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]
|
The European Union continues its march into self parody with the planned introduction of a giant barcode as the new flag of the would-be superstate.
Suddenly one of my favourite shows of the moment, Dark Angel, starts to take on a whole new symbolic meaning… for those of you who do not watch this excellent series, the heroine named Max (played by the lithe Jessica Alba) is a transgenic transhuman on the run from a clandestine US government genetic engineering operation called Project Manticore. Max is assisted by a streaming video samizdata called ‘Eyes Only’. Significantly, all the escaped transgenics like Max have an identifying barcode tattooed on the backs of their necks.
Are the grey suited faceless ones in Brussels sending us all a message?
Tolerate v.tr. 1 allow the existence or occurrence of without authoritative interference. 2 leave unmolested 3 endure or permit, esp. with forbearance
Accept v.tr. 3 regard favourably; treat as welcome 4 a believe, receive (an opinion, explanation etc.) as adequate or valid. b be prepared to subscribe to (a belief, philosophy etc.)
The assassination of Dutch cultural nationalist Pim Fortuyn has raised many questions about the nature of tolerance and liberty. Orrin Judd suggests that Fortuyn was not a libertarian as some have claimed and in this I agree. Fortuyn was indeed informed by some very libertarian principles but sought to apply them within a statist context that placed him at least somewhat within the stranger wing of a Euro-conservative fringe with more than a few touches of the ‘classical liberal’ about him.
In truth Fortuyn defied easy categorisation but in some ways his views on immigration were just dealing with the inherent contradictions between distributive statism’s prerequisite of homogeneity (the need for a quantifiable unit called ‘citizen’) and the dis-incentivization for cultural assimilation and social integration inherent in welfare statism. Much of what he said has also been said by Ilana Mercer (who is a top flight pukka libertarian with whom I just happen to disagree regarding the implications of immigration in a free society) as well as many cultural conservatives.
Orrin Judd takes the view that the essence of Fortuyn was just about advocating sexual licence (a word loaded with political meanings I reject) whilst himself not tolerating religious based distaste in others for Fortuyn’s overt homosexuality. Yet having read some of what he said and trying to filter out the political populist crap that all democratic political figures encode their words with, it seems clear to me that what Fortuyn really opposed was the fact within the Muslim community in the Netherlands were elements who wanted to translate their lack of acceptance into intolerance.
Fortuyn was not insisting Muslims or for than matter Christians like Orrin Judd accept, which is to say agree with his sexual predilections, just that they tolerate them and for him this was non-negotiable (and I happen to think he was correct in that view). And therein lies the fatal flaw of all democratic state centred societies rather than classical liberal civil societies with the state just as ‘nightwatchman’… if political manipulation of the state gives the more cohesive sections of that society the ability to back their lack of acceptance with force (i.e. to make the laws of the state reflect their views), then a legitimate lack of acceptance becomes illegitimate intolerance. Fortuyn feared that in a democratic state, a cohesive alien Muslim cultural bloc lead by people for whom society and state were logically one and the same, would start to move the state away from being the guarantor of tolerance for people largely not accepted: of which homosexuals are a classical example being as they are both ubiquitous and always a minority.
Tolerance however is not a value neutral condition, far from it in fact. To tolerate something is to not accept it. One does not tolerate one’s friends, one accepts them. I tolerate people listening to heavy metal music even though I think most of it is drivel, for the simple reason it is none of my damn business what other people listen to. It only becomes my business if they are playing it loudly in the next house at four o’clock in the morning but then it is not a matter of ‘tolerance’ any more, it is a matter of unwillingly imposed real cost regardless of the type of music involved. I tolerate smokers because if they want to kill themselves and smell like ashtrays, that is their business not mine. I do not accept it as a good idea however. What is wrong is to use the violence of the state to prevent people doing what they want to themselves and others of a like mind and there is the problem with some conservative Christians and more or less all radical Muslims: they want to criminalise what they see as sin rather than criminalise the violation of the objective rights of others. Opposing that is not intolerance because tolerance does not mean tolerating intolerance, any more than it is tolerance to tolerate anything which actively seeks to violate your self-ownership. If you believe homosexuality (or eating pork or looking at pictures of naked women) is a sin, well fine, that is up to you, feel free to not engage in gay sex (or pork dinners or Playboy). If that then induces you to vote for people who will use the violence of the state (laws) to discriminate against homosexuals (or ban pork butchers and Playboy magazine), well that is not fine.
