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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People across Europe are digging bomb shelters in their back gardens and staring skyward fearfully for the first signs of the mighty Namibian airforce.
No, not really… Afro-socialist bigot President Sam Nujoma of Namibia has added all the nations imposing the flimsy and ineffective sanctions against his good buddy Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe to the list of his usual targets for incoherent invective (i.e. homosexuals, capitalists, white people).
“I just want to make it categorically clear that if the EU does not lift the sanctions against Zimbabwe, the whole African Union will also impose economic sanctions against Europe. Either there is peace or war and we don’t want a war. Change your attitudes. If you don’t change, we are going to get you.”
I am quaking in my boots. 
The British news media are harumphing about Tony Blair being publicly upbraided by a pair of African autocrats, overshadowing the British Prime Minister’s ‘passionate’ calls for African development and increased ‘aid’ to Africa by the West.
But therein lies part of the problem. The media seems shocked that a bunch of brutal tyrants are actually sounding like, well, tyrants… ungrateful tyrants at that.
Yet the very existence of thugs like Mugabe is underwritten by Britain (to media applause) to the tune of a billion pounds a year, stolen from UK taxpayers by the British state and given to African countries, or more accurately the ruling elites of African countries. This sort of behaviour is tantamount to Britain circa 1938 offering to give British tax money to common Germans (to be disbursed by the Nazi state or pro-Nazi NGOs) and thereby relieving the German National Socialist Workers Party’s leaders of the political consequences of their own economic policies, in effect subsidising the induced cost of fascist economics.
Tony Blair and the host of other national and NGO Tranzi cheerleaders are nothing less than the logistic support system for tyranny in the ‘Third World’.
So when you read of calls for an ‘answer’ to Mugabe, please realise that the even the most sound replies to the rhetoric on offer still skirts around the real truth. The only reply to the likes of Robert Mugabe is to meet violence with violence. If just 10 percent of that aid budget was spent sending arms to Robert Mugabe’s political enemies, including the white farmers of Zimbabwe, Mugabe and his supporters would be doing the only thing they can do by way of suitable recompense to the soil of Zimbabwe’s ruined farmlands.
Of course for this to happen would require an understanding by Blair et al of their indictable role in Africa’s ruin. The effects of the legacy of British and European colonialism pales in comparison to the here-and-now effects of Western statist support for homegrown African statism.
There is a splendid reference to Samizdata.net on NewsMax.com, quoting sections of a short article by David Carr in which he introduced the term ‘Tranzi’ for ‘Transnational Progressives’.
The much reported contretemps between occasionally hilarious Jewish-American comedian Jackie Mason and largely unknown Palestinian-American comedian Ray Hanania has also received several mentions in the blogosphere.
However to my knowledge only blogger Al Barger on the Culpepper Log has followed up this with some investigative reporting of his own. After Googling previous remarks by Ray Hanania and coming up with some controversial views in a Lebanese newspaper, Barger e-mailed Hanania to get his side of the story and he did indeed reply. The exchange of e-mails can be seen on the Culpepper Log.
Well done, Al… this sort of thing reflects very well on the entire concept of blogging.
Dale’s posts certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons on the issue of racism. In the comments section, the delighfully named ‘Godless Capitalist’ from the blog Gene Expression has put forward several views that I must take issue with.
Intermarriage amongst races requires no ‘campaign’, it is a spontaneous social fact. The streets of London suggest that anyone who thinks a ‘campaign’ to encourage it is required is not just wrong but profoundly so. Miscegenation is a natural consequence of close proximity unless institutional racism prevents it.
Many years living in the USA (about 1/3rd of my life) proved to me that significant sections of US society tend to be profoundly racist in ways that have to be experienced by an outsider to be believed. The number of times a black male acquaintance of mine who was attending University in New Jersey was insulted and even assaulted because his girlfriend was white showed me an aspect to US society not many US bloggers like to contemplate.
I do not doubt the factual veracity of the crime figures that Gene Expressions loves to bandy about: I have lived and worked in urban America enough to know the reality. But whilst crime figures prove there are serious problems in Black America, they tell us nothing whatsoever about the causes of those problem. Why look for genetic excuses for what is so obviously a man-made social problem? The historical legacy of slavery, followed by Jim Crow, followed by decades of American socialist 1 and right-statist distortion of American society, all in ways that could not have been better crafted to produce an unassimilated underclass if they had actually set out to ruin as many people as possible, does not ‘prove’ anything at all about African or Afro-European genes.
I am sure if genetic science existed in immediate aftermath of the Imperial Roman withdrawal from Briton, Roman scientists would have shook their heads and written off the ancient Britons as just genetically inferior to the Romans at sight of social chaos, decaying roads and aqueducts falling into disrepair.
Mexico and Brazil are held up as examples of the fallacy of expecting miscegenation to improve racist attitudes, yet that actually proves nothing universal about anything. A ‘white’ ruling class clinging to the top of a social pyramid, presiding over societies structured to maximize class differences proves… that the people at the top like to stay on the top. This is not exactly a stunning revelation. That attitudes towards race, a visible characteristic, would conflate with the socioeconomic ‘markers’ of a power elite who have a vested interest in differentiation tell us even less about some imagined genetic predisposition of the have-nots.
1= I refuse to use the term ‘liberal’ regardless of its popularity in the United States, when the actual meaning of the word indicates ‘illiberal’.
We have enabled ‘comments’ for samizdata.net posts on an experimental basis.
Teddy Sherrill over on The American Kaiser has an article lambasting the RIAA for attempting to gain the legal right to hack your computer in order to protect a flawed and obsolete business model.
If anything Sherrill’s article actually understates the horrendous civil liberties implications of this power grab.
Let us hypothesize a fictional British man of letters in the aftermath of a terrible war, circa 1946. Imagine if you will that he is a socialist, as many in his time were, and a playwright of some renown. So interesting are his plays that even establishment newspapers on the ‘right’ take him seriously, fondly calling him a Curmudgeon of Honour.
However, let us also imagine that as the full horrors of Nazi atrocities come to light in post war Europe, our imaginary left wing playwright loudly declares that former leading member of the German National Socialist Party and head of the Luftwaffe Herman Göring should not be on trial for war crimes in Nuremberg. In fact, he goes so far as to sign a petition along with like-minded socialists to Free Herman Göring.
Now I wonder if the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian would still regard him as just another leading playwright, given his apologia for a mass murdering ethnic cleansing Nazi? Surely that would be enough for the great and good of the establishment to put him beyond the pale.
I guess not.
Want to see just how ghastly the European Copyright Directive is? Well look at this Stand article and then tell me why the EU is a good thing.
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.
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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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