?
The always interesting Brendan O’Neill has written an article called Why I hate slackers. As is often the case, I see things rather differently:
As always the 1960s has a lot to answer for. The hippies of the anti-Vietnam War brigade were the original slacker generation. There were no doubt some positive elements in the opposition to the Vietnam War – there were some anti-imperialists in there, who were keen to kick interfering America in the teeth and to defend independence and democracy in Vietnam.
I am anti-imperialist because I do not think it is right to impose non-consensual force backed rule on other people at bayonet point. That is also why I am anti-communist, anti-fascist, anti-socialist, anti-statist conservative, anti-democratic (at least in the sense Brendan uses the word) and above all, anti-political. All these things are based on intermediation-by-force.
Today, such slackerdom is writ large across society. Today’s privileged youth don’t seem to believe in anything very much. Among the young, membership of political parties is breathtakingly low
The very essence of modern democratic politics is that it is okay to collectively use the state to by-pass normal contractual relationships between individuals and redistribute wealth in certain ways, which is a euphemism for forcibly stealing private property. That so few people should join political parties is a sign of the incremental de-legitimisation of this entire process. Splendid!
very few teenagers and twentysomethings, in both America and Britain, are signing up for the military; even in the private sphere, young people are staying at the parental home for longer and are putting off getting married and having children until much later in life, if not altogether.
In reality, this is just a return to the historical norm: prior to World War II, except during major wars themselves, both Britain and the USA maintained small non-conscript professional militaries. The large peacetime militaries of the cold war era were aberrations. As for living at home, this is largely a function of caring statists ‘helping’ the housing market with rent controls that are a dis-incentivization to rent out properties in the first place, planning regulations that discourage new building, high levels of taxation etc.
As for not having children, exactly what is so bad about that? Women are not baby factories and actually want more from life than just to reproduce. Having children is a choice, not an obligation.
Some might see these as positive developments – as signs that young people are not prepared to go along with the mainstream and are refusing to do what the authorities expect of them. But when such opting out seems to be driven more by insecurity and uncertainty than by a determination to do things differently, how positive is that? So to slackers everywhere: get a life. And a job. And a home of your own. And some conviction. And…
The world is an insecure place and if people are acting accordingly, that suggests to me an outbreak of realism. The statist world view of the left and right within which Brendan seems to be operating is the meta-context of stasis, in which the certainty and predictability of the collective replaces the messy dynamism and uncertainty of an increasingly apolitical world in which people are more concerned for their own interests.
By looking at ‘slackerdom’, Brendan has actually touched on one of the societal manifestations of two important opposing forces at work: as the state imposes itself (i.e. intermediates politics) into private life in ever more pervasive ways, non-state based apolitical spontaneous network effects are pulling hard in the opposite direction by allowing people to manage information in ways previously only available to the top of the pyramid.
There are very good reasons more and more people are not dutifully tramping down the treadmill of life in the manner those whose views rely on planning want them to. Slackers have conviction, Brendan: they have the conviction that what they want as individuals actually matters regardless of what other people think they should do.
Jeff Jacoby has a superb article on Jewish World Review about a woman’s right to defend herself:
But what if some of those women did want to protect themselves with guns? If they walked into a police station and applied for a license to carry a firearm for their personal protection, would they get one?
“They would not,” says Mariellen Burns, the Boston police spokeswoman.
What if they lived in the North End and two of their friends had been raped and they were terrified that they might be next?
Tough luck, says Burns. “Living in a high crime area is just not enough of a reason to get an unrestricted license to carry.”
Now, it is not news that Boston and Brookline — and Massachusetts generally — are frequently out of step with most of America. But it ought to be news when public officials increase the risk to life and limb of the people they are sworn to serve. And make no mistake: Those who prevent law-abiding women from arming themselves with guns make it easier for rapists and other predators to attack them with impunity.
Read the whole article as it is terrific stuff. But the fact is, it is not news that “public officials increase the risk to life and limb of the people they are sworn to serve”, it is actually the norm – for it to be otherwise, now that would be (good) news.
