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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Glenn Reynolds has some well aimed remarks about Tim Cavanaugh’s rather meandering article about bloggers. Whilst I concur with Glenn’s remarks, he lets Cavanaugh off far too easy. Cavanaugh states:
For all the bitching they log about the mainstream media, none of the bloggers are actually cruising the streets of Peshawar or Aden or Mogadishu. Thus, they’re wholly dependent upon that very same mainstream media. You can cut on Salon all you like, Mr. Blogger, but they have a man in Afghanistan. Do you?
He does not seem to grasp that we are about punditry not field reporting. The fact is, there are bloggers all over the world pointing out obscure stuff and commenting on it… hell Samizdata alone has contributors in Britain, Ireland, USA, Croatia and Australia. Without Tim Blair and Jason Soon, how many of us would pick up on the Australian stories they bring to our attention? Salon may have a reporter in Afghanistan, but of all the commentary about Muslims that I have seen in Salon, is it really more insightful or informed than that found on Adil Farooq’s blog Muslimpundit? No, it is not.
Instapundit has so many eye balls each day that it is clear from Glenn’s posts he gets a huge amount of useful pointers and comments from readers, which provides news and perspectives in and of itself. Cavanaugh seems to have missed that altogether. There is a degree of responsiveness and dynamism that more established, less immediate media channels cannot match. We blogs are not trying to replace the established media, but rather we have popped up to fill an empty but useful ecological niche, rather like the birds hitching a ride on the back of a hippopotamus and in return nibbling at unwanted parasites in the hippo’s unscratchable nooks and crannies. If we are the birds, and BigMediatm is the hippo, guess what that makes Tim Cavanaugh…
And as for Cavanaugh sneering at the fact we all refer to each other, there are two points:
- Firstly, we can afford to be civil to each other because we are not all competing for a limited pool of jobs (no wonder he hates us)… we see each other as a resource rather than rivals, even more so when we disagree.
- Secondly, it is that ‘hive mind’ thing Glenn once mentioned. Someone picks up on a story and the ‘hive’ swarms together, dissecting it and commenting, with a slew of follow up posts as the hive’s different ‘takes’ collide…such as the various ‘interblog’ gun wars or Enron debates (for that is what they are, debates).
Established media pundits feed off their network reporters… bloggers feed off each other in much the same way, following their hyperlinks to their sources. And as our sources are far more varied (Peter Jennings is not prone to dissect all too many odd Pravda or Zambia Post or bonkers Feral Tribune articles he found by listening to someone else’s broadcast), so too are the opinions and directions we go in.
And of course the editorless ‘screw the received wisdom’ blogger ethos was never going to make us friends in Cavanaugh’s circles.
Glenn is of course right that bottom feeders like Cavanaugh just do not like the competition… and the fact many of us write better than he does and about more varied things. But most of all he dislikes us because we do not fit into any of his limited pigeon holes neatly. He reads us but his silly article shows he sure as hell does not understand us.
Over 3000 mostly American civilians die when Al Qaeda terrorists hijack four civilian airliners and crash two of them into office buildings in New York. A 22 year old Catholic postman is gunned down in the street by the ‘Loyalist’ Red Hand Defenders in Northern Ireland. Six Israeli Jews are gunned down during the bat mitzvah of a 12 year old girl by a Palestinian terrorist with the Al Asqa Martyrs Brigade, an offshoot of Fatah.
In none of these cases was there any pretence that the people being murdered were military targets or in any meaningful way part of the apparatus of state. They were just members of the wrong collective group.
Collectivism is the real world manifestation of the subjective, emotion based feral animal origins of humanity, like some recurring echo emanating from the primitive reptile brain that physically exists in all of us. It is the antithesis of rational objectivity, something that no amount of fancy verbiage from Marx or Chomsky or Himmler or Plato or Rousseau can disguise in their respective paeans to force and unity over intellect and evolution. Collectivism is a fancy word for tribalism. It is a hold over, an atavistic throw back to times before the modern civilisation of the extended order.
And then I see a huge protest against violence in Northern Ireland like the one today. A great and wonderful angry howl against sectarian violence by both catholics and protestants together, all revolted by the madness in the hearts of paramilitary murderers. And there, amongst the grim faced ranks of ordinary people standing under their umbrellas in the rain, I catch sight of members of the Orange Order, of Sinn Fein, of the SDLP, of various well meaning ‘left’ and ‘right’ wing groups, all calling for unity.
