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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I must say that the most egregious omission from the Oscar line up for best flick is director Chris Nolan‘s highly unconventional Memento. Unlike the linked review I think it quite possibly does make it to “favorite-of-all-time status” rather than just pretty damn good.
Guy Pearce turns in his best performance yet, sympathetic without being sentimental and Carrie-Ann Moss proves there is more to her than just ‘Trinity’ from The Matrix with her alluring, pitiable and in the end utterly detestable character. Joe Pantoliano is of course as dependable as ever. The structure of this work is pretty much in a class of its own: we see a scene and we think we understand what is going on, but a few minutes later we see the exact same scene but the context has changed, and we realise what we thought had happened before was not the case at all. This happens several times throughout the film, which in effect starts at the end and works not so much backwards as backwards, forwards, backwards again, hop to the middle, jump back again…
This little non-linear gem is certainly in my top 5 movies of all time. Hey Oscar, we wuz robbed!
Scott Rubush write a reasonable piece on his self-named blog called Libertarianism and Marxism. I quite like the way Scott writes but I have to say he drives into several well worn potholes of misunderstanding when he mistakenly sees a confluence of views between Karl Marx and Dinesh D’Souza.
The notion that libertarians always disdain the ‘tried-and-true’ is his first misunderstanding. What libertarianism is based on is the rejection of the conservative and socialist predisposition to deference for deferences sake. Ours is the way that places civil society, and not state, at the centre of social interaction. We reject the nationalisation of private life. Yet civil society is not the product of our intellects but rather complex social evolutionary processes. Libertarians seek the solutions that emphasize free consent, binding contract and free association, all rooted in the ‘tried-and-true’ common law culture of the Anglosphere. It is only the state which can sweep away the ‘tried-and-true’ with the stroke of a pen, not libertarianism. What we reject is ‘traditions’ which have outlived their time, ‘tried-and-no-longer-true’, things like slavery, prohibiting women from owning property and legislated actions against consensual sexual practices like prostitution, homosexuality and other more unusual peccadillos.
The second misunderstanding is what D’Souza and Marx both said in the quoted passages. Whilst they both initially seem to confirm Rubush’s thesis, the last sentences in both of them illuminate why dialectical materialism is not the issue here at all because D’Souza and Marx have in fact drawn the opposite conclusions.
When Marx says in his well know remark “The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself”, he is arguing that the factory system of bourgeois collectivisation of the proletariat due to the advent of technologically derived mass production, makes the merging of society and state inevitable, thereby eliminating the raison d’etre of the bourgeoisie and resulting logically in a dictatorship of the proletariat which imposes social truth on all, leading to socialist ‘New Man’.
However when D’Souza says “So technology helped to free human beings from bondage, and that is a moral gain because it extends a cherished value: freedom”, he saying the exact opposite. His thesis is not that technology will collectivise us but rather that it will make the proletariat into the bourgeoisie… in other words, we are all de-collectivised middle class now. Technology frees us from an existence of collective tribal subsistence, allowing us to develop socially towards the more several existence of an extended de-collectivised civil order.
It is this extended order that allows morality, and not just collectivised force, to govern our actions. Man is still man but the idea that changing his circumstance makes no difference to his moral development is hard to support. Where is the Hottentot Aristotle? Where is the Nung Socrates? Where is the Inuit Aquinas? It is from a level of economic development driven by technology that permits us to spend less time shooting arrows at antelope and more time becoming more than just upright animals-that-survive.
That’s why his piece is fatally flawed. Rubush fails to see that whilst mankind’s nature may be essentially unchanging, his circumstances are not… and that is a non-trivial matter when it comes to allowing people to spend more time in non-utilitarian activities and less time just surviving.
Marx felt technology would turn society into a vast state-society based on ‘scientific socialist’ principles in which truth itself in collectively derived. D’Souza feels technology frees us to think and entertain such concepts as liberty itself.
I think Tom Burroughes is far to genteel with his treatment of EU Commissioner Chris Patten‘s remarks in the Financial Times.
My answer is not that the unilateralist urge is wicked but that it is ultimately ineffective and self-defeating.
