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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In Dale Amon‘s article about his libertarian road to Damascus, he quite correctly points out that we are neither left nor right. For this reason the path by which the Samizdata people came to our respective forms of hyphenated libertarianism is often quite different.
Like Dale, Natalie Solent came to libertarianism from the left, in her case the overtly socialist British left (the ‘unequivocal left’ as I often call it). Although I do not know Natalie personally, we do have friends in common, one of whom I am dinning with tonight. However I read her blog daily and have seem many of her posts to an e-forum of which we are both members, thus I feel I have a very good idea of where she stands. Clearly socialism found her critically rational mind a poor place to set down roots.
Natalija Radic, having grown up under communism and living under that system until 1991, came to libertarianism perhaps more directly via the ‘dissident’ route. Unlike many, she was never an ethnic nationalist but rather an anti-communist. As she once put it to me, “Libertarians were the only ones who actually had anything interesting to say about liberty, rather than just economy, and why true liberty requires true capitalism”. As I was one of the first self-described libertarians she ever met (in 1992), I take partial credit/blame for spurring her off in the overtly libertarian direction.
However others on this forum have taken a vaguely similar path to me. David Carr and Tom Burroughes both have British Tory Party ‘history’. I too was very much one of ‘Thatcher’s children’, seeing her rise as nothing less than the start of a new Enlightenment.
However my political background is very transatlantic (my mother was American, my father British). Back when I decided to go to university in the USA, I fell in with the inimitable Walter Uhlman via our mutual fascination with guns, interesting women and unusual beer (or was that unusual women and interesting beer…my memory is a little fuzzy there). We both moved in very ‘Reagan Republican’ circles, as did pretty much all our extended circle of friends. Most of that circle in the USA still are voting Republicans yet nearly all are at the emphatically libertarian end of the party. I think I can safely say Walter votes Republican these days for entirely negative reasons, i.e. they are the lesser of two evils. I recall seeing a pithy quote to the effect ‘The Republicans support Big Government whereas the Democrats support really big government’. This is certainly a view that would produce a grim nod of agreement from most of my Republican friends who regard voting Republican as a rear guard action to be done with little true enthusiasm. Unfortunately I do not see any point whatsoever for voting Conservative in the UK at the moment. Unless someone like Oliver Letwin gets control of the top echelon of the Party I am unlikely to change my mind even under the ‘lesser of two evils’ principle, not that Letwin is much to get excited about to put it mildly.
Like many UK libertarians, I abandoned the Tory Party after Thatcher, who was in truth an actuator of liberty without being a libertarian herself, and I moved out of the political mainstream altogether. Certainly with the defeat of Michael Portillo in the leadership battle to succeed William Hague, any last fantasies that the Tory party might rediscover any affinity for liberty was harshly disabused. It definitely had a very radicalizing effect on me.
My business background is in various aspects of international finance, though I am not doing that these days, and so it would be fair to say my attachment to capitalism began as self-evident axioms, like most practicing capitalists and serial entrepreneurs. Only later did I acquire deeper philosophical and theoretical understandings of a less intuitive and practicle nature. It was through this process that I think I began to see the glaring philosophical holes in conservative thought, with its largely intuitive underpinnings that sow the seeds of its own failure. When I read remarks by some conservatives that ‘libertarianism is a weaker form of conservatism’ I find it hard to keep a straight face and can only assume these people have done little more than timidly stick a tentative toe in the vast ocean of libertarian theories lying beyond the arid shores of the constitutional legalisms they mistake for society’s bedrock.
Yet that is also why I see things differently to Dale. I don’t despise conservatives, at least not all of them. Where as I regard socialists (or ‘liberals’ to use the weird American euphemism) as entirely wrong, I regard some conservatives as half-right (no pun intended).
A personal and long standing view of Lord of the Rings
[Boromir speaks]
“I do not understand all this,” he said. “Saruman is a traitor, but did he not have a glimpse of wisdom? Why should we not think that the Great Ring has come into our hands to serve us in the very hour of need? Wielding it the Free Lords of the Free may surely defeat the Enemy. That is what he most fears, I deem. The Men of Gondor are valiant, and they will never submit; but they may be beaten down. Valour needs first strength, and then a weapon. Let the Ring be your weapon, if it has such power as you say. Take it and go forth to victory!”
