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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And quite reasonably too I might add. Josh Marshall lays out what he meant and raises the valid point that his remarks were aimed with an American audience and context in mind.
But the Internet being what it is, one’s audience can be far more diverse than a person might expect and thus the context within which the remarks will be read can be quite different. I had this brought home to me a week ago when I got a detailed and intelligent critique of my views on the EU from a man in Dakar, Senegal.
Although I suspect I do not entirely agree with all of Josh Marshall’s views on the subject, for the most part I actually do. His post is measured and intelligent and in reality there is not that much daylight between his and Natalija’s views either. What is more, the point that increased Natalija’s blood pressure was really more a matter of how she interpreted what was being said. As she is off on a business trip I doubt she will be posting herself for a few days but I did speak to her on the telephone, repeated the article to her and she does concede that perhaps she did read a more negative spin on the original piece than was really justified. In truth the recent ‘Free Slobodan Milosevic’ petition and associated procession of totalitarianism’s “useful idiots” has made her a tad sensitive on certain matters.
The recent trip by George Bush to Asia in which he preached the value of free trade and capitalism was of course widely reported in the media across the world. As a result, his remarks about the lowering of trade barriers are inevitably going to be thrown back in his face following the ludicrous imposition of 30% tariffs on steel imported into the USA.
Given that the underlying trend for steel imports into the USA has been downwards for years (down 30% over the last four) it is particularly bizarre that this politically motivated protectionism should have been allowed to happened. Of course this will also result in more expensive steel for the domestic US construction and manufacturing industry, it will cause retaliatory tariffs against US products overseas and most importantly, completely destroys the US ability to put political or moral pressure on other countries to lower tariffs against US goods.
So in order to protect some jobs in an inefficient sector, other US jobs are put at risk in not just steel consuming areas of the economy but also possibly the entire export sector once anti-US retaliatory measures are used to hit back by US trading partners.
Perhaps someone needs to point out to Dubya that compared to the value of liberalisation of the world trading system to a massive high tech external trading nation like the USA, the US steel industry is really not that important in the overall scheme of things. In any case, the whole idea that less competition will make the US steel industry more efficient, well, how does that work? It will just penalize the modern and the more competitive US steel producers in order to protect the less efficient unionised dinosaurs who will go bust in a few years anyway regardless. In the meantime overall competitiveness of US industry suffers versus overseas steel users who have access to steel at the regular non-‘protected’ price. Nice one George.
Natalija’s suspicions seem to have been correct
Both The Telegraph and The Times are reporting in their print editions that a French officer may have tipped off war criminal Radovan Karadzic about the impending operation to grab him in Bosnia.
Is anyone surprised?
I was going to just point out a splendid article in the UK edition of Esquire magazine by the dependably excellent Karen Krizanovich about ‘the murky world of the dominatrix’ and how context really matters:
Let’s say that one evening your girlfriend starts having a go at you for not doing the washing-up. “You are so lazy!” she screams, slapping a teatowel against her firm thigh. Her breasts quiver as she gestures at you. “I should put you across my knee and spank you!” she shrieks, her pupils dilating with anger. She’s red in the face now, and you are the helpless target of all her built-up rage and resentment. She steps forward, towel in hand, to take her revenge…
Whoa! Stop right there. Maybe this isn’t the perfect evening for you. But picture this scene in the bedroom with both of you naked. Maybe now you get the point.
Yes indeed I do!
But the fact is that quite apart from this howlingly wonderful Karen Krizanovich piece, this is one of the best issues of Esquire I have read in ages. There is a great article about the race car driver and supremely cool French Resistance hero Robert Benoist, a fascinating piece on the Falklands War, a hilarious ‘Ali G’ interview, new iMacs, why the sex, sadism and hard drinking in Ian Fleming’s James Bond books make the 007 movies look pallid, and an excellent list of Britain’s 40 most eligible women. Under the entry for supermodel Kate Moss:
Money: You know your annual salary? She wouldn’t get out of bed for that.
Personality: Like shouting at an alien bartender through a wall of ice 6ft thick while juggling two cats and a monkey
Run, do not walk, to your nearest news agent and purchase a copy of the April UK edition of Esquire
Former lefty Brian Linse has more or less succumbed to Stockholm syndrome and we will soon be asking him to become a regular contributor to Samizdata. 
It was tough but although he is still in a state of denial, the process is irreversible and we will have him signing his soul away signed up to ‘The Cause’ very soon indeed.
Mark my words, he will not be able to resist the forces drawing him back to salvation in London for long. We all know that latent libertarians like him never have an easy time coming out of the closet. Still, it was touching to see him actually eat the autographed picture of Barbara Streisand he used to carry around in his wallet.
