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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Our most recent new link is the wonderfully named Recovering Liberal. The term ‘liberal’ obviously being used in it’s North American sense (i.e. illiberal). The subtitle is a particular delight: sacred cow slaughterhouse. Excellent. At first glance this blog seems more neo-conservative that libertarian but is a good read nonetheless. After all, us capitalists gotta stick together!
Whilst on the subject of interestingly named blogs, I would be interested to hear from readers what blog titles tickle their fancy (regardless of content).
My favourites are Opinionated Bastard, Fevered Rants and, possibly the best, Where HipHop meets Libertarianism.
What do you think?
Addendum: Yikes. What could I have been thinking? How can I write about interestingly named blogs without a tip of the hat to The Edge of England’s Sword and The Fly Bottle, both of whom we are already linked to (see side bar).
There is a good article by Douglas Carey called Wartime’s Lost Liberties over on the Ludwig von Mises Institute site.
Many others say that any lost liberties will be restored once the war is past us, or once terrorism has been eradicated. Although history has shown us that the most egregious laws and orders are usually rescinded eventually, each bold step by the government has led to even bolder steps in the future.
That is the trouble with laws: they are easy to pass but hard to repeal. One merely has to look at the idiotic British Pub Licensing Laws, introduced as a ‘temporary measure’ to curtail alcohol related absenteeism in the factories during World War I. They are still on the books today.
Samizdata reader Kate Redmond wrote in pointing out that view similar to mine regarding the dismal Taliban member John Walker are appearing beyond blogland. Kate writes
I have finally started to see some vaguely similar sentiments in the mainstream press. I don’t know if you saw this article by Mark Steyn this
week:
I’m not in favour of trying him for treason: Alan Dershowitz and the other high-rent lawyers are already salivating over the possibility of a two-year circus with attendant book deals and TV movies. But there is another way: on page four of John Walker’s US passport, it states that any American who enlists in a foreign army automatically loses his citizenship. Mr Walker wants to be Abdul Hamid: Mr Bush should honour his wishes. Let us leave him to the Northern Alliance and let his San Francisco fancypants lawyers petition to appear before the Kabul bar, if there is one. It would, surely, be grossly discriminatory to subject Mr Hamid to non-Islamic justice.
Actually, what it says in my U.S. passport is that, Under certain circumstances, you may lose your U.S. citizenship by performing, voluntarily and with the intention to relinquish U.S. citizenship, any of the following acts: […] (3) serving in the armed forces of a foreign state
So, I guess the crux of the matter for Steyn’s argument is whether Walker intended to renounce his citizenship. I’m not certain that it’s not possible to serve in a foreign army without losing one’s citizenship. I believe I’ve heard of American citizens who have served in the Israeli army and I know Swiss-U.S. dual citizens who almost certainly do their mandatory Swiss military service.
Similarly many US citizens served with the British military prior to America’s entry into WWII, notably the pilots who flew for the RAF during the Battle of Britain. There were also US ‘Internationals’ with the Croatian HV and HVO during the recent Balkan Wars and certainly the State Department never made any attempt to go after them. I think the ‘certain circumstances’ quoted above is intentional legal wiggle room, thus it very much depends on exactly whose military you have joined. Joining the French Legion Étranger is not likely to get people hopping up and down (though in reality most US members of the LÉ claim to be ‘Canadian’) but signing on for a jaunt with North Korea, toting a Kalashnokov with the Cubans or becoming Abdul Hamid and joining the Taliban is a rather different matter.
I must say the prospect of the likes of Alan Dershowitz turning John Walker into some cause célèbre is quite an unpleasant thought and I love Mark Steyn’s suggestion on that matter. On the contention that anything that thwarts Alan Dershowitz must surely be in the national interest, Walker should loose his citizenship on that basis alone.
I have already had some peeved e-mails saying I am overstating things by calling Britain a Police State. Well, just yesterday Britain agreed to extradition to any country in the European ‘Union’ simply on the order of a foreign judge or magistrate. On nothing more than their say so that the person in question is a suspect in some crime, you can find yourself arrested and taken by force from your own country. This is regardless of wether or not the alleged crime is even an offence in Britain. You have NO recourse to a British court to prevent your extradition.
