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]
|
Russell Leslie wrote in to disagree with David Carr‘s article Buddy, can you spare a lime?
“Even a child knows that nobody ever died from eating vitamins or herbal supplements.”
To which Russell writes:
Actually – people (specifically asthmatic children) die from the common alternative remedy “royal jelly” on a regular basis. People think of royal jelly as being a wonderful natural remedy but it does kill people.
Vitamin A, a fat soluble vitamin, will kill in excessive concentrations. Though generally the people that have died have been people that have eaten the livers of sharks, seals and (ooh! gross) dogs – rather than store bought vitamin supplements.
Comfrey can lead to internal bleeding in excessive doses (there are some reports that Calendula can do this as well, though I am not clear on how reliable these reports are).
Herbal remedies are fine when intelligently used – unfortunately some people do not have the mental wattage to do anything intelligently. It is not to protect the intelligent that some form of controls may be needed – only the truly stupid need protection – but no one wants to admit that they are stupid. It is difficult to devise a system of controls protects the stupid but that doesn’t get in the way of the skilled or intelligent.
However whilst Russell makes some good technical points, I think he asks a very leading question: how do we protect the ‘stupid’ from the consequences of their own actions?
This seems to accept as axiomatic that, firstly, people who take ‘excessive’ doses of vitamins or herbal supplements are necessarily stupid… and secondly that anyone has the right to ‘protect’ said ‘stupid’ people from their own actions. The first point is highly conjectural and the second is morally dubious to put it mildly. Surely the best way to induce sensible decision making to not to insulate people from the consequences of their actions, be they the people who take alternative remedies or the people who market them.
We have been deluged with interesting e-mails for publication in the last week, so please do not take it personally if we do not always publish yours. Sometimes we do not publish submissions for editorial reasons or due to excessive length but more usually it is simply because we do not always have the time. Samizdata is a loose but more or less functioning anarchy, so having someone to edit and publish a submission is a rather hit-and-miss affair depending on who does or does not have the time to do it. At the moment the main limiting factor is the sheer amount of incoming e-mail and our available time to digest them all!
And for all who have asked: Natalija Radic is currently off skiing in Austria and so I do not expect to see her posting again for several days yet.
By the way, a few links may have vanished off the side bar due to a minor mishap during template surgery, followed by doing the daily back up the wrong way. Doh!
Hey, hey! It’s been so long since I have written with a pen,
its sharper than a razor, I don’t feel like Errol Flynn.
Got no computer, I can’t type the letter ‘M’.
You’re not responding right, I guess I better start again.
– ‘Last cigarette’ by Dramarama
At some point when I was growing up, it was impressed upon me by someone, I do not remember who or even when, that good handwriting was something that mattered. I don’t mean mattered just to them, but that it was something that was one of the multiplicity of ways a person could be judged, much in the same way a person could be judged by how they dressed or their smell or the manner in which they spoke. By this I do not mean the shop from which their clothes came, or what sort of aftershave they used or the specific meaning of what a person said. No, I mean were there clothes unkept, clean, carelessly worn, well fitted, did they smell unwashed or was aftershave used to mask rather than attend natural odors, were words carelessly and crudely strung together or well chosen and rich.
Clearly handwriting was another one of those ‘things-that-matter’. So I attended to it, studied calligraphy, adopted formal, social and casual hands, did a wicked gothic black letter and a distinctive cursive italic… and the years slid by.
Then tonight I found myself rummaging through one of several teetering piles of music CD’s I have not listened to for quite a while and popped on ‘Dramarama’, a reasonable but essentially unremarkable late 1980’s band and heard the song quoted above.
And it was true. In spite of churning out thousands of words a day for business and pleasure I have not written anything with a pen for more than two weeks by my best guess. And what I wrote then was a scrawled supermarket shopping list on the back of a page of last year’s The Far Side daily calender.