Wrong.
Tragically, terribly and utterly wrong.
The world already has enough ‘unity’ to kill every man woman and child one hundred times over. The lasting repulse of tribal violence will not come from ‘unity’, which is just an appeal for the creation of a different, larger tribe to combat the ‘other’ tribes, but rather individualism: the explicit rejection of every tie that comes not through choice but from force. Do not mistake collective action for collectivism, for it is the latter, not the former, that both ‘left’ and ‘right’ has on offer.
The answer is not ‘Unity’, which is just short hand for ‘join us, not them’… the answer is ‘Don’t tread on me’
Jim Henley over on Unqualified Offerings has turned a private exchange between us into a very interesting open letter to yours truly. He makes some very interesting points!
I’ve got to tell you, Perry, I get infuriated too. What we have is, on one side, Rothbardians arguing that prophylactic war is incompatible with limited government. On the other, self-described “anti-idiotarians” who claim to believe that it is. The identity of the actual idiots here is less clear to me than it is to some others. When you factor in the Rothbardians’ least tenable thesis – that “aggressive defense” can never be anything but a smokescreen for imperialism – neither side seems to brim with promise.
Sort of Anti-anti-antiwar.com… but only sort of. I have always thought Unqualified Offerings was a daily ‘must read’ and this confirms it if you enjoy the illuminating spotlights of reason and insight. Thought provoking stuff.
The traditional bestiary of belligerency is inhabited by two feathered beasts: the Hawk and the Dove. However, that is a very crude and misleading way of looking at things for there is a third beast to be found. The Ostrich.
The Dove constituency is essentially pacifist: whilst such folks are largely found amongst the ‘soft’ socialist left wing, there is also a small conservative constituency that is profoundly dovish on religious grounds. A few libertarians also fall into one or both of those categories of dove as well, though actually very few libertarians are true pacifists.
Hawks can be found on the left, particularly the communist left. Many of the anti-war left are far from pacifists, they are just opposed to all American use of force, rather than objecting to force per se. On the conservative right there are also many hawks of several different sub-species, such as the Jeffersonian ‘aggressive defender’ who was quite prepared to send the US Navy to shoot it out with Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean, and Teddy Roosevelt style ‘predators’ who dream of Pax Americana and an American Imperium. Most libertarians fall into the ‘aggressive defender’ category despite what antiwar.com would have you believe.
The Ostrich is largely found within both the paleo-conservative right and the surrealist areas of libertarianism. This is a school of thought which is certainly not pacifist but regards the instances under which force can be legitimately, at least by America, Britain and Israel, used as being so narrow and constrained that many make the mistake of calling them doves, but this is quite incorrect. Amongst conservatives Pat Buchannan is a member of this flock and he is joined by quasi-surrealist libertarians like Lew Rockwell and full-blown psychedelic surrealists like the totally barking Justin Raimondo. Rockwell is a largely pukka and worthwhile commentator but who seems to become unhinged when the issue turns to military matters. Mr. Raimondo on the other hand is more florid in his views generally: imagine a version of Noam Chomsky but with at least some grasp of how economics actually work.
The essence of the ostrich is that of huddling behind national borders and refusing to use force against anything short of a homeland invasion of Pittsburg. The more florescent surrealist ostriches like Raimondo also take this view but adds some interesting touches, such as a fondness for authoritarian and totalitarian regimes under which he does not live himself, provided they dislike the United States.
I must confess I have occasionally wondered if he is ‘for real’. He is a peculiar sort of libertarian, as he seem to view mass murder as being just fine provided it is confined to within national borders. Raimondo is an apologist for the Chinese massacre in Tiananmen Square, contending that in fact it was a triumph of capitalism over communist counter-revolutionaries. The non-Euclidian geometry of his logic is hardly worth the effort of trying to follow; suffice to say Occam’s Razor does not feature prominently in his thinking. He also seems to be of the view that the press in China is as free as in the west, so I look forward to someone directing me to the Chinese publications and websites within China taking critical views of Chinese policy in Tibet and towards Taiwan (I have a Chinese reading friend). As for his contention that:
“Today, government-sanctioned “patriotic” churches, including Catholics and the various Protestant denominations, function openly”
…rather misses the point that the ‘patriotic’ catholic church is an adjunct of the Chinese Communist Party (which he thinks is actually a capitalist party)…the real Catholic church operates underground at great risk and I personally know a French priest who is a member of it in China. To put it bluntly Mr. Raimondo does not know of what he speaks. Typical ostrich.
