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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As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress.
-Cherie Blair
Certainly compared to the even handed measured words from the delectable Queen Rania of Jordan, the remarks by Tony Blair’s wife Cherie Blair, were crass and appallingly framed, coming as they did a few hours after the latest massacre of the innocent by psychopathic Palestinian suicide bombers. Not a mention from her lips of the horror visited on Israelis and the suffering of their civilian populations. A simple preface to her comments abominating Hamas was all she needed to do to completely change the context of her remarks.
Yet in spite of the cack-handed delivery and timing, the fact is her remarks are patently true in and of themselves and so much of the reaction to what she said was simply a cheap political shot by her husband’s many enemies. Of course I very much doubt that an advocate of force backed collectivism like Cherie Blair actually has any useful solutions to square that particular circle, itself a poison construct of the collectivist mindset.
Yes, Cherie Blair is right that young Palestinians need hope, but it is not going to come from fuzzy thinking collectivists like her. As David Carr said in his earlier post, it is back to the drawing board time. Israel’s demonstrably ineffective military response brings them no closer to victory over the terrorists and the terrorists’ slaughter of Isreali children at bus stops and pizza parlours brings them no closer to a Palestinian state.
Diplomatic and easy on the eyes
Not
…So what? British Home Secretary David Blunkett has been disarmingly frank about the fact he has had to back down on the horrendous planned extension to the already Draconian Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (RIPA). Some commentators have actually been patting him on the back for his admission that the whole plan was ill conceived .
Yet it should be clear that this is in no way a realisation on his part that he was wrong to try and extend this authoritarian infringement of civil liberties on moral grounds, but rather an admission of a failure to read the political support for such an action.
Blunkett and Blair still do not actually see any ethical/moral problems with such people as local councils and the Food Standards Agency being able to read your e-mails and tap your phone calls. No, their contrite remarks are nothing more than acceptance it was foolish of them to assume they could count on widespread political support for such a move.
These people should be abominated for what they tried to do, regardless of the fact they failed. The government are profoundly authoritarian and if the Tories were smart (which they are not), they would use the vast exposed flank Labour has to make this a key issue… but then of course these are the people who have the likes of Ann Widdecombe and Michael Howard in their ranks so I would not hold my breath if I were you.
The widely reported attempt by the state to extravagantly expend the list of state bodies with access to e-mail and telephone intercepts has been withdrawn in the face of strong cross-party opposition from politicians with a modicum of respect for at least the fiction of civil liberties.
However it is very important that people not judge the government just by the laws it has passed but by the laws it has tried to pass. The Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (RIPA) is bad enough as it stands without the latest astonishing power grab by the state, yet it shows once again if anyone doubted it that no matter what the state says about its modest intentions when taking upon itself new powers, the belly of Leviathan is filled with an insatiable hunger for more.
Bob Ainsworth, the Home Office minister is using The Big Lie technique to claim this is not in fact about crushing civil liberties but ‘protecting’ us all, so do not kid yourself that the advocate of a Panopticon Britain will give up so easily. What we need protection against is the British state or we will soon have a system of pervasive surveillance and intrusion that rivals that of the INS and IRS in the United States. Tony Blair was not joking when he promised to bring us ‘joined up government’. The line being drawn between those dots being joined up runs through the centre of our lives.
 When the state watches you, dare to stare back
Harold Pinter is a well known British playwright, a scourge of the Tories and impassioned voice for the statist left. None of this matters one jot to me as the world is full of people declaiming incoherent left wing world views. He is also a signatory to the free Slobodan Milosevic petition, which makes him an apologist for Europe’s most prolific socialist mass murderer since Joseph Stalin. That most certainly does matter to me and to any rational non-idiotarian who views support for mass murderers as prima facie evidence of off-the-scale immorality.
So one would think that this would put Harold Pinter beyond the pale in polite society in Britain, right? I mean if telling a mildly racist joke ends your political career, then presumably showing solidarity with a man who ordered the systematic raping of Croat and Muslim women in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the slaughter of tens of thousands by government backed Serbian einstztruppen must mean there is hardly an open door in Britain for such a man.