The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter Two, The Council of Elrond
[…]
[Sam Speaks]
“But if you’ll pardon my speaking out, I think my master was right. I wish you’d take his Ring. You’d put things to rights. You’d stop them digging up the gaffer and turning him adrift. You’d make some folks pay for their dirty work.”
[Galadriel replies]
“I would” she said. “That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas! We will not speak more of it. Let us go!”
The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter Seven, The Mirror of Galadriel
For me, the Lord of the Rings works on every level, and I refer to both the magnificent new motion picture and the trilogy of books, which I first read in the early 1970’s as a child and have re-read many times since. It works on the most basic level as a glorious epic, rich with its own mythic cycle that borrows from Celtic, Nordic and Saxon traditions. Simply put, it is a bloody good read and the motion picture captures that most effectively, editing and abridging where needed without doing a fatal violence to the source.
Yet The Lord of the Rings can be read in many other ways as well. It also works extraordinarily well as a series of quite deep allegories. Certainly many people have subjected J. R. R. Tolkien’s remarkable epic to the Bunsen burner of allegorical analysis before, particularly those looking to divine a racist subtext. I have only ever read a couple such works and to be honest was unimpressed. I have read a few summaries of others but it has always struck me that the arguments of this or that critique of his work usually skirt around the core issue, for there are really only two facets of the story that truly matter: Frodo and the Ring itself.
I have always thought the allegorical meaning of The Lord of the Rings is starkly obvious and quite profound. Mankind in all its varied forms and mythic archetypes can be found with the story, yet in truth the reader is presented with a single representation of themselves: Frodo Baggins, the Hobbit. Frodo is us.
The entire story is about Frodo and his relationship with the Ring. Everything else is the supporting artifice. Frodo is Everyman, who does not choose the world in which he lives, rather the world is thrust upon him by forces at first seemingly outside his power to influence or even understand fully. It is Frodo, more than any other character, who dwells most upon the issue not just of dynamic reaction to events, but of moral choice. Although surrounded by mythic heroic characters of every shape and form, Frodo is physically puny, banal by predisposition and would be hard pressed to intimidate an irritable rabbit. Yet he is indeed strong, in that his strength is entirely moral strength… and because he chooses to exercise that moral strength, in the end he has no equal. We are shown that it is from personal moral courage that all other strengths derive and that all the weapons in the world count for little without that.
So if the Hobbit is us, then what is the Ring?
The Ring is everything that Frodo is not. He is a weak little man, vulnerable and multifaceted. The Ring is strong, almost indestructible and pure in its single minded malevolence. It tries to corrupt all who touch it or are ever associated with it and it is about absolute pitiless control of others. Frodo deals not through agents or proxies, but directly, face to face, whereas the Ring makes its wearer invisible and extends its power terribly through its influence over the other Rings. It is the antithesis of interpersonal morality. No matter how pure of heart the person who wields it is, no matter how just their motivation for taking that power upon themselves, the end result is always corruption. Yet the lure of such power is so overwhelming that only the most truly moral can resist it when it is dangled in front of them: Gandalf and Galadriel are both offered the Ring but refuse it. Elrond too sees it for what it is and will have none of it.
We cannot use the Ruling Ring. That we now know all too well. It’s strength, Boromir, is too great for anyone to wield at will, save those who have already a great power of their own. But for them it holds an even deadlier peril. The very desire of it corrupts the heart. Consider Saruman. If any of the Wise should with this Ring overthrow the Lord of Mordor, using his own arts, he would then set himself on Sauron’s throne, and yet another Dark Lord would appear.
Powerful, corrupting and impersonal. The Ring is of course an allegory for the modern state.
Our new mystery contributor is actually a well known blogger in his own right by the name of… well, that would be telling.
For reasons that will probably become apparent after he has posted more of his frustrations of being a libertarian and critical thinker in an environment which encourages neither, he wishes to remain behind the pixilated burqa of on-line anonymity.
On Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds touches on a matter in which true justice does seem to have prevailed. But this is indeed an issue which has long made me of the view that of the many splendid and admirable things about the United States, the US system of justice is most certainly not one of them.