Many ostriches are strongly anti-Israel due to its repeated projection of force beyond its borders. Now defending Israel is something of a novel experience for me as I am highly critical of their behaviour: a case in point being the disgraceful bulldozing of 50 Palestinian houses in the Gaza Strip last Sunday as collective punishment for the actions of a few: collectivist Israeli psychopathy at its most typical. And yet, I also argue that just because Israel frequently behaves criminally, Israeli society still has a right to defend itself from the clear and present dangers it faces. To do this effectively requires more than the reactive use of military force within Israel itself. An extreme example being the destruction of the Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad in 1981 by the Israeli airforce.
What many ostriches refuse to acknowledge is that if the IAF had not destroyed the Iraqi reactor, Saddam Hussain would have developed either nuclear weapons or at the very least ‘dirty bombs’. Of course I am sure Mr. Raimondo probably refuses to believe that Iraq was in fact ever trying to develop nukes or might have stuck plutonium dust on a Scud. To see an ostensible libertarian acting as an apologist for yet another mass murderous regime is curious indeed. Surreal in fact.
One theory I have to explain the ostrich mindset (as found in libertarians, rather than paleo-conservatives) is that they are so reflexively hostile to the American and British states that anyone the American and/or British states opposes must therefore be one of the good guys. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Now anyone who has been reading my articles on Samizdata.net for a while can hardly have failed to notice I am hugely distrustful of nation states generally…yet I try to base my views on critically rational analysis and not just reflexive anti-statism. I realise states lie. They lie a lot. But that does not mean that everything a state says is automatically false. Yet I suspect that in reality that is what ostriches think, leading them into pretzel logic apologias for Chinese, Middle Eastern and Balkan tyrants under whose regimes the likes of Mr. Raimondo do not actually have to live and therefore do not reflexively distrust. Keeping ones head in the sand is not conducive to a realistic view of the wider world.
Brian Linse has responded to my remarks, sort of, about capitalism and the reality of monopoly on AintNoBadDude, though he does not appear to have actually read the article I wrote, or if he did, he obviously did not understand it.
Speaking of Team Sami, Perry has a post on global capitalism or something… Ok, I’ll just admit that I have no idea what the fuck Perry is talking about. I think I may have inadvertantly triggered some primordial proto-libertarian confluence of meta-contextual rhetorical lilliputianisms when I mentioned turn of the century railroad monopolies. Or not. Anyway, just a reminder: E N R O N.
Brian’s obsession with Enron is revealed for what it is: political rather than economic.
My remarks were about the nature of markets and how the effect of regulations is often to cause the very problems they are intended to alleviate, such as monopoly and unsustainable bloated entities like Enron. One does not have to agree with my views but I think they were pretty easy to understand. But clearly Brian is only interested in how Enron’s collapse can be used to hurt the Republicans and thus his eyes glaze over when people like myself, who care nothing for either his precious Democrats nor his detested Republicans, wants to talk about economics.
Fine, no problem Brian. Feel free to continue to opine about Enron without having a clue how real world economics work if that is what excites you, but I think I will decline to get involved in that sort of ‘mass-debate’.
This morning, January 16th at my home in London, I received a Christmas card from Greensboro, North Carolina. The post mark was dated December 10th 2001.
Now it has often been my observation that the US postal service is not unlike the Bermuda Triangle: a fabled place where the spacetime continuum does not quite work the way it does in the rest of the universe. However what made the letter more interesting, in fact the only thing that made it interesting, was the odd indigo stamp on the envelope:
MISSENT TO
JAKARTA SOEKARNO-HATTA
They sent the letter to Indonesia?