Er, no. It means you get mentioned in the latest list of honours. This ‘non-political’ award by the British state is of course replete with political meaning. If you are a vocal left winger then standing up for a mass murderer is regarded as little more than an endearing eccentricity that in no way detracts from being ‘The Great Man of Letters’. This sort of thing is exactly what I do not dislike the British political class.
I hate them.
I agree that Logan (see previous article) is almost certainly not a totalitarian. However I stand by my contention that there is indeed no such thing as ‘public health’ except for communicable diseases not because I disagree with his self evident statement that ‘The field of public health is primarily concerned with prevention of disease’ but that ‘health’ is not in fact legitimately ‘public’ except in the case of communicable disease (and possibly some mental illnesses as well) as it goes to who owns a person’s body.
Most other health related matters are essentially only legitimately private rather than public matters. I have no problem whatsoever with anyone spending non-appropriated monies (such as a philanthropic fund) to preach high and low the virtues of folate in bread/low fat diets/wearing seat belts/not smoking/not taking crack cocaine/wearing sensible shoes/eat more fish/eat less fish/avoid mad cow beef or whatever the health scare de jour is… provided the people being preached to ‘for their own good’ are free to respond with a loud yawn and a rude gesture if they are so inclined. Yes, it is legitimate to ‘educate, persuade, and cajole individuals to take folate’… and to induce (not mandate) companies to produce folate bread… but it is not legitimate to mandate it and it was that I was objecting to.
To mass medicate, such as putting folic acid in bread or fluoride in water in such a way that people cannot realistically avoid changes to their body chemistry, is to suggest that the state and its experts actually have some over-riding ownership of everyone’s physical body and they may adjust its chemistry as the likes of Professor N.J. Wald and Professor A.V. Hoffbrand see fit. Now it that is not a totalitarian value then I don’t know what is. The issue here is not health but who owns your body!
On 27th of May, two eminent medical professors wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph newspaper. Professor N.J. Wald and Professor A.V. Hoffbrand are seriously peeved that the recommendations of the advisory scientific committee on nutrition (COMA) are not going to be supported by the government. Those recommendations are to require by law that all bread in the United Kingdom is fortified with folic acid. This is already mandatory in the USA. In their letter the government funded professors wrote:
We believe that the decision of the Food Standards Agency [not to accept the COMA conclusions] is a mistake and illustrates the structural weakness in our ability to make rational public health decisions. The problem goes further than folic acid. It affects our whole approach to public health.
The contemporary view is that public health is essentially an issue of personal choice. In fact, the essence of public health is that it is a collective strategy that does not require personal choice (it is just there for all to benefit from). At present, individual decisions relating to public health [emphasis added] are a separate issue. We need an agency that is mandated to consider public health in a rational, evidence-based manner, with the authority to recommend policy to government and monitor its implementation. We are, regrettably, far from this paradigm.
We hope that ministers will ignore the view of the Food Standards Agency and implement the strategy proposed by COMA, the Governments’s own scientific advisory committee
First off, let me say that I certainly agree that increasing ones intake of Folic acid has beneficial effects (I take a pill of the stuff myself every day). However that efficacy or otherwise of folic acid is utterly irrelevant. By what warped moral value does COMA and professors Wald and Hoffbrand have the right to decide that the entire population are going to be medicated by the state? There is only one person who has the right to decide if I will add chemicals to my body and that person is me. The only conceivable morally justified circumstances in which I might be medicated against my will is that of highly infectious dangerous diseases, on the theory that if I have smallpox (or whatever) then I would pose a clear threat to others.
Yet that is not the case here, and neither is it in the case of water fluoridation. Both are probably harmless and even beneficial yet it would seem that the morality of using the violence of the state to impose the judgement of technocrats like Wald and Hoffbrand does not even get a mention.
