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.
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Joshua Marshall has been discussing why he does not approve of dual-citizenship in several interesting posts. Not surprisingly I see it in very different terms to him. It is not one of those things that I feel I must ‘take him to task’ over because I do understand his view and realise that the root of our disagreement lies much further up the causal chain than the issue of ‘citizenship’. I see our difference of opinion as springing not so much from error but rather from radically different views of the world itself. He wrote:
To my mind, this isn’t a conservative view. It’s a liberal one. One of the things that makes us all equal as citizens is the fundamental reality that makes us citizens: membership and allegiance to this political community, this country. That’s what allows an immigrant citizen to be just as much an American as the guy whose ancestors came on the Mayflower.
He is quite right that the way he reasonably describes ‘citizenship’ is indeed ‘liberal’ (in the American sense of the word: i.e. what Europeans call ‘democratic socialist’). The ‘political community’ Josh describes is not civil society at all. Civil society is something to which people like me have no problem belonging and which does not require the permission (citizenship) of the state thus to do. No, what Josh is talking about is ‘The State’ because state and society are not the same thing. That is because civil society is not a ‘political’ community at all (i.e. a community in which politics, which is entirely about the use of force, governs the interactions), but rather a community which works by affinity and economic interaction rather than legislation.
In a sense I suppose it’s not a very big deal. But doesn’t this trivialize what it should mean to be a citizen of one of those countries? It’s sounds less like a civic, national identity than a sort of heritage knickknack or heirloom. Citizenship isn’t just about having a standing right of residency or something you have because you have some attachment or family connection to a particular country. I think it’s something more than that — particularly in the context of American citizenship.
Josh is also quite right that dual-citizenship trivialises what it does mean to be a citizen of one of those countries. His objections mirror those of Marxists with their disdain for ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. When a person sees political rather than social interaction as the core of society, then a person who stands outside, indeed above, the political structure in question is surely a threat to the authority of the political order. Yet globalization, technology and trade are indeed inexorably producing a larger and more culturally influential cosmopolitan class, not just a ‘Jet Set’ of people who work in banking and broking, but also a more broadly based group who have ’emigrated’ yet retain close and active ties across the oceans in ways that were previously either too expensive or technologically impossible to maintain. In past times, a family moving from India or Jamaica or China to a new life in Britain or North America or Australia, would have only the slow and remote link of written mail sent by ship to stay in contact. → Continue reading: Citizenship: the state’s way of saying it owns you
Although we have reduced the amount of blogs to which we link on the Samizdata main page, we have added a separate links and photographs page. We will occasionally add new photographs there every now and then if we can catch a member of the Samizdata Team in a compromising situation.
We added the links page as the sidebar was becoming unmanagable and the links list was in danger of melting down… a sort of blogger China Syndrome.
Update, July 2002: since our transmogification to Samizdata.net, this has all changed
The regular Samizdata e-mail address is back up and running after our domain host finally clubbed the misbehaving server into submission like a baby seal.
Feedback should go to: [address removed]
If you have them, the various other samizdata.net e-mail addresses are now functional again.
Inside Europe: Iberian Notes on 11:00 CET, March. 22, 2002 (no link to individual articles) does a pretty good job of comprehensively trashing the Spanish claims on Gibraltar and pointing out the weird logic involved.
I mean he is begging for it… and so in order to indulge his rather interesting masochistic habits, he is walking down the virtual beach and kicking sand over all the big 250 lb guys on the beach. He wants to get bitch slapped by the liberals (by which he means American socialists), challenged to fisticuffs by the conservatives (by which he means American Republicans) and shot by the libertarians (by which he means us, I guess).
Well I don’t feel qualified to respond for the first two groups but for the last… well sorry John, I am not offended. In fact, I thought it was hilarious and not far off the mark.
But seeing as how I know John will be heartbroken if I don’t reply more ‘in character’… asking for the reason why libertarians don’t get elected is rather like asking why so few Jews are pork butchers. I am sure there probably are a few Jewish pork butchers (probably Russian ‘Jews’ living in Israel or Highland Park, New Jersey, who no doubt have a fine Slavic sense of irony) just as there are a few ‘Libertarians’ who get elected to put their hands on the levers of state oppression in order to manipulate society with the state’s proxy violence…
…perhaps you see my point. Or not.