You don’t believe me? Well I lured him into taking the Ethical Philosopher Selector test and this was his top 5 results (I was peeking and he didn’t cheat):
1. Rand (100%)
2. Sartre (98%)
3. Stoics (90%)
4. Kant (88%)
5. Nietzsche (79%)
That’s right… our former pet pinko aced RAND! We may have created a monster!
…goes to Matthew Yglesias, who can rest happily between ‘Adbusters’ and ‘David Duke’. Natalija’s first language is not English and judging from his recent reply to Natalija’s articles, perhaps neither is Yglesias’… so here is a link he might find useful.
The Daily Dose is a wide ranging newsblog, consistently libertarian in outlook but less likely to assault you with polemics than yours truly. Blogstress Orchid presents numerous brief-comments-with-link entries daily plus the occasional lengthier prognostication. A typical Orchic flowering:
WHY THE DOTCOMS FAILED: Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard it all before… overinvestment, shoddy business models, the arrogance of 24-year-old CEOs. This rant (scroll down below the images) points out something that most chroniclers of the DotBombs underemphasized: human nature.
(Is chroniclers a word? Oh, well, you get my drift.)
If you like your bloggage in informal quick-fix Daily Doses, then this is the blog for you.
Boy, I take my eyes off Adil Farooq of Muslimpundit for a week and he gets a severe dose of blogorrhea.
As usual his stuff is top notch.
Does your blog lack a certain zip? Does it fail to reach other parts other blogs reach? Does Glenn Reynolds treat your blog like a bidet? In short, does your blog suck? Well perhaps your problem is that your refreshments, so essential to good blogging, are in pedestrian porcelain… your crockery is a mockery!
The truth is that hardcore bloggers prefer their bourbon toddies in a Bitter Princess mug. It is not enough to just hang out with a ‘Mittle European’ fixated Bitter Girl… to feel the full effects that are so efficacious to superior blogging, only a Bitter Girl mug will do! I find that running my tongue along the edge and thinking of Shannon greatly enhances the creative processes.
Christopher Caldwell has written an endearingly daft article that demonstrates why the libertarian vibe cannot fail in the long run to carry all before it.
Today, the Swimsuit Issue is as fat as Vogue and as dirty as Playboy: 300 pages of wall-to-wall near-nudity. Only the most determined adolescent could work his way through it single-handedly. And now that it’s outright pornography, of course, it’s become a respectable American institution.
Of course the issue here, from a libertarian perspective is… well… that there is no issue. The fact it is indeed a ‘respectable American institution’ only goes to show how far the libertarian meme has infiltrated into civil society. Conservatives and socialists alike can sneer that libertarians are an irrelevant fringe because we do not have self-described libertarian governments, yet the signs of our influence are on newsstands everywhere and at the same time less people by the year can be bothered to legitimise the democratic bean counts statists think are so important.
‘Dirty’ does not register on the libertarian aesthetic radar except when looking at pictures of wallowing hippos. Playboy is not ‘dirty’, it is just a somewhat tedious magazine which features pictures of enhanced young women, a curious artifact that once featured astonishing beauties like India Allen, Saskia Linssen and Teri Peterson, but is now just another wildebeeste amidst the herd on the news rack. Porn is one of those non-issues, along with feminism, gay rights and racism, that makes libertarians yawn. As issues these things just make no sense within a meta-context that sees the world in terms of choices and natural rights. There are no gay rights or women’s rights, just rights and the choices that spring from them.
People like sex. People pay for what they like. Add sex to your product and people will like it. Stand in the way of that particular economic/ideological steamroller at your peril. So when people like Chris Caldwell ruminate about the ‘dirty’ swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated, he is writing his article on the front of the aforementioned steamroller whilst moving backwards with unseemly haste. It is rather like expecting a description of a woman as ‘immodest’ to have any cultural relevancy. That might work in Iran but in the Western World? Nah. Not even in Peoria and Milton Keynes any more. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it, but don’t expect all too many other people to give a damn. If you want to stick to reading Inside The Vatican then be my guest. To each their own.
Of course I have indeed purchased the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated and so should you if you like looking at beautiful women. If you have a problem with that then that is exactly what it is… your problem.
The regular Samizdata e-mail addresses seem to be working again, so please resume using our usual reply mail (see side bar) and the other Samizdata addresses if you know them, rather than the emergency e-mail address previously posted. 
 Our usual e-mail address is temporarily down, so in the meantime we can be contacted at samizdata-at-cloister.dircon.co.uk
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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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