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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Blogger Chris Johnson of Midwest Conservative Journal may be a benighted conservative but at least he is my favourite kind of benighted conservative. His blog is wide ranging, informal, staunchly anti-idiotarian and laced with humour (such as his ‘break up LibSam’ campaign) [Ed: at least we hope he is joking!] with remarks like:
Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy responded by saying, “I don’t look at judicial nominations through a political prism,” but had to cut his statement short when his growing nose poked a reporter in the eye. The reporter was not seriously injured.
If you like to sample conservative blogging but find some of them too po faced, then Midwest Conservative Journal might be just what you are looking for.
Todays newspapers give us two contrasting images. Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s ANC leader smiling as he poses with his friend Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF leader, sticking by him in the face of world wide (but not African) criticism of Zimbabwe’s descent into collective nihilism.
It also gives us a picture of the dead body of Zimbabwean farmer Terry Ford, murdered by Mugabe’s ZANU-PF thugs. It shows his distressed Jack Russell terrier, Squeak, who lay curled up next to his dead friend, refusing to leave his side.
And so now we read that Commonwealth Leaders meeting in London today will delay their ‘verdict’ on the farcical ‘elections’ in Zimbabwe and whether to suspend that country from the Commonwealth, a trivial matter of suspending a murderous tyrant from a trivial organization.
Yet clearly if the Commonwealth is serious about democracy then surely nations with governments which do not adhere to the social values of the majority of the Commonwealth must be expelled.
Therefore, I call on the Commonwealth’s leadership to expel The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India forthwith as being grossly unrepresentative of the murderous kleptocratic regimes which characterize the majority of the Commonwealth.
Next time they want a Foreign Aid hand out, let the murdering sons of bitches ask their good friend Thabo Mbeki for South African taxpayers money.
Update: Kill white landowners, kill black political opponents, destroy a nation’s economy and plunge it into a nightmare and what happens? Does the Commonwealth demand the overthrow of the tyrant and his government? No. Does the Commonwealth demand Zimbabwe’s expulsion whilst ZANU-PF remains in power? No. The Commonwealth has in fact decided to suspend Zimbabwe for one year. Read that again. ONE YEAR. The fact even this pathetic gesture has been so long coming is an indictment of the moral bankruptcy of the Commonwealth as an institution.
John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister stressed: “The committee expressed its determination to promote reconciliation in Zimbabwe between the main political parties.”
Reconciliation? Mugabe is a tyrant and murderer and any rational society should be urging that he be summarily put up against a wall, shot and then thrown in a garbage dump, not ‘reconciled’ with. Well I guess we should look on the bright side: things will not be so violent in Zimbabwe one year from now as all Mugabe’s opponents will either be dead or Mugabe will be hanging on the meat hook that he deserves by then.
All pale compared to the horror of having the builders in. The mess, the noise, the frangible schedules, the trail of half drunk mugs of tea… In fact, the combination of slipping schedules and a partially dismantled house (and an illness in the family) has forced me to delay a brief business trip to Europe I had planned for this week. Inconvenient does not even begin to describe it.
I mentioned my views on ‘The British Builder’ to both Joanne Jacobs and Brian Linse when they were in London recently, intimating to them both on separate occasions that these sceptred Isles produce by far the greatest domestic affliction known to Western man since Attila the Hun remodelled much of Italy… but both Joanne and Brian quickly asserted that the British Builder’s American counterparts are even worse fonts of woe, calamity and ruined carpets, taking deposits and promptly taking on a strangely ethereal quality.
I remarked on this to a German associate of mine and he in turn dismissed both British and American claims with a wave of his hand, claiming nothing leaves more misery in its wake than the attentions of Westphalian interior decorators. Then an Irish friend of mine asserted that the Irish builders had amongst their ranks many who had been rejected by the paramilitaries for being too destructive and had thus ended up with careers in construction, joining and decorating where their talents had a more ready outlet.
I seem to be detecting a strange form of inverted nationalism at work here!
As the ever lengthening stalactite of side bar links was becoming unfeasibly long, I have moved a big chunk of them to a separate page. This new page is also full of juicy goodness and well work you visiting.
The splendid Julia Gorin puts the boot in right where it is needed regarding the psychopathology of the Anti-gun male
He often accuses men with guns of “compensating for something.” The truth is quite the reverse. After all, how is he supposed to feel knowing there are men out there who aren’t intimidated by the big bad inanimate villain? How is he to feel in the face of adolescent boys who have used the family gun effectively in defending the family from an armed intruder? So if he can’t touch a gun, he doesn’t want other men to be able to either. And to achieve his ends, he’ll use the only weapon he knows how to manipulate: the law.
Read the whole thing. Prepare to laugh until it hurts.
All those people who greeted the inane steel tariffs with a yawn (“No one is interested in steel tariffs”, “it is just a bit of politics”) will be no doubt equally uninterested that the European Union, you know, the USA’s largest trading partner, is now planning fast track retaliation against the USA that will specifically target US states that benefit from the US protectionist measures.
They join Russia, Australia and Brazil looking into setting up a splendid little self-reinforcing destructive anti-international trade harmonic that will hurt everyone.
If there is anyone out there who did NOT think that international retaliation against US goods and services was the guaranteed response to the new US steel tariff, can they please e-mail me to explain why they did not think that was going to happen?
Now what were you guys saying about it not being any big deal and just being about internal US politics? So what’s next George? “Read my lips: No New Tariffs” perhaps?
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.
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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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