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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Brendan O’Neill has posted a reply to the various people who have commented on his anti-monarchist remarks posted earlier on his own blog. In the following paragraph he addresses my article posted yesterday called A toast to the ‘anti-democratic’ and pleasingly powerless Monarchy
Perry at Libertarian Samizdata challenges my definition of democracy, and claims that ‘the Queen steals a great deal less of my money and poses a far lesser threat to my liberty than the democratically elected thugs in Downing Street’. This is a popular argument in favour of the monarchy – that it is at least better than the politicians we end up with. But this is an inherently anti-democratic view. At least we can get rid of politicians if we don’t like what they do – there is no option to ‘unelect’ Prince Charles for talking utter nonsense about the environment, or Prince Andrew for being a useless, parasitic playboy, or Princess Margaret for being obnoxious and arrogant. We’re stuck with them, whether we like it or not.
Of course what I said was anti-democratic, what I wrote was an overt anti-democratic polemical article! It seems Brendan has completely missed my point. I don’t care what Prince Charles says about the environment because he, unlike Tony Blair, has no ability to take my money to put his views into practice. I am free to ignore him, which I do. I don’t give a damn how obnoxious Prince Andrew is… supporting his playboy lifestyle is chump change compared to what the socialist British state takes from me by force to support the ghastly National Health Service or any other of the host of other theft based ‘social’ (meaning state) programmes. I regard the monarchy as a quaint oddity and the Jubilee as a fine excuse for a party because it has no real political power and thus does not actually need to be ‘un-elected’. The Queen and that idiot Prince Charles does not decide how much of my money the British state will steal tax, the democratically sanctified state does, aided and abetted by everyone who adds bogus legitimacy to that appropriation by voting for the thieves MPs in Parliament who act as their proxies confiscating other people’s property.
To say an aspect of life is amenable to democratic politics, which is to say, to politicise it by allowing parties other than the people directly involved to decide what form some interaction must take, is to take that aspect of life out of the realm of voluntary association/dis-association and to give it a violence based mandatory nature… and to morally de-legitimise it.
I am not pro-monarchy, I am anti-political… and that includes democratic politics as well. Thus the reason I will toast the monarchy is that it is essentially a non-political figurehead with no real power over me, unlike Tony Blair or Iain Duncan Smith or Chaz Kennedy. I do not care how it is determined who gets to pull the political levers of power… I want those levers to have no one’s hands on them and the hands (and, yes, maybe heads) of anyone reaching for them cut off with an axe. I do not want the power over my life wielded by the democratic state transferred to the monarchy, I want it removed all together. Brendan, I think the ‘libertarian’ bit before Samizdata might have given you a hint where I was coming from. What matters is not democracy or monarchy, but several liberty.
Perry: “Have you read Orwell’s 1984?”
Adriana: “No, I don’t need to, I used to live in it.”
democratic adj. 1 of, like, practicing, advocating, or constituting democracy or a democracy. 2 favouring social equality.
Brendan O’Neill is a republican in the British sense of the word, which is to say he wants to abolish Britain’s figurehead monarchy. He wants to do this because it is ‘anti-democratic’. Of course when a Marxist says ‘democratic’ it is useful to actually ponder the meaning of the word and how it is being used. After all, communist East Germany was the ‘People’s German Democratic Republic’… and Brendan is both a self described republican and in favour of democracy, so clearly one must not just assume that when the D word gets bandied about we all mean the same thing.
Or do we?
When I use the term democratic, it is generally in a negative pejorative sense. To me it means my neighbours voting themselves some of my money, in effect mugging me by proxy when the state taxes me for their perceived benefit. To me ‘democratic’ means allowing my neighbour a say in how I build my house and how I raise my children and what chemicals get put in my food and water regardless of what I want. Democracy is at its core about denying the concept of ownership, even of your own body, because other people get to use the violence of the state via their ballots to reduce my actual ownership. When the state intermediates itself, it negates society, because state and society are two completely different things. The morality of several ownership, even of yourself, gets superceded by the force based political state.