So does ones handwriting really say anything significant about you in this digital age? Well last year an old chum of mine got married again and asked me to do her invitations by hand, just like I did 12 years ago the last time she got married. I told her I was very out of practice and that she should get them printed but she insisted in that way she knows I cannot refuse. So I suppose she certainly thought it was ‘something that mattered’. Fortunately she provided a vast number of spare invitations as it seems that formal handwriting is most certainly not like riding a bike. It took me several days of concerted effort to dredge up that unused skill before I was producing hand lettered invitations to what I felt was an acceptable standard.
So what does it actually mean? Well there was a time when I would probably have thought a bit less of a person with ghastly handwriting. It was almost as if when handed a hard to read scribble that that person was being presumptuous and disrespectful, forcing me to try and decode it rather than making themselves clear. It was rather like someone who does not deign to look at you whilst addressing you.
But times do change. Although it might still irritate, I do not really accord quite so much stock to the quality of a person’s written hand. In this age of print-outs and IR networks there are people I know very well indeed and yet have probably never even seen what their handwriting looks like.
Perhaps it still is important, just not in quite the same nuanced way it once was. Still, I do hope my friends marriage proves more durable than the last one as I do not look forward to doing her invitations for a third time.
Patrick Crozier has a good article On Corporate Manslaughter. He notes that the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) will be prosecuting Railtrack (the company which ‘owns’ the actual railroad infrastructure in Britain, recently in effect re-nationalised by the State). Thus one part of the state is trying to make another part of the state pay fines to yet another part of the state.
Patrick makes several excellent points and avoids the usual stale perspectives on these sort of issues.
Jason Soon over on the Catallaxy Files has a fascinating article about the idea of using native rights to over-fished waters as a means for achieving some free market environmentalism.
Libertarians have long claimed that there are alternatives to environmental regulation – one of the more obvious is giving property rights to what were previously unowned resources. Native title rulings seem to be a perfect opportunity (where a tradition of property ownership can be established) to put this worthy libertarian principle into practice while recognising ‘Aboriginal rights’ in a manner that promotes economic efficiency and justice and encourages entrepreneurship – and privatises more of Australia (alright so ownership will be vested in the tribe but how is that different from firms in Western society owning property? It’s part of their tradition, let them sort out the principal-agent problems).
Interesting idea. The whole article is well worth pondering.
Kevin Holtsberry uses Russell Kirk‘s opus The Conservative Mind to analyse his own views. I find this approach interesting because I suspect the devil is in the details. Here is my libertarian take on Kevin’s listed summation of ‘The Conservative Mind’:
1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.
Yes: I believe that morality is something objectively derived but the understanding of which is often an evolutionary process. However it is this objectively derivable morality, which being the basis for all natural law, which transcends the custom of time and place and complex utilitarian constructs of written law, business and economy. It is the test all custom and law must in the end be subject to.
2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.
Yes, this is surely one of the keys to a libertarian or classical liberal mindset: an antipathy to conformity as a desirable objective independent of context. It is liberty and the inevitable diversity of objectives and understandings that spring from minds freed from literal coercion that is the highest objective of the classical liberal, rather than a utilitarian objective such as tractor production or discouraging single mothers. I am not so convinced “proliferating variety and mystery of human existence” is actually a true conservative value however.
3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders an classes, as against the notion of a “classless society.”
Yes, but given that ‘class’ is just a moving amorphous set of social cues, it is not something that is an end in and of itself, anymore than ‘classlessness’ should be. It is only when concepts of class take on force backed statutory characteristics that ‘class’ becomes an objective ill. ‘Class’ when rationally understood is an emergent phenomena that means a whole lot less than Marxists would have people believe.
4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all.
Yes. All true libertarians would regard this as axiomatic.
5) Faith in prescription and distrust of “sophisters, calculators, and economists” who would restructure society upon abstract designs.