Just remember that what is sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. In a democratic state, no one group ever monopolizes power for ever. If the people who, on the basis of religious non-acceptance, want to legally disadvantage (i.e. no longer tolerate) certain people because of their sexual peccadillos… and then use their transitory political clout to actualise that, well don’t be too surprised if one day the object of that discrimination tries to use the state to legally discriminate against the religions which are seen as the source of the intolerance towards them. In a democratic state, any large cohesive voting bloc with intolerant rather than just non-accepting views is a potential threat. The more truly democratic a system is, the greater such threats are.
Daniel Antal, a Hungarian economist, wrote in regarding Brian Micklethwait‘s article “Give me a definition of racist”:
I had been busy trying to get an interview appointment with Pim Fortuyn, the recently assassinated controversial Dutch politician whom I formerly recommended as a new type of Liberal to listen to for Samizdata readers. I am also working on a paper which shall analyse his political manifesto, which has a shortened version available in English.
Well, should be clear, Fortuyn was a nationalist. Fortuyn had similar views on Islam as Rushdie or Naipaul, although he expressed them in populist political language. This was mistaken for racism by some journalists. You have cited the Simpson interview, which terminated on BBC when Fortuyn asked Simpson about his definition on racism. Later Fortuyn sent Simpson away for “showing disrespect to him” and did not allow the interview to be finished. However, today’s Independent have revealed the last sentence of the interview, clearly cut a couple of seconds on BBC before the end. It goes:
“Give me a definition of racism. You don’t know what a racist [is] because you have Negroes who are Muslims , you have yellow men who are Muslims, you have white men who are Muslims, so how can you connect the Muslim religion and culture with race? Then you are very stupid, Mr. Simpson.”
Of course regarding this example that Daniel Antal mentions, one can speculate why the interview was cropped where it was. To me it seems obvious that it suited certain people to have Pim Fortuyn dismissed as an incoherent fascist who is immune to rational discourse, rather than someone who asked inconvenient questions that the great and good in the media do not have answers for.
For another example of this, Sean Gabb‘s recent exchange on Radio 4 with Charles Moore, Editor of The Daily Telegraph was edited to the point of altering it beyond recognition. Much in the way Stalin would have former Bolsheviks airbrushed out of photographs when they did not continue to represent The Party Line, it seems that British national state media simply edits unwelcome dissent out before broadcasting. It would seem that when the true ‘loyal opposition’ actually dares to oppose, that cannot be allowed to sully the airwaves. They would rather give voice to Charles Moore, that way there is less risk of any real and intellectually rigorous dissent being heard.
At least Brian Micklethwait seems to have the contacts to actually get his voice live and unedited on talk radio shows to put his unalloyed, full fat, non-diet libertarian perspectives out on the statist clogged airwaves.
If full moons make people go bonkers or turn into wolves, maybe the lack of a full moon makes people po-faced and excessively serious.
Jason Soon*, who like the fragrant Natalie Solent is a high quality blogger who is on the side of the angels, also does not seem to have figured out that Tony Millard was actually joking. The fact Tony’s article appeared on Libertarian Samizdata was a significant clue that the wine tasting apparatus might be lodged in the cheek.