Oh, and John, I would hazard a guess that the reason I blog a lot more than you is I probably have a lot more money. I made it via an obscure and very complex arbitrage deal that involved hiring other people’s kids to blow strangers for crack. Damn I love capitalism.
But the fact remains… John’s article is funny and contains a fair element of truth about ‘liberals’ (socialists), conservatives and libertarians.
P.S. Stay the hell off my property!
For much of today, we have been having e-mail problems (i.e. the domain hosting server is down), so if you e-mailed any of the usual addresses, we probably did not get it.
As a temporary measure, please send all e-mails to samizdata at cloister.dircon.co.uk until you get the all clear.
Oh happy happy joy joy, we love our domain server!
There is an interesting article about a meeting of libertarian science fiction writers over on Hollywood Investigator. The splits between libertarian thought (and libertarian ‘thought’) are made very clear by the views on parade at this dinner.
This is the first time I have noticed one of the 2001 pattern two pound coins (£2 = US $3). I think the tails side is far nicer than the messy modern art confusion of the previous pattern, which looked like a circuit board that had been stamped on by an elephant.
 
In this report in the Times of India, US reduces reward on Bin Laden, we see the strangest manifestation of the backward bending demand curve I have ever seen!
 Update: As a couple people have ask me to simply explain what a ‘backward bending demand curve’ is, it is a strange and counter intuitive phenomenon in which sometimes as a product gets cheaper, people buy less of it or if a product gets more expensive, they buy more of it. This does not seem to make sense but it does occasionally happen.
Example 1: A high price designer ‘name label’ dress is offered at a reduced price… still out of reach of the ‘woman in the street’ buyer. Paradoxically the high end target market buy less of the dresses, presumably because the reduced price indicates it is probably ‘last years design’ (even if not true, the price is used as the primary source of information by the potential purchaser as to ‘what is hot’).
Example 2: Soviet made wristwatches, made to uncharacteristically high quality and standards were marketed in Britain in the early 1970’s. They were every bit as good as other high quality wristwatches available at the time but were almost half the price. Even though Soviet products were a relative rarity in the UK, British buyers stayed away in droves, presumably taking the view that any watch that cheap had to be complete rubbish. The Soviets were baffled but on advice from a British consultant raised the price to just below the typical UK price and they stared to sell.
Thus, the US is lowering the price on the head on Osama bin Laden in the hope the new level of reward is something rural Afghans can actually relate to in the real world. In each case the specifics are different but price is just a form of information and sometimes if the price of something is unexpectedly high or low, the effects is the opposite of what one might normally expect. That is what I mean by a ‘backward bending demand curve’!
Also on reflection, I was thinking of this in terms of the US doing the ‘selling’ of an outsourced service here (terrorist removal)… but I suppose one could argue that this is a backward bending supply curve: the US is offering money in the hope some impoverished Afghan will ‘supply’ a dead or bound-hand-and-foot Osama bin Laden 
Andrea Harris is the Fox News guest blogger and showcases former US Libertarian Party candidate Harry Browne‘s wit and wisdom.
So will people please just read this and then stop asking me why I keep saying that Browne and his Libertarian Party do not define libertarianism in the USA. Guys, face facts… as long as you have a barking moonbat like Browne who thinks a libertarian society could survive contact with reality in the manner he advocates, the vast majority of US libertarians will continue to either vote Republican or if they cannot stand that, just not vote at all.
There are a lot of great people in the US Libertarian Party. Unfortunately those folks are not the ones running it.
 Update: As many e-mails have pointed out (and indeed as I alluded to on my final line above), many LP members both take a very rational view regarding the current war and do not think either Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan were ‘provoked’ by the mean old USA and Britain into World War II and if we had only been nicer to nice Mr. Hitler all that nastiness could all have been avoided. After all, our own Dale Amon has LP ties and he is extremely ‘sound of mind and sharp of sabre’ on all such issues.
Nevertheless, some LP remarks ‘from the top’ since September 11th have indeed fallen into the tinfoil hat and black helicopter category of barking moonbat mating calls… and this is rather a problem for me. Getting rid of Browne is certainly a start but his whole associated idiotarian meme stream is going to be decisively flushed down the toilet as a minimum pre-requisite for getting many pukka libertarians to even touch the LP with a barge pole.
Looking at another country from afar is rather like viewing it through a spyglass. In the case of Britain, with its huge on-line media presence, with the wave of a mouse you see what UK media writes about in detail without seeing what lies around the issue. Then you see what the media in one’s own country says about things going on in the UK, and finally you base your emergent views within the meta-contextual references of your own culture, as we all do.