Yes. Civil society is the product not of reason and imposed models of ‘what should be’ but rather of evolutionary processes. To think otherwise is to confuse the essential difference between society and state, which is the underpinning fallacy beneath all forms of statism. Yet a willingness to let ‘nature take its course’ invariably means a willingness to accept the inevitability that as economic realities shift and readjust dynamically within any rational economic system, so too will society… and not all people who have ‘abstract visions of society’ want those visions imposed at bayonet point.
6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration rather than a torch of progress.
Yes, see above. But the libertarian/classical liberal is also a dynamist, and thus grasps that rational understanding of the gradualist evolutionary nature of societies does not preclude an enthusiasm for innovation and the changes that tend to spring from that. A society which accepts change through social evolution and development towards a less statist/stasist imposed order is not a society unmaking itself but rather one becoming deeper and denser: an adaptable society is a successful society.
Yesterday, 12 March 2002, there were 11 RNLI lifeboats launched off the British and Irish coasts.
Also yesterday people all across Britain and Ireland would have seen men and women on the high streets of their towns and cities collecting money from passers-by for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) and rewarding them with small stickers. The RNLI is an emergency service that has been in operation in Britain for 175 years and it is run by volunteers and is entirely funded by voluntary donations.
As an all-weather sailor myself, I have always had not just a fondness for the RNLI but a significant vested interest in its existence.
Lifeboat stations can be found in coastal communities across the British Isles.
Anyone who has seen an off-shore lifeboat launch during a pounding North Sea gale can be left in no doubt that these people are some of the world’s great unsung heros. In the course of saving over 130,000 people from the sea since its founding, more than 400 RNLI volunteers have lost their lives.
But another reason that I am so fond of them is not just their fierce bravery but that regardless of the fact the RNLI is an utterly non-political organisation, they are perhaps one of the very best arguments for libertarian voluntarism in the world (link requires Adobe acrobat reader or similar): a world class non-governmental ‘common good’ emergency service not just manned but also funded without coercive taxation.
Please visit the RNLI website and donate to this superb organisation.
It drives on with a courage which is stronger than the storm. It drives on with a mercy which does not quail in the presence of death. It drives on as proof, a symbol, a testimony that man is created in the image of God and that valour and virtue have not perished in the British race.
– Winston Churchill, RNLI Centenary 1924
A.N. Wilson is one of that species of writers that Britain has in abundance: well educated, articulate and not excessively intelligent. He is an exemplar of a particular strain of well heeled British thought that will praise a well crafted essay that states the received wisdom with an air of wise engagement and formulaic cynicism. However such people are deeply suspicious of anything resembling a rigorous argument (for that might imply the truth is not self-evident) or any attempt to make causal links beyond the second logical tier. This species of writer’s forbearers were the people who knew that ending unemployment was good, and that The National Socialist German Workers Party had ended unemployment in the 1930’s. Thus as they looked on and saw a tidy, neat Germany arise from the social and economic chaos of the Depression Years, they would state at parties in their Eton and Oxford educated accents that that Hitler chap might be on to something.
And so we have A.N. Wilson writing about Eugenics on Sunday, 10th March 2002 in The Future lies with Eugenics. He quite interestingly and articulately describes an underclass in Britain that lives a life of state subsidised indolence, crime and childbirth, leading to generations predisposed genetically from birth to become predatory unemployed drains on the diminishing public purse that would otherwise be setting aside tax money for more worthy retirees.
And his solution? Keeping in the tradition of not so much Occam’s razor but rather Occam’s chainsaw, all problems are resolved in one causal step:
(A) The children of ‘hooligan parentage’ provide the majority of repeat offending criminals.
(B) Therefore the solution is to forcibly sterilise repeat offenders to prevent the birth of more congenital criminals.
The justification for this is that these hooligan elements not only absorb a disproportionate amount of appropriated state tax monies containing, housing and feeding them but also will have the temerity to demand an equal share of nationalised state welfare benefits in their dotage.