As a sheer matter of practical justice, it cannot be right that the winner of a legal action can nevertheless be reduced to penury by having to pay legal fees, particularly if they were not the party which brought the action. Unlike most of the rest of the western world, who operate upon the principle that the looser of an action pays the legal costs of the winner, in the United States both parties to an action are responsible for their own legal costs regardless of who wins or loses… thus a person can be unsuccessfully sued and still end up bankrupted by their own lawyers as they cannot always recover their costs.
I cannot help thinking that the overweening power of the Bar in American politics is the reason this has never been addressed. The ‘pay your own costs’ principle is a licence for speculative law suits of dubious merit, a veritable ambulance-chaser’s charter, removing the cost incentive to only litigate when the merits of the case make success highly likely. Surely introducing the ‘looser pays both sets of legal fees’ principle across the board in the USA would, at a stroke, reduce the flood of absurd ’emotional distress’ and ‘tripped on a mat’ litigation as well as making it less attractive for well funded individuals and corporations to use the threat of bankruptcy-through-legal-fees to intimidate those who are less well funded. Also, less wealthy defendants who nevertheless have solid cases can approach far more capable (and thus expensive) defence counsel as upon seeing off the accusations in court, they can recover costs from the other side.
WASHINGTON, DC. According to a Cato Institute report released Monday, the U.S. has become overly dependent on foreign turmoil for its conversations and media coverage. “The American people consume as many as 60 million barrels of crude speculation every day, using it for everything from driving discussions to heating up political debates,” the report stated. “Unless we can dredge up domestic sources of turmoil, we may end up utterly dependent on the Middle East for conversational fuel.”
From The Onion via Mondial Global Investors
As I read more and more stories in the press and see the astonishing images of the inferno around Sydney on the British news channels, I cannot help but marvel how well Australia is served by its magnificent firemen. Yet it is clear that what is happening is hardly less than an emergency of wartime proportions. And in wartime, a society has to do what it has to do to protect itself. Of course people might argue that a natural disaster is hardly the same as a war and that is true.
But many of these fires are not natural at all, they have been set by arsonists. Just because the state is not the target of these premeditated acts, it is not regarded as an act of terrorist violence. Yet, the target of these vile nihilists is nothing less than Australian society itself, an infinitely more valuable asset than the damn state.
So what is to be done with any captured arsonists? Well my vote is to handcuff them to a tree and just leave them there. That might not sound very libertarian but the way I see it, acts of violence are intolerable and can be reasonably met with acts of violence. Liberty is about being free to reap the fruit of your own actions… what could be a more elegant manifestation of that than an arsonist roasting in the fire they themselves started?
Perhaps I will not feel so extreme tomorrow but seeing the images of those exhausted fireman just fills me with fury at the thought their lives are in peril through the actions of worthless nihilists who care nothing for the property or life of others.
Now that Will Wilkinson is back from his Teutonic debauching, The Fly Bottle is overflowing with typically excellent offerings.
Goldberg pretends to loathe grab-bag culture, but he and his ilk do it just the same when they pick Christianity over Celtic paganism and individual rights over collectivist subjugation. However, conservatives attempt to camouflage that their preferences are just preferences by constructing a highly selective narrative about “Western Civilization” that gives their preferences the illusion of intrinsic worth as necessary keystones of their fictitious cultural edifice. I’m not being postmodern here. I’m being descriptive.
Of the essentials of Western Civilization, Goldberg writes:
… some of the ingredients for Western civilization I have in mind are such categories as Christianity and religion in general, sexual norms, individualism, patriotism, the Canon, community standards of conduct, democracy, the rule of law, fairness, modesty, self-denial, and the patriarchy.
Why not Stoic mysticism, collectivism, military nationalism, absolute monarchy, slavery and the Napoleonic Code? Why don’t these go in Jonah’s grab bag?
Top notch stuff.
A great film and nice biscuits but…
Ginger Stampley spectacularly misunderstands not so much our views on the dynamics of insurrection, but the entire nature of the conversation that was taking place. Whilst I also think she gravely under estimates the polarisation going on in American society, I do not think that is really the issue. She says our views are based on dystopian fantasy. Well, yes… that is the whole point. Neither Walter nor I think the United States is ripe for armed groups to rise up against state tyranny… things would have to get far worse than they are for that to even be within the realm of possibilities as things stand.