Here is the core of the crypto-socialist beliefs of purported conservatives like Chris Patten. Only the collective approach works.
The attacks of September 11, in which citizens of more than 80 countries lost their lives, brought home in a terrifying way the vulnerability of the US and the rest of us to the actions of extremists plotting from safe places in failed states such as Afghanistan.
Indeed. That is why the ‘failed state’ which harboured and succored Al Qaeda was overthrown by force of arms and replaced with one more to America’s liking.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, it seemed that the US had rediscovered its need for allies to confront this common menace. The stunning and un-expectedly rapid success of the military campaign in Afghanistan was a tribute to American capacity. But it has perhaps reinforced some dangerous instincts: that the projection of military power is the only basis of true security; that the US can rely only on itself; and that allies may be useful as an optional extra but that the US is big and strong enough to manage without them if it must.
I suspect in fact the US actions were based on the quaint notion that a dead enemy tends not to plan further attacks against you and that time was of the essence, given that attack by Al Qaeda was not just a possibility but had actually occurred. Expeditious action was unlikely to have been served by waited for the participation of Belgian, Portuguese and Greek para-commandos. How long did it take for the Europeans to acquiesce in the tepid military action against the Bosnian Serbs who had been randomly shelling civilians in Sarajevo? Is that how long Patten expected the Americans to wait after September 11th?
I hope those instincts will not prevail, because I believe them to be profoundly misguided. The lesson of September 11 is that we need both American leadership and international co-operation on an unprecedented scale. It is in the world’s interest, as it is in the interests of the world’s greatest power, that leadership should be exercised in partnership.
The US said ‘you are either with us or with the terrorists’, which sounds like leadership to me. They then proceeded to blow seven shades of crap out of Afghanistan… at which point nations such as Syria, Sudan and Yemen started ‘co-operation on an unprecedented scale’ with the US. Sounds like leadership and co-operation to me. The problem lies in the Islamic world and this it is the co-operation of the relavent bits of the Islamic world that matters. If the people who flew the aircraft into the WTC were mostly French and German, no doubt there would be more of an imperitive to secure French and German co-operation. Of course partnership is pretty much the antithesis of leadership so quite what Patten means by leadership should be exercised in partnership is unclear to me.
Why is that so? Let me offer five reasons. First, every day makes us more aware of the interconnectedness of the modern world: a world in which America is at the centre of an increasingly integrated web, in which modern technology is corrosive of national boundaries and national jurisdictions. That makes it all the more important to work with those who share your values in order to protect them.
Exactly. Which is why the US worked with the UK and not Brussels. The US and the UK share values. The US and the EU do not.
Second, while globalisation – the combination of open trade, capitalism and technology – creates unparalleled opportunities, it also has a dark side. The European Union symbolises the ability of countries to come together to tackle common problems.
The ‘dark side’ of globalisation is creating global capitalist wealth generating networks which stasis based institutions like the EU and repressive regimes everywhere have great difficulty controlling. The ‘common problems’ Patten refers to are common to trade unions, subsidised farmers and protected national industries. The ‘problem’ they have is that they are trying to sunbathe and finding themselves in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Patten said a few days after September 11th that the attack was ‘due to globalization’. So presumably if we restrict trade to within national borders and subject all economic activity to state regulation, Al-Qaeda would not have attacked the USA. Here is an alternate thesis: if for the last 50 years the EU and other trading nations had not protected their markets from Third World/Middle Eastern people trying to trade with them, the Islamic world would be far more prosperous and secular and integrated into the world economy and thus much less of a stagnant swamp of repressive governments and epistemologically crippled civil societies than they are now.In short, the September 11th attacks happened because people like Christopher Patten have limited globalization by trying to only let it happen on controlled statist terms.
Third, the international institutional architecture – from the United Nations to the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organisation – owes more to the genius of American statesmen than to any other source. But these institutions are under threat. Their rulings are challenged with increasing truculence and impunity. They lack democratic legitimacy, which fuels the muddled movement against globalisation. They need to be nurtured or they will lose their authority – and we shall all be the poorer for it.