The state will nearly always try to place whatever its functionaries perceived to be its own narrow institutional interests before those of its subjects. The very nature of modern governance is about management, which is usually interpreted to mean control, and keeping weapons out of the hands of private individuals is pretty much the perfect manifestation of the desire to have the ability to easily impose management decisions on people who might not see that decision as being in their interests.
Yet the reality is that what makes management decisions by the state different from management decisions by a company or individual is that the state backs its decisions with the threat of force and does not think twice about intermediating itself into a person’s life without consent. The fact that very real threats to your personal safety are trumped by the state’s desire to maintain exclusive control over the means of self defence pretty much proves that the state regards its ability to impose management decisions as manifestly more important than a person’s right to life and limb, let alone private property.
In reality, the principle threat to most people in high crime areas are not so much the muggers but the state which make you easy prey for them and requires you to live in fear for its own convenience.
The state is not your friend.
It may have caught the eye of readers in the UK the other day that the Inland Revenue has redesigned its logo. Samizdata.net brings you a special preview!
It seems that our regular samizdata.net e-mail (as found in the sidebar) is now operational again and can be used once more.
Alas we seem to have lost some of the e-mails that were sent to us over the last week (i.e. since late last Friday) unless they were sent to our emergency address.
In Wednesday’s Daily Telegraph, Janet Daley wrote an article called The Tories have room for liberals of both persuasions.
Now I really have no quarrel with the thrust of her contention:
The cruellest and saddest irony of all is that the self-styled new model army, with its social liberalism ticket, need have no dispute with the old faith. Social liberalism and Thatcherite economic liberalism are consistent with one another.
Nothing is more likely to give people the confidence and the wherewithal to live their lives as they choose than personal prosperity and the freedom that it brings. Respect for personal liberty sits neatly alongside the promotion of economic self-determination. Together, they could make a coherent, radical and very modern party programme.
Well as our confreres in the United States so lyrically say: no shit, Sherlock.
What I find so saddening is that perhaps Daley has indeed set the level and tenor of this article to what is appropriate for the current state of sophistication and received wisdom of the typical Daily Telegraphy reader, i.e. acting as if ‘all the elements of truth and measure’ were to be found within the essentially bipolar world of parochial Westminster party politics. But frankly what Ms. Daley is saying is nothing more that what libertarians in Britain have been saying for a great many years. When she says:
Respect for personal liberty sits neatly alongside the promotion of economic self-determination.
This phrase practically defines the libertarian meme and yet you will search the article in vain for the word ‘libertarian’.
William Saletan continues to live up to my expectations, which I assure you is not a compliment, with a bizarre article in Slate that contends that if a law is passed in the USA to make the level at which capital losses can be written-off against income tax more generous, that would be, wait for it, “suburban socialism”.
Fascinating. So lowering someone’s tax burden is socialism. Let’s run by that again…the state gets less of a businessman’s money, which is to say, more of the ‘means of production’ currently in private hands remain in private hands… and that constitutes socialism?
Of course I do not expect someone like Saletan to have actually read and understood any serious books on political economy, but I would expect someone who opines on economic and political issues to have read some ‘Idiots Guide to Political & Economic Systems’ so that he has at least the vaguest inkling as to what the hell socialism actually means.
The plan in question is not the state socialistically redistributing wealth by taking it (via tax) from someone and giving it to someone else. No, they are just talking about reducing the amount of theft (i.e tax) the state appropriates for certain people who have run up losses: the loss making taxpayer is not getting other people’s money, he is simply being allowed to keep more of his own money by off-setting losses. Duh.
Just a reminder that our e-mail is still buggered up, and has been so since last Friday. Please use our emergency e-mail rather than the one in ther side bar to contact us.
Steve Sailer has written a very good article called How tolerant are the British? that takes a good look at Anglosphere attitudes without the rather self-congratulatory tones of many in the blogosphere.
In a rather different article a while back, I came to some similar conclusions and pointed out the agreeabe implications of the high incidence of miscegenation in Britain.
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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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