I actually look to civil society in the United States, for all its many and variegated flaws, as the Anglosphere’s beacon of hope and regard it as almost certain to overcome the contrary tides of repressive statist stasis (well, almost certain). For there to be an armed insurgency in the US beyond that of fringe groups like the KKK, I would have to be quite wrong in my essentially optimistic long term view of US society. Yet if it turns out I am, and that Waco was just the first and most spectacular of many, then the dystopian fantasy would indeed be turning into dystopian fact, and the required ‘popular support’ for armed resistance Ginger talks about would indeed start to develop.
The reason I am so keen to prevent the attempted disarming of American society is that this is a wonderful litmus test of civil society’s health… and hence why I am increasingly pessimistic about already disarmed British civil society, which grows more like Stanley Kubrick’s vision of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ year by year as our common law rights are rachetted away by Brussels with the assistance of people like Tony Blair and Jack Straw and David Blunkett and Michael Hesaltine and Christopher Patten, all profoundly hostile to the essential underpinnings of non-state centred British civil society.
Thanks to Gary Larreategui for a small correction
Advocates of the imposition of irreversible transnational socialism (Trazi?) for Britain via the European Union, have long implausibly argued that it was a purely ‘economic matter’ rather than a political/constitutional issue. For the few credulous enough to actually believe that, the remarks of UK Treasury official Gus O’Donnell must have come as a bit of a shock.
Gus O’Donnell, the Treasury official charged with overseeing assessment of the tests, was cited in several newspapers on Friday as having said it would be impossible to reach a “clear and unambiguous” verdict on the tests. “Ultimately, it will be a political decision,” The Times quoted O’Donnell as telling a student seminar. But a Treasury spokesman said O’Donnell’s comments, taken from a careers presentation to a group of undergraduates in late November, had been “totally misrepresented”. “Mr O’Donnell has no recollection of saying ‘ultimately it will be a political decision’,” the Treasury spokesman said.
Ah, that explains it then.
via Reuters
In response to an e-mail from a reader that asked me “Why do you distrust the state so much? How else do you expect order to be maintained and property protected?”… I present the following gem from the Daily Telegraph:
A LANDOWNER was arrested by police he had summoned to help him after more than 60 “ravers” had broken open a padlocked gate and started a party in one of his barns.
[…]
“It was like being a farmer in Zimbabwe,” Mr Benton told Radio 4’s Today programme. “The police stood outside the gate while inside people were smashing up my property and they were doing nothing about it.”
Does that answer your question?
Over on the The Catallaxy Files, top notch bloggah from down undah Jason Soon has an outstanding post about immigration.
However on the Blogical Suspects, that doctor of intestinal blogages, Will Quick suspects we Samizdatistas may have over indulged during the New Year’s festivities and developed blogorrhea due to our high volume of postings. I guess we need to cut back on the philosophical roughage, but at least we are letting it out unlike a certain un-named blog, which is clearly very full of it.
Just joking Charles, and hey Brian, we think you are rather nice really (“some of my best friends are liberals, honest”) and feel free to send us more of those pictures. hehehehe.
Rand Simberg is in lethal form reporting the death of Buddy, the Clinton’s dog, over on Transterrestrial
Best of the Web helpfully points out the other occasions when the Clintons were “deeply saddened.” I suspect that a couple of those 2200+ occasions were the deaths of Vince Foster and Ron Brown. I wonder if Buddy was about to write a tell-all book?
Nasty!
Take a peek at On the Third Hand and you will see Kathy Kinsley urging the adoption of a weapon that when wielded resolutely against an ‘Islamic’ would-be hijacker, makes even the mightiest of handguns pale into insignificance… after all, a suicidal hijacker is hardly going to be afraid of being shot dead… but the prospect of getting their brains bashed out with one of these babies is likely to reduce them to paroxysms of idiot terror! Does the deviousness and innovation of the post-enlightenment mind know no bounds?
Stock up on them now before Charles Schumer starts demanding they be regulated and all purchasers licenced, thereby expanding the remit of the BATF yet further (renaming it the BATFS). It might be a good idea to bury a few in your deep freeze under the frozen peas where Federal snoops will not find them.
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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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