The UN, IMF, World Bank and WTO are idiotic institutions. Not because they are not ‘democratic’, which is just another way of saying ‘politicized’ , but because they are statist, which is to say, they are based on the premise that trade occurs between states rather than people and free associations (companies). Legitimacy does not come from democracy, it comes from non-coercion and free choice. And so does prosperity. Left to their own devises and without layer upon layer of regulations and tariffs, would companies trade more or less? Obviously more, and as more trade means more wealth is created, the problem is not how can states facilitate companies trading but how can companies prevent states and the whole alphabet soup of state-based organisations they create, from getting in the way.
Fourth, Europe cannot hope to match US military spending – nor should it even aspire to do so. Like Lord Robertson, the secretary-general of Nato, I feel strongly that European governments should increase their national military budgets, shouldering more of the burden for their own defence. But “security” is a wider concept. The EU, with its member states, is a massive provider of development assistance. We provide about 55 per cent of total international assistance and as much as two-thirds of all grant aid. That too is a contribution to international security. No one disputes the need for tough military action to destroy the al-Qaeda network and its bases. But if we are to deny al-Qaeda, and other networks, the territory from which to plan future atrocities, we have to do all we can to bolster weak or failing states and prevent them falling into the clutches of the bin Ladens of this world.
By providing “55 per cent of total international assistance and as much as two-thirds of all grant aid”…TO STATES the EU underwrites 55% of the problem, not the solution. It takes money confiscated from EU taxpayers and gives it to kleptocratic regimes across the world, who allocate the money on socialist-statist principles. Far from adding to global security, the EU undermines it. Far better would be to take that ‘aid’ money, which only aids the very regimes which lock-in the self reinforcing doom loop of politicized economics, and leaving it with the individual EU taxpayers to whom it belongs. If the EU insists on stealing it however, they would do a hell of a lot more for global security by spending the money on aircraft carriers rather than supporting flawed third world governance.
There is a final point. I need hardly say that as well as affection and admiration for America around the world, there is also fear and resentment. As the world’s only superpower, the US carries a particular responsibility to maintain moral authority for her leadership. Do your own thing and everything seems clear and purposeful; but there is a cost in terms of legitimacy and long-term effectiveness. That cost accumulates over time.
Almost invariably when someone says “I need hardly say that as well as affection and admiration for America around the world” it means nothing could be further from the truth and they are about to say something that proves quite the contrary. Patten represents a fundamentally illegitimate organisation which even by his own standards of advocating legitimacy-by-democracy is illegitimate. Who elected EU Commissioner Chris Patten.
So where does this leave us? It leaves me, at least, uneasy. I look to America – as I have always looked to America – to engage with a complex and dangerous world. There is much that is evil in that world. But to brand a disparate group of countries as an “axis of evil” did not strike me as the finest phrase ever produced by the president’s speechwriters. Of course we must oppose what is evil. But we must also build on what is good – and on what offers hope of a better future.
And what exactly is the good that ‘we’ must build on in North Korea, Iraq and Iran?
In Iraq, for example, we must redouble our efforts to get the inspectors back in and to support the opposition to Saddam Hussein. But in Iran? When some in Washington say that European policy in Iran has failed, my immediate reaction is that we need to find new ways to support reform there, not that we should put up the shutters.
Militarily crushing the entire political and military apparatus of Iran and Iraq would be pretty much an unmatchable way of ‘supporting reform’. That is no more ‘putting up shutters’ than the manner in which the US and UK interacted with Nazi Germany. We did not remove the ‘problem’ of Auschwitz and Belsen by prevailing upon the Nazis to allow inspectors to visit. If Iran and Iraq do indeed pose a clear and present danger, then it must be made clear to them in no uncertain terms that such actions will lead the USA to pose a clear and present danger to them. Publicly calling them part of an ‘axis of evil’ seems to achieve that pretty well.
In the case of North Korea, the sunshine policy of Kim Dae-jung offers the best prospect in years of bringing real change. In the Middle East, we need dialogue, not isolation and further radicalisation of the Palestinians.
Patten ended up by quoting Henry Kissinger:
“America’s challenge is to transfer its power into moral consensus, promoting its values not by imposition but by their willing acceptance in a world that, for all its seeming resistance, desperately needs enlightening leadership.” That sentence is not mine but the final paragraph of a recent book by Henry Kissinger. Is it overly candid of this friend of America’s to say that I agree with every word?
