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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I was having dinner last night in a Polish restaurant with an old chum of mine and a most delectable young lady, when I noticed something that reaffirmed my conviction that the triumph of global capitalism is completely unstoppable. If there was ever any doubt in your mind about how capitalist innovation makes our lives so much better, it can be dispelled by purchasing a bottle of Polish Zywiec beer and examining the label on the back of the bottle closely.
Refrigerate, wait until Zywiec logo appears. That indicates ideal drinking temperature
Science and business join hands to deliver the perfect bottle of beer! God bless capitalism!
Patrick Hayden over on Electolite makes ‘A brief detour into wild generalizations’ when talking about the supposed ‘cultural cringe’ that characterises part of the transatlantic relationship:
But it is hard to imagine anything in recent American history to compare with (for instance) Margaret Thatcher’s comprehensive destruction of autonomous local government bodies or the widespread European surrender of regulatory power to unelected transnational officials.
That is an interesting perspective but looking the other way across the Atlantic I see the RICO statutes wiping out at a stroke two of the supposedly sacrosanct amendments of the Bill of Rights, not to mention the lives of thousands of people each year that they are used against.
Whilst I certainly abominate the transfer of powers of criminal appropriation and force to EU bodies (because they are force backed appropriators, not because they are undemocratic), I also see Margaret Thatcher’s hatchet job on local authorities in Britain as a good thing which just did not go far enough. I saw local bodies engaged in democratically sanctioned theft of wealth, taking money by force from one section of the community and giving it to another more numerous section, being restrained in the extent they could continue to do so by the central government (via rate capping, or abolition in the case of the GLC). I used to work in UK local authority finance and I for one was delighted to see them reined in. Theft is still theft regardless of which tier of government is engaged in it, but obviously less theft is better than more.
Do you live in the EU? In Britain? Well you have been nationalised… super-nationalised in fact. Yes, I mean you. You do not own your own labour, it is no longer yours to give or not give, as you see fit.
Do you need a bit more money to take your family on holiday later in the year? Want a bit of a boost to buy a slightly bigger car this time? Well if you ask your boss for some overtime to pad out the ol’ pay packet, the European Union has a message for you: tough shit. They know what is best for you and you do not… and they want the British state to use force against both you and your employer if you will insist on contributing to economic growth for longer than 48 hours in a week.
Do NOT cooperate. If you need the money, conspire with your boss and become economic ‘criminals’, it is an entirely honourable thing to do.
Theodore Dalrymple, a prison doctor, has written a remarkable article in the Sunday Telegraph called A world where no one is to blame:
Replying to the suggestion that he and his brother were gangsters who terrified people, he said: “Gang culture is nothing like that. It’s just youths. A group of youths growing up on the estate.” The implication here is not only that no one has a right to criticise gang “culture”, because all cultures are equal and he had done only what every other person in his circumstances had done. Of personal responsibility, not so much as a squeak: he was Pavlov’s dog, responding not so much to a bell as to a Peckham housing estate.
I can only speculate why local people do not start simply banding together and applying polycentric law of their own to deal with such problems, given that the state has not only failed to apply its law but is in fact the root cause of the problem in the first place.
As part of the intellectually confused but nevertheless laudable Daily Telegraph project called A Free Country, Charles Moore, about whom I am rather ambivalent, writes an exceedingly good article called Rally on May Day to blow the whistle on the control freaks:
Whose job is it to defend freedom? The answer really is, everyone’s. In practice, unfortunately, that tends to mean, no one’s. The people who want to ban tobacco advertising or fur farming or dangerous dogs or drugs or the publication of a something they don’t like will seldom outnumber the people who would prefer them tolerated, but they will almost always out-organise them. MPs do not get round robins from the “Please let us get on with our lives” society, but from the thousands of groups that want to ban or control. “Stop X Now” is a far more common message than “Leave X Alone”. Politicians, who rather like exerting their power to stop things, are only too happy to oblige.
And that is indeed the problem: we must change the frames of reference. Time to start refusing to tolerate force backed intolerance just because it is sanctified by some notion of democratic legitimacy.
Canada is treating its soldiers disgracefully. The fighting in Afghanistan is not a gentlemen’s game between sportsmen, it is a fight to the death with desperate terrorists. If some dead Al Qaeda/Taliban soldier was posed for a photograph with a cigarette and a placard around his neck saying ‘fuck terrorism’ then I say so what? It is okay to kill a man, to blow a hole in his body with a 50 cal slug, to shoot him dead, at the behest of your government… but not to disrespect the terrorist supporting son of a bitch’s corpse? Ludicrous.