But a little learning is a dangerous thing. If I were to read the LA Times and NY Times from afar day after day without having lived in the US for many years, I might conclude I have a shrewd idea as to the undercurrents of US society and reasonably deduce that the United States was a very different place than the one it in fact is.
A great deal of wildly generalised commentary has been written about anti-Semitism and racism in ‘Europe’ recently. John Braue, who is not an unreasonable commentator much of the time, discusses Euro-racism in terms which are correct to an extent but also very misleading as he makes sweeping assumptions that tell us as much about his meta-contextual frames of reference as about the subject at hand:
It’s not contempt, it’s outright racism. Europe is the home of the Tribal State; if you are not a member of the Tribe, you can never be a member of Tribe, not even if you are a tenth-generation immigrant. You are at best a Gastarbeiter, to be given the scut work to do so that the Volk can collect their government benefits in peace; at worse, a nuisance to be run out of town if, inexplicably, one of the Volk wants your job instead of just cashing his monthly check as an “occupational reservist”. That, incidentally is the reason for European anti-Semitism; the Jews not only (in their view) cannot be assimilated into the Volk, they don’t want to be; they act as if being Jewish is as good as being English, or French.
From my discussions with French friends, there is some truth to that. Likewise one only has to read the nominally libertarian Hans-Herman Hoppe‘s works to realise how different German and Anglosphere views of the nature of society are. Every nation has its intolerant elements, but to think German and French racism on one hand, and English racism on the other have a common root is to fail to understand that ‘England’ (John does not say ‘Britain’) is not Europe.
To suggest that at its core, English culture has a blood and soil volk ethos is to fundamentally misread the often repeated messages of English history. By that logic we should still have Huguenot ghettos in London. How can the enormous number of Jews who have been senior government ministers over the last 50 years be explained away? The Jews of Britain have been the masters of successful assimilation precisely because being a Jew does not make a person less British or even English, any more than being a Catholic makes me less British or English. As a splendid example, when one reads David Carr’s articles to this blog, one is struck not by his jewishness but by his effortlessly pugnacious Englishness.
I am sure John and other commentators of similar generalised views reads the on-line Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Reuters etc. and are therefore very up on current events as reported in the UK media but I wonder if John also knows that there are more members of ethnic minorities in local government in the UK than in any other single country in Europe.
To be British is much like being ‘American’. It is a meta-context to which one subscribes, rather than be born into. Britain, and in particular England, in fact is no less integrated than the United States and probably more so (and with far less heavy handed intrusions by the state to make that happen) and far, far more so than mainland Europe. Mixed marriages are endemic, which is far and away the best measure of social assimilation. The proof of the sheer extent of miscegenation in Britain can be seen walking hand in hand down the high streets of Britain in glorious and damning rebuke to those who believe free choice without the direction of state leads to social separation. Is there racism and anti-Semitism in Britain? Yes of course. In a few areas it is very serious but it is hard to escape the view that race relations in the UK overall are almost a case study in socially driven (rather than state driven) assimilation.
For another splendid example of the reality of the ‘English Volk’, I recommend you check out the site of fellow British blogger, Adil Farooq of MuslimPundit and see Islam interpreted in ways which spring from a truly British meta-context.
Yes, I know that the UK has been far and away the most ‘involved’ of the USA’s allies in the war against Al Qaeda, with almost the entire Special Air Service (SAS) being deployed in Afghanistan at one point.
But the latest commitment of 1,700 Royal Marine Commandos to a offensively tasked Brigade forming in Afghanistan is a significant step that indicates a much more robust policy of aggressive engagement by Britain.
Some libertarians will grimace that the state is sending men far away to march to the sound of an American drum, but I for one am delighted, for the enemy in question is the enemy of modern civilisation itself. I live in a major metropolitan area that would make a lovely target for a small nuclear weapon and thus am of the opinion that the only good Al Qaeda is a dead Al Qaeda and I do not much care where the men armed and equipped with my tax money have to go to find them. Godspeed Gentlemen.
The Royal Marines, with their specialised arctic and mountain warfare training and equipment, years of extreme weather training in Norway, air mobility and formidable élan make a very high quality addition to the corkscrew and blowtorch warfare that is to come as the remaining cadres of Taliban/Al Qaeda are exterminated.
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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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