Now a more rigorous mind might have noted that the common thread here is not some societal line of poison genetics but rather who gets to share in the money the state has appropriated from its hapless taxpayers. The concept that perhaps it is the very structure of the predatory wealth destroying state that is the problem, rather than a genetic underclass, would appear to be a causal link too far for a writer whose primary aim is to be articulate rather than intelligent.
So house prices are skewed by state intervention in tenancy relationships, low end jobs are priced out of existence with minimum wages, undercapitalised businesses are bankrupted with taxes and regulations, tax monies are forcibly taken from the productive and given to subsidise unproductive behaviour and yet somehow the emergence of a perpetually unemployed underclass is deduced to be a genetic problem? Well perhaps it is. Maybe if a few more of A.N. Wilson’s class had contrived to get themselves slaughtered in Britain’s 20th century wars, we would not have developed a political and media elite that seems genetically predisposed to blame everyone for the miserable state of Britain except themselves.
I cannot think of a more compelling argument for the importance of the libertarian argument that no state can be trusted with such a high degree of power over civil society as states have today. The likes of A.N. Wilson would have people castrated and spayed by the state because those people have to live in the reality that the likes of A.N. Wilson helped to create.
As is the case with many libertarians, I am opposed to the death penalty not on the grounds the state is wrong to kill people, it does that all the time on an almost casual basis via more indirect means, but rather that as a falliblist I am all too aware that miscarriages of justice occur with frightening regularity and you cannot ‘undo’ an execution. However I have no objective moral problem with the idea of a murderer paying with his life per se, just a problem entrusting that decision to a fallible judiciary.
In the USA, convicted murderer Tracy Housel has been on death row for 16 years for the 1985 rape and murder of 46-year-old Jeanne Drew. Because he is a British passport holder, the usual parade of people from the UK have been petitioning to commute his sentence to one of life imprisonment. Even our blessed leader Tony Blair has written to the US authorities on behalf of this man. Vera Baird, the Labour MP for Redcar is in the USA and has said that “at a time when British troops are working along side American troops in Afghanistan, some special consideration is called for”.
And so given my libertarian opposition to the death penalty, presumably I agree, right?
Wrong. In this case, the murderer Tracy Housel admits he raped and strangled his victim. There is absolutely no grounds for reasonable doubt here and so I say let him get exactly what he deserves. What is more, the conflation of value by the Member of Parliament for Redcar of British soldiers putting their lives on the line alongside their US comrades in the fight against terrorism, and a self confessed British rapist-murderer in the US is nothing less that a disgusting insult to British soldiers everywhere. To hear the two mentioned in the same sentence is an absolute disgrace of the sort I have come to expect from moral relativists like Vera Baird.
I just spotted this splendid article on the ‘Grauniad’/Observer website which actually have the bravery to call for the complete abolition of Britain’s third rate socialist healthcare system. The sooner the better.
UPI reported recently in an article titled Big brother is big business that the UK is the most remotely surveilled state in the world.
Advocates point to its efficacy at the same time as national crime rates are soaring. A study by the Scottish Center for Criminology suggested that “spy” cameras had little or no effect on crime. It concluded that “reductions were noted in certain categories, but there was no evidence to suggest that the cameras had reduced crime overall.”
Yet more and more CCTV cameras appear on our streets every day as companies vie for state contracts to bring Orwell’s vision of a Britain under all pervasive observation to reality. Authorities invariably claim that they are to discourage violent crimes and burglary, yet increasingly they are used to prosecute people for transgressing traffic and litter regulations. Nightmarish.
When the state watches you,
dare to stare back
John Weidner‘s Random Jottings is a rambling, strangely structured blog that reminds me of wandering through an antique shop. It is a place filled with peculiar and fascinating artifacts, some clearly desirable and collectable and others curious but of unclear purpose like a button hook or silver chatelaine.
You are as likely to find information about a resurgence in skilled oriental rug making in Turkey as you are to see commentary on the war in Afghanistan. It may be the only blog I would describe as ‘charming’. Visit daily because who knows what you might find?
|
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.
|