So when I hear people like Brendan say something is ‘anti-democratic’ I usually assume that whatever they are referring to is actually a good thing. The US Constitution for example is quite anti-democratic because it severely constrains (in theory at least) the ability of people to vote for laws that would abridge liberties (such as freedom of speech or the right to own the means to defend yourself)… so things that act as a check on that violence backed tyranny of the majority called ‘democracy’ are generally a splendid idea. For me, voluntary social interaction is the source of legitimacy, not the sanctification of the ballot box and the violent intermediation that springs from it.
Yes, I suspect Brendan and I do indeed mean the same thing when we use the term ‘democratic’, I just happen to regard it as the means by which a vast engine of criminality powers itself whereas Brendan sees it as the key to an egalitatian Utopia at gunpoint.
So whilst I must confess to being infused with the widespread indifference to the monarchy Brendan mentions, the fact is the Queen steals a great deal less of my money and poses a far lesser threat to my liberty than the democratically elected thugs in Downing Street, so I for one am happy to use the Jubilee as an excuse to hoist a few drinks to toast the health of ‘Her Majesty’, who reigns without ruling, something I am unlikely to ever do to the Capo di tutti Capi, the Prime Minister, who rules without reigning.
Dodgeblog is doing a multi-part series on sex, drugs, and rock & roll… well as Andrew is a rock critic, these are subjects about which I would venture he is more than passingly familiar 
Update: Part II and Part III are also up.
Once more our crappy domain name host is down. Please use our emergency contact address if you wish to e-mail us.
Update: Our regular e-mail seems to be working again.
For sex (bikini reference!), violence (attack by dog! blood!) and much, much more, go to Bitter Girl!
Leo Le Brun wrote a letter to Instapundit making much the same point made by our own illustrious Samizdata Illuminatus regarding the call by the collectivists at the American Jewish Congress for people to boycott the Cannes Film Festival (a call being ignored in droves). Exactly what ends are served by blindly attacking the people working in a sector of the French economy? Any damage caused will include damage to people like Leo Le Brun who did not vote for Le Pen and, judging by his blog, Leo is not fighting to suppress an urge to burn down the nearest synagogue. It is not something like cutting off the food and water to a town to force it into submission, it is just causing some people’s living standards and job security to be slightly reduced at the margin.
There is nothing quite like annoying but ineffective pressure from outsiders to confirm prejudices, which is why ‘American Jewish Congress’ actions are so idiotic. All it does is play into the hands of the racists who can point to a few empty hotel rooms (not enough to actually scare anyone into line, of course) and then point an accusatory finger at ‘The International Jew’. It is not within the power of American tourists to change the actions of the French state or to significantly alter French public opinion about Jews for the better, even if 100% of potential US visitors to France complied with the AJC’s wishes (and I very much doubt even 5% will).
The ability of such organisations to do harm to the interests of Jewish people (particularly in France) is far greater than their ability to do good if they are going to dismiss the entire French people with a phrase like ‘The French are anti-Semitic’ and then make pronouncements that can only encourage precisely that sentiment. Although the tourism sector in most countries took a big hit after September 11th, I would not be surprised to see groups like the AJC and French neo-nazis making common cause by claiming ‘The Jews’ are responsible for the misfortunes of various French resorts, the former ‘taking the credit for a successful boycott’ and the later declaiming about ‘the power of International Jewry’ whereas in fact it was all down to Al Qaeda flying three airplanes into buildings last year.
Of course the same sort of dynamic can work to more beneficial ends. Every time the European Union turns the screw and imposes another annoying but ultimately trivial little ‘EU directive’ on Britain, a few more people are pushed into the anti-EU camp and British society polarises a little more, a trend I would like to see continue. The Aquis Communitare is not the only ratchet at work here.
Roger Dorrington, the father about whom I reported on Wednesday following his conviction for beating up the drug dealer who was divvying up heroin with Dorrington’s children in their family home, has been told by Judge David Griffiths that he will not have to pay the drug dealer £250 after all.
However the conviction still stands and he will have to do 100 hours of ‘community service’ for the crime of defending his children against a predatory heroin dealing trespasser. If Judge Griffiths wants him to actually serve his community, I can think of no better way of him spending that 100 hours than for Dorrington to explain, slowly and graphically, to the idiot on the bench what the reality of trying to prevent two teenage children from destroying themselves with heroin is actually like in the real world outside Southampton Crown Court.