If because it is said to be objectively beneficial to force people to ingest certain chemicals, then why not also allow Wald and Hoffbrand to decide what the nations subjects will be required to eat and not eat? High fat low fibre MacDonald’s burgers? Why not just make them illegal and require all restaurants to serve state approved menus set by COMA? If these professors have no moral problem forcibly medicating millions of people every day ‘for their own good’ then why not try to reduce the incidence of heart disease by shutting down the burger joints and pizza parlours? Except for communicable diseases, there is no such thing as ‘public health’. My diet and supplements are none of Wald and Hoffbrand’s damn business. How dare they try to put chemicals in MY body without my personal and explicit permission?
Of course the totalitarian mindset demonstrated by these people, rooted in collectivist hubris and moral relativism, sees choice itself as irrational… morality does not even come into it. Yet even on the amoral utilitarian basis under which such people operate and to which they would required us to submit our very body chemistry, we all know how well the state’s retained scientists can be trusted regarding ‘public health’. Look at how well they did regarding ‘mad cow disease’.
12 exabytes of unique information…
Humanity had created about 12 exabytes of unique information by mid-1999 and would double that vast quantity by mid-2002, researchers from the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley, predicted two years ago. There is an interesting article in the Financial Times about the vast heap of information being churned out by the networked world. An exabyte is 10 to the power 18 bytes, or a billion gigabytes, or 50,000 times the contents of the US Library of Congress.
Yet again our crappy pox ridden ‘tech-support-vanishes-at-Five-O’clock-on-the-dot’ domain host is down… so if you want to send us e-mail, send it using [removed] rather than the usual ‘libertarian-samizdata.net’ addresses. Grrrrrrrrrrr.
In the not so distant future, Libertarian Samizdata will be moving both to a different domain host and probably off blogspot in order to make everything more reliable.
 Both Blogger.com and Soho-uk.com are living on borrowed time Update : Problem fixed… normal e-mail addresses working again.
Josh Chafetz over on OxBlog has an interesting post about the nature of order, touching on Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith but mostly about Fred Hayek. He also brings up a useful point about a Pejman Pundit post ridiculing the idea of an anarchy club. In a later posting Pejman insists he does understand the definition of the word ‘anarchy’ and points out his first posting was mostly in jest.
There is indeed a useful point being made here and one I have made to several Libertarian Alliance members before: we understand what we mean when we say ‘anarchy’ but when the term is used in common parlance, it is generally a synonym for ‘nihilism’. For example when a bunch of scruffy self-described anti-globalisation protestors set fire to a MacDonalds in Paris and smash up a Mercedes parked near by, those so-called ‘anarchists’ are not doing those things because they want more kosmos (spontaneous or natural order) and less taxis (imposed order), leading to a morality based anarcho-capitalist golden age… no, they are mostly just nihilists whose vision of the future is little different from that of the bikers from hell in the movie ‘Mad Max’. The few of them who actually do have a semi-coherent idea of what the future should look like are Spanish style (circa 1938) ‘anarcho-syndicalists’… which is to say they are rather like meat eating vegetarians (see the ‘related article’ link below).
It is for this reason I usually urge libertarians to stay away from the ‘A’ word because it is so widely misused. Josh Chafetz also expresses his views about anarchy as an objective that shows he more or less does understand the true nature of what real anarchists are arguing for:
That is to say, there is nothing absurd about people organizing in favor of anarchy. What they are doing is stating a preference for absolute kosmos with no taxis. Again, I think this preference is folly. I think that it is neither possible nor desirable to do away with all taxis. I am not an anarchist.
I said more or less understand because taxis does not necessarily mean state imposed order: for example most of the rules within a stock exchange are ‘taxis’ rather than ‘kosmos’ and are analogous to the rules of a private club.. a few are imposed by the state but most are imposed by the exchange itself. No one is forced to trade in a stock exchange and thus in some hypothetical anarchist future, there may well still be ‘taxis’ intensive stock exchanges.