This day of days again we keep –
In memory of those who sleep
Away beyond the quiet sea…..
Away in far Gallipolli.
‘Tis ANZAC Day Day – ’tis Anzac Day..
Our soldier comrades far away,
They died in war – that we in peace
May live and love that war may cease.
There has been a widespread outbreak of harumphing, moaning and hand wringing by the forces of statism across Europe over the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen‘s National Front Party in France.
Yet when Le Pen declares he is “socially to the left, economically to the right”, his remarks go reported but largely unchallenged. However somehow regardless of his being bitterly opposed to market driven mechanisms, free trade, ‘Americanization’ and globalization, the newspapers demonstrate yet again that the term “right wing” is largely meaningless.
John Lichfield of the Irish Independent tells us “Let us not exaggerate. Let us shut our eyes and think of France, the real France” after himself pointing out that when you add the neo-fascist vote in France for Le Pen to the extreme Troskyist vote for the far left, it is a whopping 35% of the French electorate. Sorry John, you cannot write off one third of a country as ‘not the real France’. Violent collectivist statism is as French as camembert cheese, Laetitia Casta, the Eiffel Tower… and the Guillotine.
It is the long process of erosion that French civil society itself has been undergoing for over 150 years that provides such welcoming ground for the Jean-Marie Le Pen’s of this world. Jaques Chirac is not part of the solution but is rather part of the problem. ‘National Greatness’ conservatives like him are no less statist than socialist Lionel Jospin or neo-fascist Jean Le Pen. There simply is no significant political constituency in France that does not see the state as being the very centre of society, rather than just its boundary keeper. Almost all significant interaction is touched on by the state and thus reduces society to a series of competing political, rather than social, factions, all clamouring for the violence backed recourse of the state to champion their interests. These people who are aghast at the rise of Le Pen are the self same people who tilled the soil in which he grows.
Statist political interests of ‘left’ and ‘right’ appropriate a vast swathe of the national wealth, encouraging people to simply vote themselves other people’s money, and then wonder why folks have no time for tiresome and time consuming social integration or a dynamist assimilative culture. Why bother when it is clear that the normal way for solving all problems is the hammer of the state? You don’t like American products competing with French ones in the shops regardless of the fact other people want to buy them? “There ought to be a law against it” and both socialist Lionel Jospin and conservative Jaques Chirac agree with that. You don’t like the sound of all those English language pop songs on the radio and TV? “There ought to be a law against it” and both socialist Lionel Jospin and conservative Jaques Chirac agree with that too. If all these other unjust things are democratically sanctified, then if you don’t like Africans or Moroccans, well, I guess there ought to be a law against them as well if that is the way everything works. If everything is up for grabs by the ‘democratic’ state, well, don’t be surprised if everything really does mean everything.
No, not really… but Brian Linse is back home in L.A. after completing filming of his movie Den of Lions in Budapest. He is back to his old blogging habits at Ain’t no bad dude.
So why am I grinning? Simple. It shows that the entire edifice of the French Fifth Republic is rotten to its kleptocratic statist core. This is what the European Union’s amen chorus wish Britain to tie its political, economic and cultural fortunes to. Yet in fact this is a salutary lesson where statism inevitably leads… to ever more profound forms of statism, such as the nationalist racism of Le Pen. The non-assimilative post-modern collectivism of Jospin leads to the even less assimilative atavistic collectivism of Le Pen.
And to think the one thing Jospin, Chirac and Le Pen’s supporters all have in common is that they all look down on the Anglosphere. From people like that I take that as a compliment.
There has been a big demonstration in Washington D.C. which was referred to by Dale Amon in a previous post. Radley Balko of The Agitator followed the going on in person and reported:
Unfortunately, the two demonstrations met, turning the entire uptown area into a activist stew of random causes, screams and protests. Palestinian flags flew next to signs excoriating Citibank and Monsanto. The crowd was anti-wealth, anti-racism, anti-terrorism, anti-war on terrorism, anti-poverty, anti-drug war, anti-Israel. All the messages blurred together.
Now this is wonderful news. The sight of groups holding up signs saying ‘a suicide bomber is a poor man’s F-16’ standing next to an anti-globalization protestor is just about the most sublime sight I can imagine. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. This public conflation of toxic idiocies is providing people who are pro-capitalist or pro-Israel or pro-war-on-terrorism, or any combination thereof, with what can only be described as a ‘target rich environment’. Juicy.
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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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