*[Ed. Jason’s archive links do not seem to be working at the moment (a frequent problem with blogger alas), so in the meantime just go to Jason Soon and scroll down to the article Un-libertarian samizdata to see why we are spanking him]
Now to the serious part of my blog post:
Tony Blair and David Blunkett have promised to scrap all British restrictions on firearms ownership, affirm the state’s commitment to individual civil liberties, repeal the Town and Country Planning and Land Act and replace the statue of proto-fascist Oliver Cromwell in front of Parliament with a statue of Margaret Thatcher wielding a sword and standing astride the prostrate body of the fallen Arthur Scargill…
And unfortunately probably not the end of the unerringly off-target Frances Fukuyama. He is one of the more dependably incorrect pundits currently putting quill to parchment, and his ‘The End of History’, coming as it did in the middle of history’s violent resumption in the Balkans in 1992, may go down as the most ludicrous analysis of the world since 1848.
In his latest prognostication he argues that September 11th has undermined the entire thesis of libertarianism.
Sept. 11 ended this line of argument. It was a reminder to Americans of why government exists, and why it has to tax citizens and spend money to promote collective interests. It was only the government, and not the market or individuals, that could be depended on to send firemen into buildings, or to fight terrorists, or to screen passengers at airports. The terrorists were not attacking Americans as individuals, but symbols of American power like the World Trade Center and Pentagon. So it is not surprising that Americans met this challenge collectively with flags and patriotism, rather than the yellow ribbons of individual victimization.
There is something almost endearing about Fukuyama’s unerring ability to get it wrong. Fire departments in many places are not ‘government’ at all, but rather local volunteers who need no cohesion or coercion from the state to put their lives on the line for their jobs. In most of the western world, it is not ‘government’ who provides the airport security but private business, and does anyone really think that nationalisation of this function in the USA has actually made airports safer? If you have an incompetent screener, who do you think finds it easier to fire him, a private company or the US government? If emergency services can only exist when set up by the state, then how does ‘historian’ Frances Fukuyama explain the fact that for the last 175 years, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution has provided that service for Britain not just privately manned but privately funded?
Likewise, Fukuyama might like to hold up the Cato Institute‘s dafter remarks about Saddam Hussain as the totality of libertarian foreign policy ideas but it just ain’t so and there is indeed libertarian thought which does not take the strict ‘anti-war’ line, seeing that as being in fact anti-survival. I have huge respect for the Cato Institute and regard it as a superb organisation, but when it comes to matters of defence and co-existing in the real world with psychopathic tyrants who are trying to arm themselves with nuclear weapons, well sorry, the dollar amounts expended in the Gulf War is really not the sensible starting point for analysis. Yet the fact is not all libertarians are full blown anarcho-libertarians, even if we are indeed much informed by anarcho-libertarian ideas… there is in fact libertarian life beyond Murray Rothbard. Many of us support the concept of a nightwatchman ‘state’ in some form or other. Minarchists like me see dropping bombs on the Saddam Hussain’s of this world as being one of the very few legitimate functions of the state and the reality is that my views on that sort of thing are actually those of the majority of ‘small L’ libertarians (and more than a few American Libertarian Party activists as well if the truth be known. I can think of one who contributes to this blog).
Yes, I like the idea of getting the state out of 90% of what it does but the only time I turn the other cheek when my community is threatened is when I need to shoot my rifle off my left shoulder because I am taking cover in a doorway. As I mentioned in several earlier articles, the de facto pacifist libertarian ‘ostrich’ faction is by no means a distinguishing feature of libertarianism, just a faction of it.
Of course as a general rule, if Frances Fukuyama says something, you can safely assume the contrary is in fact the case.
Staying with the Middle Europe theme, it looks like a great deal of partying went on in Hungary when Brian Linse of Ain’t no bad dude blog fame went there to make his movie Den of Lions, with Steven Dorff, Bob Hoskins and Laura Fraser… I wonder if they remembered to actually shoot the movie?
As I have heard rumours they are still clearing up and rebuilding in Budapest post-Brian, when the dreaded Bad Dude of the Blogosphere arrives in London to do the movie’s post production work, I wonder what havoc will be wrought here? My liver hurts just thinking about it.
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.
|
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.
|