However like Josh, I too am not an anarchist. I am a minarchist but where I depart from Josh is that whilst I agree it is probably not possible to depart from a system in which there is a state, I do think it is desirable. In essence I believe in systems involving the one word conspicuous by its absence in this interesting but utilitarian discussion: morality. I believe in objective morality, albeit imperfectly understood and conjecturally proposed. That, rather than the force of state or vox pop, is the one and only source of legitimacy in any system.
 Probably not what you had in mind
This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle…
This precious stone set in the silver sea…
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…
– William Shakespeare
My views on the state of The State (not just Britain, any state) are well known: I am a libertarian up towards the radical end of the minarchist spectrum.
Yet whilst going out for lunch today, I walked past The Trafalgar, a popular pub on King’s Road in Chelsea, and ended up watching the match between England and Argentina which resulted in a gripping and hard won 1-Nil victory by England. The roar and fierce chants of the English supporters in the pub was utterly magnetic and I found myself pulled in almost against my will, swept up in an irresistible atavistic fervour as if the blood of my ancestors on both sides of the line on Senlac Hill was calling to me to join the shield wall, to add my strength to theirs… now does this sound like the rationalist libertarian who writes anti-state polemics on the Samizdata?
Well, a society is not a state and a nation is not a government. Some libertarians may think that a libertarian future will have evolved beyond tribal yearning as we all live in rational individually determined free associations, but they are quite incorrect… because it is those very yearnings which will lead to many of our free associations.
Many hear echoes of the Nazi Nuremburg mass rallies in the football terraces and pubs of England but they are wrong because coming together to act collectively is not the same as collectivism. Only the state could have caused the Nazi mass rallies, but only the state could prevent such freely associated mass rallies we call football matches, because they are the expression of a deep seated need that will never ever disappear, no matter how rationally centred a society is. The need to wave the tribal banner and roar the latter day war cry can be turned to evil, but what great collective assemblies like football matches show that there is indeed another way to express those feelings which do not involve invading Poland or conquering India.
It will come as no surprise to anyone who habitually reads British newspapers that the state likes the idea of being able to intercept any and all of your communications on the Internet. Well it just so happens that some people are not going to roll over for the government and play ball. Just as the state comes up with new technological ways to spy on its subjects (i.e you), those same subjects are finding ways to prevent them from doing so.
Mathematician Peter Fairbrother simply refuses to just accept the Draconian powers that the state has taken upon itself via the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act and is developing M-O-O-T, an integrated privacy system that you just pop in your PC or Mac at startup. As it uses off-shore key storage, the user can rest safe knowing that the British state cannot get access to your sensitive data at a whim. Bravo!
Lowell Ponte over on Front Page has written a superb retort to Frances Fukuyama’s latest collectivist cri de coeur ‘Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution’. Although critiquing Fukuyama is sometimes a bit like shooting fish in a barrel (Instapundit frequently makes sport of him on slow news days), Ponte does a very good job at pointing out the horrendous implications of Fukuyama’s line of thought
Who owns your body? In Fukuyama’s implicit view, the government does because “you” are merely a cog transmitting your DNA on to the collective of future generations whose rights are superior to yours. You should have no right to tamper with your own mind or body via drugs or with your heredity by cloning yourself or altering your own DNA.
[…]
Fukuyama likes big government, especially when it grabs people by the short-and-curlies and prohibits them from using science to alter reproductive DNA. “Libertarian advocates of genetic choice want the freedom to improve their children,” wrote Fukuyama, “But do we really know what it means to improve a child?” (“I am guessing,” riposted Libertarian David Dieteman, “that Johns Hopkins, where Fukuyama is a professor, does not include this query with its tuition bills to parents.”)
This is terrific stuff and I strongly commend the whole article to anyone who holds to quaint notions of self-ownership as I do. Fukuyama and his ilk are not just misguided, they are the intellectual cheerleaders for a totalitarianism of the most profound kind… they would have the state lay claim to the very molecular structure of your body.
As John Stuart Mill wrote in 1859, “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign”. Well not if Frances Fukuyama has his way.
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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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