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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Over on Dodgeblog, there is a short post about a panel of guests on a talk show who had much sympathy for the Taliban and Al Qaeda but none for their victims.
Can any rational human living in Britain who is not a 24 hour somnambulist have failed to notice the overwhelming support for the USA by people across this country?
I am all for airing a wide range of views, I am a libertarian after all, but why is it that such a high proportion of views shown on television of the various talking heads is so at odds with the views of society at large? If the show Andrew Dodge was referring to was just on some commercial channel then that would be alright… after all, I can always surf off to another channel.
But it is not just another commercial channel, it is the channel that the British state uses the force of law to make me contribute to financially for the ‘privilege’ of owning any television in Britain. It is the tax funded BBC. The official state media. The voice of state establishment. I am being forced to pay for the propagation of this poisonous shit and that is not alright.
USS Clueless has a lengthy article about US unilateralism which makes some interesting points. He also makes some rather dubious ones.
We gave Europe one chance, after WWI, to dictate their own terms and the result was another bloody war. So the second time, we did call the tune — and the result was a hell of a lot better.
As for Britain and France dictating its own terms, what about Woodrow Wilson’s role in dismembering the Austro-Hungarian Empire and trashing all vestiges of the potentially stabilising old order? America shares some of the blame for the instability in Europe in the 1920’s and 1930’s. And the ‘second time’ was better for who? I don’t think too many Poles, Czechs and Hungarians would agree with Steven as they ended up with nearly half a century of communist rule. Does Steven think Yalta was America’s finest hour?
But that’s because we are willing to try the unconventional. For example: after WWI, France insisted that Germany, with its ruined economy, pay drastic reparations to France. The result was hyper inflation, collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of the Nazi Party.
All of which may never have happened if the US had stayed out of the Great War and a negotiated settlement had been reached in 1917 or early 1918.
And even in the recent past the Europeans have proved that their counsel sucks. That’s what we learned in Yugoslavia, something I’ve discussed here at great length. Years of dithering where the US lobbied for military action and the Europeans counseled diplomacy and sanctions, and what it got us was years of slaughter and civil war there. Finally the US issued an ultimatum; and after 6 weeks of bombing, and the war there ended. Milosevic was deposed, and the Serbs went back to democracy and ceased to be imperialistic. And it’s been reasonably peaceful there ever since.
Yeah, and they all lived happily ever after dreaming good dreams about nice Uncle Sam. That is an… interesting… analysis of the intricacies of the recent Balkan Wars. Whilst I am not fan of European diplomacy (to put it mildly), US actions in the Balkans were at best only half right and Kosovo was a rather more ambigious matter than you seem to think. Do you not think the fact the Croatian and Bosnia Armies (not the USAF) had defeated the aspirations of a Greater Serbia might have had more than a little to do with Slobo’s declining political fortunes? He was politically very vulnerable due to the fact he had lead Serbia to catastrophe, horror and defeat in Bosnia and Croatia, unemployment was running at over 30% (50% by some estimates), the currency was fast turning into toilet paper and so is it really so surprising that he collapsed after yet another military defeat, this time at the hands of the largely US strategic air offensive that resulted from the Kosovo affair?
I am afraid Steven’s analysis contains some grossly simplistic elements and seems to ascribe almost magical qualities to the application of US military force: the USAF turns up and shazam… peace breaks out all over the Balkans. It is rather more complex than that.
[Editor: Link fixed. Now goes to correct article on USS Clueless]
Over on Live from the WTC, blogger Megan McArdle writes in favour of the abolition of taxation on corporate income. It is a good albeit lengthy article that is well worth reading.
And Megan, the truth is “When the revolution comes, she’ll be the first one with her back against soft silk sheets.” Forget the empty threats of the left, the future belongs to the radical evolutionaries.
This test, being prepared all sorts of people, will be to see if the Bush administration is actually as sophisticated as I think they might be.
Somalia is being suggested as the next course on the menu after Afghanistan by all manner of odd bed fellows, from the Ethiopian government who would like to see their neighbour destabilized for their own ends, to oil companies looking to redeem worthless Siad Barré era concessions, to certain conservative US revanchists looking to avenge the bloody 1993 repulse of US Rangers by Somali militiamen.
My guess is that if there is any US military action at all, it will be highly targeted, rather than just blundering in and picking a fight with a Somali clan over an absurd UN derived desire to reorder Somali polity more to Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s liking, as happened last time.
Dr. Frank on the Blogs of War has blogged an article called Group Think which raises all sorts of interesting issues to those of a libertarian persuasion. He also touches upon one of my earlier bloggings.
I have no stake in the “whither libertarianism” question that appears as the background to many such arguments, and I’m probably missing some of the subtleties of it; but just because the idea of attacking Iraq is a hobbyhorse of “National Greatness” conservatism doesn’t automatically mean it’s a bad idea. Saddam Hussein is dangerous. He’ll have to be dealt with in some way sooner or later, whether or not doing so would be in line with the official principles of libertarianism (whatever they turn out to be.)
Libertarianism is not a political party, it is a social but non-statist meta-context within which political though occurs: a ‘vibe’ if you like. There are no ‘official’ principals and by its very nature there are only a loose series of underpinnings as the ends of libertarianism is simply liberty, rather than, say, tractor production or discouraging one-parent families. In my view at least, all forms of genuine libertarianism revolve around this:
You are not a libertarian unless you accept as axiomatic that, at its core, society must allow individuals to make their own choices in the pursuit of self-defined ends.
I have always thought all the other sundry libertarian principles often quoted, such as ‘Propertarianism’ and the ‘non-initiation of force’ principles all flow from that. Other libertarians see it the other way around.
Can the “aggressive defender” sub-species in de Havilland’s aviary legitimately launch pre-emptive strikes without turning into an Imperialist “predator?”
For sure. The big difference would be going in to destroy a threat and then going home or going in and making all of Arabia and Iraq into an American satrapy, as some seem to be suggesting.
There are those who maintain that any military action on behalf of US/British/Western security is automatically suspect; this, as de Havilland points out, is often elaborated into a belief that “anyone the American and/or British states opposes must therefore be one of the good guys.” That’s the shared target of “anti-idiotarians” where this issue is concerned, isn’t it?
Yes indeed. It seems to me that September 11th was a watershed in that it resulted in an event so stark in its moral simplicity and lacking in the ambiguity that shades Iraq, Israel, Kosovo etc. that the true nature of many was revealed in the shadowless light of the burning twin towers. Much to my astonishment some on the left, like Christopher Hitchens, turned out to be critically rational whilst many who I had thought far better of, were revealed to be crypto-subjectivists so emotionally attached to their unalterable world views as to be incapable of rational moral judgement.
And by the way, I wonder why all my recent articles seem to feature birds in some form or other? Is someone e-mailing me subliminal messages?
Sean McCray has an interesting de-construction of the New Black Panther Party over on Next Right. Judging by Sean’s analysis, the Panther is just a soggy little crypto-Marxist pussy cat.
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.
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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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