Now I will grant that the address was handwritten rather than printed, but the writing was extraordinarily clear and precise, so I can only speculate that some US postman was just not concentrating, perhaps he was pondering the chore of impending Christmas shopping or contemplating homicide against his colleagues in a shooting spree or some such matter to which US postal workers seem prone, and thus mis-read ‘London SW3, England’ as ‘Jakarta, Indonesia’.
But whoever you are, you little misshapen cog in the vast shuddering machine of the US postal service, I thank you.
One of my absolute pet hates is the ‘Round Robin’ pro forma ‘family up-date’ letter sent by people I met only once many years ago. As they always do, it starts ‘Dear Friends’, followed by an interminable wodge of fascinating details about children I have never met, places I have never visited and have no desire to and strange revelations that
Yes, we have joined the ACC mania for the second year in a row. Surprisingly enough, I can even quote a few stats… that’s scary
Scary? It is bloody terrifying. What the hell is the ACC? And why am I supposed to find that interesting? And why should I care where your children, whom I was only vaguely aware even existed, are going to school? At least I am told Jamie is doing well: good for him…ah, no… later in this interminable missal I discover that Jamie is a she, not a he.
So once again, Mister Distracted Postal Worker, I thank you. There was at least something interesting about this letter… on the envelope.
The USA will possibly face the most punitive trade sanctions in the history of the World Trade Organisation if the European Union is granted the right to act on a WTO ruling that US tax breaks for exporters are a violation of global trade rules.
This is entirely a self inflicted wound for the USA. Unlike the vast majority of the rest of the world, the USA claims tax from companies based on their global activities. Quite apart from the fact this is manifestly iniquitous, it is also pretty damn stupid economically. Although EU nations do not attempt to tax globally, the European states tend to subsidise their favoured companies in various ways (which is also stupid from a macro-economic perspective). This in turn has lead the US to deduce for the last 31 years that certain businesses operating in competition with subsidised EU companies should be given tax breaks to help them compete more evenly. There is just one problem with that: making special cases in that manner violates WTO treaty rules.
The solution for the US is of course simplicity itself: just abolish all US taxation at the water’s edge like the rest of the world does… no special cases therefore exist. Result? American businesses overseas flourish without the absurd and wildly expensive accounting gymnastics needed to avoid actually paying very much tax to the American IRS on corporate operations in Mongolia (or wherever).
The fact is, of the medium and small businesses I know of run by Americans overseas, the reality is that they successfully shelter the vast majority of their operations from the US tax man. So why not just recognize that there is no justification for this very hard to enforce ‘taking’ by the IRS… what reasonable pecuniary interest does the US state have on economic activity beyond its shores? Scrap this extraterritorial intrusion and not only is justice served, the WTO problem simply disappears with a loud ‘poof’!
Reader Martha Lane e-mailed me to ask what was a typical libertarian position on ‘hate speech’ in a free society. I referred her to In Defense of Hate Propaganda (Sort of) by Pierre Lemieux (pdf format: requires Acrobat reader or similar).
I often recommend stuff found in the Libertarian Alliance archive of publications. It has over 650 mostly short and to the point pamphlets from a wide range of genuine libertarian view points. The Libertarian Alliance does not have a manifesto or a single ‘party line’, choosing instead to showcase the full range of libertarian views, from anarcho-capitalists to minarchists to Old Whigs to libertarian-conservatives… and everything in between.
Pierre Lemieux’s two page article that I recommended above is typical of most of the LA’s on-line publications, which is to say brief, easy to digest and free.
Suman Palit over on The Kolkata Libertarian has been prognosticating with considerable plausibility on various nightmare scenarios for the Indian sub-continent. His view on where some of those scenarios could lead are:
In 2050 A.D., Sudan and Botswana surpass the Indian GDP, organize pop-rock concert to deliver food aid to Calcutta.
Not vastly optimistic then, Suman?
Brian Linse ponders the nature of monopoly and capitalism on his blog AintNoBadDude. Rather than answer him directly, I will give him my modern Austrian school economics influenced perspective on the nature of markets and monopoly.
The nature of modern capitalism is significantly different to that of, say, capitalism in the 19th century. The vastly enhanced flow of information and the global nature of enormous pools of fungible capital means that market mechanisms that worked sporadically in years past now work more smoothly and with tidal inevitability when allowed to. The larger the pool of possible market entrants and participants, the more liquid and inexorable the markets become.