Finally I agree with Patten… or more accurately, with Henry Kissinger. Although the US should not seek to impose them, the sooner the US realises its policy of benign neglect is a mistake the better: it does indeed needs to encourage the willing acceptance of its values… by Europe.
As Sandline International proved in Sierra Leon once when they dramatically improved the security situation before their good work was largely undone by the amoral drones in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, private military organisations can be a valuable and stabilizing factor in many parts of the world. It is interesting that there are progressive elements in the British government who see this. Not surprisingly many socialist Labour MPs are horrified at the thought of non-state owned military formations even existing, as if somehow only being a state makes the use of force moral. Yet if the 20th century showed anything, it is that nations are far more likely to use force to murder their own citizens than to fight foreign wars. Third world armies in particular are notorious for endemic human rights abuses and rather than protecting the societies that fund them, in fact pose the primary threat to them.
Highly professional modern mercenary outfits could give many small nations the best of both worlds: first world capabilities without third world problems. Also the hiring nation is not forced into being a neo-colonial supplicant that results from accepting British, American or (particularly) French military ‘assistance’. Similarly for countries like Britain or the US to contract out certain military operations is not just a return to practices that were common in the 19th century but give more ‘casualty sensitive’ nations like the US a good way to bring stability without making worthy objectives hostage to opportunist politicians looking to boost their exposure with every returning flag draped coffin. Companies like Sandline and Executive Outcomes are almost certainly the face of low intensity warfare in the future regardless of short term opposition because they make such eminent sense.
Over on the Von Mises Institute site, there is a superb critique by Ralph Raico of the final installment of Robert Skidelsky‘s airbrushed biography, John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946 (New York: Viking Press, 2001). Raico makes it clear the extent to which dishonesty and revisionism have characterised this and other hagiographies of Keynes
It is now clear that [Robert Skidelsky] refuses to confront these shameful comments of his hero. So, for all practical purposes, Keynes’s fawning words on Stalinism have been thrown down an Orwellian memory hole, rarely if ever to reappear in the literature.
[…]
But if Keynes was such a model champion of the free society, how can we account for his peculiar comments, in 1933, endorsing, though with reservations, the social “experiments” that were going on at the time in Italy, Germany, and Russia? And what about his strange introduction to the 1936 German translation of General Theory, where he writes that his approach to economic policy is much better suited to a totalitarian state such as that run by the Nazis than, for instance, to Britain?
Read the whole review. Highly recommended.
As there was quite a lot of interest last time I showed one of these, here is the latest one.
This is a snapshot of where Samizdata visitors came. Also in the last 72 hours we have had e-mails from Brazil, USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Germany, Israel and Australia.
Slobodan Milosevic Is the Scapegoat in a Show Trial by Marko Lopusina and Andre Huzsvai is nothing less than lies on the scale that the Nazi holocaust never happened. Marko Lopusina and Andre Huzsvai are not ‘presenting an interpretation’ when they make remarks like:
Were allegations of Milosevic’s “war crimes” in Bosnia and Croatia true, he would have been indicted in 1995, instead of rubbing elbows with U.S. politicos at the Dayton peace talks. Were Washington serious about toppling him, it could have done so in 1996 by supporting the Serb opposition movement, Zajedno.
“War crimes” in Bosnia and Croatia? What were they then, a mass suicide? And the idea that Zajedno would have toppled Milosevic in 1996 is preposterous. Lopusina and Huzsvai are deluded fantasist apologists for a mass murderer. If they wish to sue me for defaming them I will be happy to give them my address and see these two sacks of shit in court.
Natalija was going to write a first hand account of why these two pieces of crap are wrong but was so distressed by it that she decided to just ignore these cretins. The editors of the L.A. Times should hang their heads in shame for allowing this travesty of the facts to touch the pages of their publication. Shameful and disgraceful.
The L.A. Times belongs nowhere except in the bottom of cat litter trays. Kudos to Matt Welch for heaping righteous disdain on these people and for Brian Hoffman‘s letter to Matt.