Judge Griffiths is just doing what the state expects him to do by demanding that all British subjects be prostrate in the face of any actual threat in which the state does not choose to intermediate itself. Justice for Roger Dorrington and the very survival of his two children does not even enter into that equation. The state is NOT your friend.
None other than the talented and angst fuelled Bitter Girl! 
Roger Dorrington is a builder with two teenage sons, called Nick and Joseph, who have a problem with heroin. There is another man called James White who provides them with that heroin since they were 14 and 15 respectively, in return for money. As most people would correctly surmise, the British state says it is illegal to sell heroin to children like Nick and Joseph.
Now as a libertarian, I think that blanket prohibitions are not the way to deal with the problems caused by addictive drugs like heroin. But I also think that addictive drugs are a problem and that this is best dealt with via social mechanisms like families and in particular ‘robustly engaged’ fathers like Roger Dorrington. However in the here and now of Britain 2002, heroin is a Prohibited Class A drug and the state would have us believe that this makes dealing such drugs A Serious Matter which should be left to the state’s blue clad enforcers.
Now Roger Dorrington is by all accounts a fine caring father to his children and thus does not want drug dealer James White giving Nick and Joseph heroin. As a result he warned the man to stay the hell out of his family house. So when Dorrington came home unexpectedly and found White cutting up heroin in his own house, he beat the drug dealer up and ejected him from his property.
White complained to the police and Dorrington was arrested for assault. White was not arrested at all in spite of the fact he brought a class A drug into Dorrington’s house to give to Dorrington’s children. People must not ‘take the law into their own hands’ says the state and yesterday a judge ordered Roger Dorrington to pay £250 (US $360) to the injured drug dealer and do 100 hours of ‘community service’. Dorrington says he will refuse to comply with either order and will no doubt suffer more later as a result.
So what exactly is going on here? Well it is not about justice, but then nothing whatsoever any state does is in reality about justice. It is not even about The Law, which is certainly what states say they are about in their tenuous claim to be legitimate expressions of a society rather than a vast engine of criminality. No, it is about what is the true priority of nation states. It is about power. 9 times out of 10, if a person sells (highly illegal) a class A drug (possession of which is illegal) on private property from which they have been explicitly excluded (illegal trespass), this will not rouse the state to do anything at all… yet when a private individual himself uses force to prohibit three illegal acts on his own property the state arrests the enforcer of its own laws and does not arrest the violator of several of its other laws.
This is the true face of the modern British state and yet more proof of what both Frédéric Bastiat and Thomas Paine said about State and Society being two fundamentally different things. States only provide justice incidentally en-passant to enforcing their laws. It seems now even that pretence is fading. The only illegal acts that truly stirs Leviathan from its theft bloated torpor is a challenge to its own monopoly of violence backed enforcement. The state not only wants you helpless, it takes concrete measures to make you helpless. No wonder they took our guns away.
Well that is certainly what the redoubtable Sarah Lawrence thinks and on the basis of his latest idiotic article I am inclined to agree. Now it is well known amongst regular Samizdata readers that I am not reflexively pro-Israel but the notion being peddled that Arafat is not part of the terrorist problem in the Middle East is so patently idiotic that I can only speculate that this is indeed what Sarah categorises it as… an example of The Big Lie technique from a person who sees the world in Chomskyist terms, i.e. devoid of any objective meaning at all.
Spiffy graphic by Scrofulous Steve!
Steve runs quite possibly the strangest blog in the entire blogosphere, rejoicing in the name of Scrofula (morbid condition featuring swelling of the glands), tagline: News, Rumours, Stupidity and Muck.
He is particularly adroit at, um, interesting graphics (I particularly like his ‘Conan the Egalitarian’ and ‘David Blunkett as Robocop’). Many of his works are rather splendid animated gifs: watch Robert Fisk come to grief again and again! Make sure you visit his picture archive for maximum juicy goodness. Steve has a much better idea for a new EU flag than that silly barcode…
 Uncle Joe loves EU
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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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