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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Seeing a reference to the marvellous children’s programme Thunderbirds over on the Brothers Judd sent me off on a rare bout of nostalgia.
Thunderbirds was far and away my favourite programme when I was young and this was long before I appreciated the shows astonishing libertarian political message… These guys were like the real world RNLI only with guns and spaceships!
‘International Rescue’ were shown as a benevolent but armed covert high tech para-military search and rescue organisation, privately controlled and funded by a philanthropic American businessman’s multinational company (Tracy Construction and Aerospace Industries), run secretly by his family and loyal friends. IR was completely independent of any government! What is more, International Rescue’s ‘muscle’ was provided by British aristocrat Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward, cruising in a pink six-wheeled armoured Rolls Royce, capable of travelling at 200 mph complete with a hidden front grill mounted auto-cannon. No anti-capitalist or anti-private ownership of weapons vibe here!
Now that is a splendid role model for children rather than the usual dreary assortment of statist lawyers, severe cops and government spies who are trotted out to pass for heros!
As part of a longer e-mail to me from first class blogger Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings fame, he had the following pearls to cast:
Boy, your country is a rich source of material, isn’t it? First, outlaw the most basic right going, the right to defend yourself from imminent harm. Then, since that causes a crime problem, outlaw jury trials!
Safety and social perfection will arrive, I suppose, when you’re all living in proctored dorms.
Sad but true.
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There is an interesting article with links on Brothers Judd in which Orrin Judd muses on the question of the fading of Jewish identity, referring to articles by Richard Just in American Prospect and Gary Rosen’s review of the dismal Alan Dershowitz’s interesting book ‘The Vanishing Jew’. That this diminution of Jewish identity is in fact a problem seems to have been accepted as axiomatic by Orrin.
But maybe it is just that Jews in America (and Britain for that matter) have just grown up and evolved away from a narrow tribal collective mindset. They realise that their identity is not primarily I am a Jew, but rather I am David Cohen. In fact, perhaps the reason for this Jewish ‘problem’ is that due to hundreds of generations of being free from the limiting delusion of ‘blood and soil’ has made Jews uniquely suited to embrace individualistic notions of identity. Jews have a Jewish nation state in Israel now if they want it… and it is just another messy nation state like any other, better than some and worse than others. Few people are better placed psychologically than the world’s Jews at this point in time to see the world for what it really is: the ‘Promised Land’ is Jewish again and the world still sucks.
Perhaps the only thing that made the Jews a collective ‘tribe’ at all was being forced together by the hostility of host societies who despised them for not being part of their ‘Volk’. The Jewish ‘problem’ of a loss of identity in the larger cosmopolitan society is not a problem at all… it is a blessing! Just as ‘everyone can be Irish on St. Patrick’s Day’, there is nothing wrong with letting Jewish identity (and every other limiting ghetto-of-the-mind) become little more than a bit of cultural spice of only passing significance. As other people have stopped regarding Jews as a people apart, it is not surprising that Jews have started to do the same.
Paul Staines has pointed me at a great article in The Spectator by Bruce Anderson:
The Americans will not be deflected by the absence of support from continental Europe. A few months ago, William Hague asked George Bush how he would deal with European objections to ballistic missile defence. “I’ve got a secret plan,” Mr Bush replied. “What is it?” “I’ll go ahead anyway.” So he will on Iraq.
Anderson explains that Continental European hostility to Bush’s approach to, well, pretty much everything, is rooted in moral relativism and the taint of a Marxist meta-context
They also insist that we live in a world of moral relativities. European governments had a double quarrel with Mr Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech. They do not believe in the axis. Nor do they believe in the evil. They prefer to live in a world as depicted by Whistler, in which everything is a subtle symphony of endless grey. From this perspective, Saddam may be a bad man, but he is merely a darker shade of grey than Ariel Sharon.
The leaders of Europe preside over powerful modern economies and complex societies, all of which are rendered impotent by fundamental philosophical flaws in the very epistemology of their ruling classes.
Quite why so many people write about Nelson Mandela in such a hagiographic manner baffles me. This is a man who is going out of his way to give aid and succor to Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the man convicted of murdering 270 people in the air and on the ground when he blew up a Pan Am Jumbo Jet full of people over Lockerbie, Scotland.
One of the angry relatives, who lost their 19 year old daughter, asks:
If Mr Mandela is truly concerned about the conditions Megrahi is suffering, then perhaps he should visit and represent other convicts in Britain’s prisons who are serving their sentence for their crimes in worse conditions than Megrahi will ever have to experience.
Back when I was at school, I reall seeing some people wearing tee-shirts saying ‘Free Nelson Mandela’… Now whilst I abominated the apartheid regime in South Africa, it seemed to me that replacing white tyranny with the ANC was just going to be a case of changing not that country’s tyranny but merely that tyranny’s colour. I also happen to recall seeing other folks, ‘Young Conservatives’, in the 1980’s wearing a tee shirt which said ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’… hmmm…
Perhaps marketing those tee-shirts again might be a nice business opportunity!
Better late than never?
Adriana is known for her cutting style of blogging
Perry and his chums bag another tasty socialist swine
As well as being eminent bloggers, Brian Micklethwait and Steve Chapman are founder members of the Mauve Shirt Appreciation Society
David Carr was tongue tied at the sight of Adriana’s see-through top
There are many tools of liberty that may bring illumination to the benighted
Adriana ponder the meaning of ‘In vino veritas’.
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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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