Coming soon to the L.A. Times: the serialisation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Between 1937 and 1945, Heinz produced a version of alphabet spaghetti for the German market that consisted solely of little pasta swastikas.
[Update: probably an Urban Legend. Too bad, I rather liked the image of little baby Fritz having a tantrum on May 9 1945 “Waddaya mean, no more yummy little swastikas?”]
The music industry is a wonderful example of how established players in any market often feel they have a vested interest in stasis rather than dynamic change. Rather than see new technical innovations as potential boons, the industry has spent a fortune trying to use the state to defend its existing business models with an army of lobbyists and lawyers, attempting to un-invent the technologies that they (rightly) see as shattering the current structure of its multi-billion dollar industry. Steven Den Beste has a good article on the subject and makes an excellent point regarding the self-defeating culture in the boardrooms of the music industry majors:
As long as the industry doesn’t see it from that point of view, they will continue to try to fight the future. No industry can ultimately survive if it thinks of its customers as enemies; ultimately the industry has to adopt the point of view of its customers and cater to their desires. You cannot sell someone what you want them to have. You have to sell them what they want to buy.
A classic case of this syndrome of ‘customer-as-enemy’ was provided by Steve Heckler a VP from Sony Pictures Entertainment in August 2000 who said:
The [music] industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams,” Heckler said. “It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what. […] Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source – we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your [ISP]. We will firewall it at your PC.
Although Sony tried to apply some damage limitation spin to Heckler’s remarks soon afterwards, this is clearly delusions of grandeur on a spectacular scale and is exactly the mentality to which Den Beste has alluded. The major players think they can translate their wealth into political muscle and use the state to crush would-be new entrants that seek to undermine their businesses. taking out Napster has only encouraged this flawed thinking. Additionally yet more money is being spent on technological fixes which are also doomed to fail due to the ‘Swiss Watch Effect’ (it is cheaper and easier to smash a Swiss Watch than it is to make one): they spend millions on copy protection that will be broken within months or weeks by the worldwide army of Internet linked 15 year old crackers who work for free.
Another indication of the scale of ‘wrong-think’ going on in boardrooms is that they do not seem to realise that many people’s CD player is their computer. I might have purchase the new Natalie Imbruglia CD White Lilies Island but I have read that most computers gag on some of the tracks due to copy protection and I do tend to play a CD in my computer whilst I surf the Net. As a result I have not bought the CD. Well I suppose if the company strategy is to make it hard for me to rip any tracks into MP3s, one way of doing that is to discourage me from buying their products all together. Somehow I don’t think that was quite the effect they were hoping for but that is the one they have got.
[Update: article amended with Steve Heckler of Sony’s exact remarks thanks to the excellent input of readers Tino D’Amico and Joachim Klehe]
The British International Development Secretary Clare Short did a bit of off-message, and hence truthful, commentary by pointing out that the French state is one of the primary obstacles to Africa’s economic development due to their insistence on Europe-wide protectionist trade policies.
Now whilst I usually regard Short as a subjectivist economic ignoramus and thus part of the problem, not the solution, she is quite right in her remarks in this subject. The fact is that French policy in African being aimed at maintaining French control rather than fostering African development. My family has had quite a lot of first hand experience of doing business in Africa and I know this to be true on many levels.
Socialists have the gall to claim to be the people who care about the impoverished Third World and yet put duty on African goods which can run as high as 300% in order to protect the EU’s grotesque Common Agricultural Policy. The EU are in truth the architects of misery, poverty and starvation if Africa and France is the ring leaders of this ignominious association of the statist, regarding their preposterous concepts of Francophone prestige in Africa as being more important that African prosperity.
Clare Short is just another statist clod but she is quite right that France’s strong presence in Africa is a truly malign influence. I could have told her that 20 years ago. Who cares of people are living in abject poverty in Chad just so long as things are status quo on the Quai d’Orsay.
“Blog this, you Bounder!” “Bloggin’ ‘ell!
A veritable verisimilitude of Bloggers from Blighty Samuel Johnson Only a very few spaces left. E-mail for details if you are a blogger in the British Isles.
Adil, all messages to your e-mail address are bouncing. I need to get in contact with you a.s.a.p!
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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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