Thus paradoxically, there is only one method by which monopoly and oligopoly can really occur for extended periods in a ‘harmful’ form, and that is in market niches protected from globalization. That is why Microsoft is so obviously only a transient ‘problem’ rather than a market ‘failure’ as its market position is not the result of adapting to regulation and protection. As big as Microsoft is, it is dwarfed by the pool of global capital looking for alternative uses. There is a good reason that in spite of its huge market share that MS products are really not that expensive. New entrants are impossible to keep out: if MS were to create ‘excessive’ profit margins, they would be quickly faced with hordes of new competitors as the software market does not require huge start up costs to enter. Thus the MS ‘monopoly’ is of little concern in reality. Apple products are actually more expensive and yet no one is accusing them of abusing a monopolist position. The reasons for that are not so hard to understand. In essence, the only way MS can remain a near monopoly is by not acting like a monopolist. Multi-billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt thought he was ‘bigger than the market’ and it ate him alive because he was trying to mess with a truly global commodity market. Bill Gates is under no such illusions.
It is ironic that left wingers and protectionist paleo-conservatives who fret about ‘monopolists’ are the same people who create the conditions for them to flourish by hampering the progress of continuing to globalize ownership, and by raising the cost of market entry with vast teetering towers of regulations designed to prevent precisely what they are in fact enabling. Capitalist ‘conspiracies’ that the left are so fond of fretting about inevitably come to nothing if the pool of capital and potential entrants is larger than the ‘clique of conspirators’ can in reality control, which in the case of truly global markets is the norm rather than the exception.
Given that ‘Samizdata Illuminatus’ has been posting Churchill quotes lately, it is only matter of time before someone else thinks up this Churchillian reference:
The only traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, bloggery and the lash.
Sorry.
I was watching the news on the television this afternoon when Bono, the Irish singer for U2 came on to opine on issues of third world debt, AIDS and trade, with reference to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit in Blantyre, Malawi.
For one brief shining moment I thought that a universal law of thermodynamics (that when entertainers talk about anything other than the entertainment business, their voices can be heard to emanate from their posteriors) was about to be spectacularly falsified. He remarked that it was appalling that Africans are denied access to US and EU markets due to disgraceful protectionist measures and how this was crippling the entire continents’ ability to develop economically… well, that certainly made me sit up: a singer who actually understands real world economics and genuine liberty? Surely not!
Alas cruel reality quickly reasserted itself. He then went on to rail against how banks were putting ‘profits before people’ because of the crippling levels of debt in Africa. Naturally he did not mention that this debt was not forced on Africa’s governments at gunpoint but was freely entered into by the purported leaders of various African nations. Somehow the actions of African borrowers of money result in Western banks ‘putting profits before people’. Interesting. I wonder if Bono also takes a neo-colonialist view that as African leaders are presumably not competent to make sound economic decisions, they should not be allowed to borrow money in the first place? Just curious.
And then, Bono deliverers the rhetorical coup de grace designed to impress upon the Western viewers how urgent the situation is:
After September 11, people cannot just ignore Africa any more. This is a problem that must be dealt with now by America and the West
Now please, will someone out there correct me if I am mistaken, but I was not aware that anyone from Zambia or Congo or Nigeria or Burundi or Mozambique or Senegal or Zimbabwe or Angola or Ghana had hijacked some American airliners and crashed them in to the Pentagon and World Trade Centre towers. What the hell does September 11th have to do with African poverty?
Perhaps someone should point out to Bono that the way the US responded to September 11th was not to shower Afghanistan with largess but with an earth shaking hail of 2000 lbs laser guided bombs and the forceful destruction of the Taliban government.
Then again…
…given that most of Africa’s economic problems are clearly derived from government malfeasance, perhaps my fleeting first impression of Bono as an astute observer was correct after all and that is indeed what he wants for Africa’s ghastly kleptocratic regimes: obliterate most of Africa’s governments, remove all Western trade barriers to African goods and services, declare victory and then go home to leave the formerly oppressed African man-in-the-street to get on with their lives unhindered by the likes of Robert Mugabe or Jose Eduardo dos Santos.
Cool, that works for me.
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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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