Thus British people can now find themselves in courts in which there is a presumption of guilt rather than innocence, under the Napoleonic legal systems that prevail in most of Europe. They will also be without any protection of habeas corpus. Is it any wonder the British state has ensured its population of subjects are well and truly disarmed? Given the option of shooting it out with British police attempting to serve a Greek arrest warrant on me or trying my luck with a corrupt Greek court answering to an establishment that sponsors domestic terrorism, that is not a choice with an obvious answer. In fact by accusing the Greek establishment of actually supporting the N-17 terrorist group, I am probably breaking Greek law and could soon be theoretically liable for arrest here in London.
Another e-mail questioned how any country with a free press could be regarded as a police state. Well, Britain has a free press only if you ignore the Official Secrets Act,the variety of Race Relations Acts and the fact the law will soon prohibit inciting ‘religious hatred’. Many of the anti-Islamic post found on numerous blogs will soon be illegal in Britain. There is no British ‘First Amendment’. And does no one remember the farcical situation of the TV media being prohibited from broadcasting the words of Sinn Fein/IRA leader Gerry Adams? The media responded by showing his image and having an actor dub over the words he was speaking. Free press? Sure, just so long as you don’t say things the state does not approve of. The capacity for self-delusion amongst British people never ceases to amaze me.
The fact the astonishing raft of repressive British laws is only lightly enforced (at the moment) just shows that the liberties of British society is now at the sufferance of the state, rather than by right. Given that it was largely British legal concepts that underpin the American legal system, this should serve as a salutary lesson to people in the USA as to what happens when a culture of liberty is allowed to decay… and please, I do not want e-mails from Americans telling me “Oh, but we have our wonderful constitution.” I have two words for you: forfeiture laws. So much for the 4th and 6th Amendments.
I am a great admirer of Western Civilisation and particularly the Anglosphere’s traditions of liberty. In many ways, we can see very encouraging trends as the communications revolution drives economic globalisation ever wider. Our ability to freely associate and trade outside the bounds of the state grow almost daily. Yet there are also trends in the other direction. As governments lose their largely illusionary ability to ‘control’ national economies, they are resorting to other means of applying power and coersion. Our liberties, regardless of where we live, do not come from judges or democratically ‘legitimised’ politicians or from a sanctified scrap of 200 year old paper. They come from us ourselves and are made real only by our willingness to refuse to let ourselves be the ‘things’ of any state. The best, no, the ONLY defence for liberty is a culture that values it and will fight for it by whatever means are required. There is no other way and there never has been.
We received an e-mail from Samizdata reader Kevin Connors asking why we do not focus more on the dire state of civil liberties in Britain and pointing us at an article in Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (aptly known as RIP) is one of the most draconian Big Brother surveillance laws of its type in the western world and that came into effect in October 2000. Not only is it intentionally worded as to be largely unintelligible (thus providing ‘wiggle room’ for whatever the state wishes to do), but it reverses the burden of proof when the state demands crypto-keys. The key holder, not the state, is required to prove they do not have access to them if they are demanded or face two years in jail.
Whilst on the subject of surveillance, Britain has the dubious honour of leading the world in closed circuit television (CCTV), with more per capita than that ‘bastion’ of civil liberties, Israel, which at least has the excuse of a genuine and demonstrable daily security threat.
This government is also attempting to restrict the automatic right to trial by jury. This is one of the fundamental ancient bedrocks of British liberty and yet it is under attack for reasons of crude utility. Although there is opposition to this astonishing assault, it is a testament to British apathy that people are not rioting on the streets at the mere prospect of such a huge diminution of a basic underpinning of liberty.
And civilian gun ownership in Britain? Oh, don’t get me started on that monstrous tale of confiscation and repression. That deserves an article of it’s own.
There is an excellent article on Rantburg about Al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy. It quotes some of his remarks as printed in a London based Arabic newspaper
Terrorist attacks on Western civilians are justified because they live in democracies and are directly responsible for government policies that anger Arabs, Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenant implies in the latest excerpt of his memoirs. In the passages that appeared Tuesday in the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, Ayman al-Zawahri says the West understands only “the language of self-interest coupled with oppressive power. If we want to make them understand our rights we have to speak to them in the language they understand,” he said.
Well he is correct in one respect: the West, particularly the Anglosphere, does indeed understand that language. The problem is, we are considerably better at expressing it than they are. If they want this ‘dialogue of civilisations’ to be conducted at 3000 feet per second, ok, we can do that. That is not a dialogue we are going to be on the loosing end of.
The Islamists like poor deluded Mr. Al-Zawahri are actually in a no-win situation. If they elect to fight us, which they obviously have, we are richer by several orders of magnitude and much, much better at the whole ‘directed violence’ thing than they are… but if they do not fight us, they are still doomed. In the long run the sheer joyous banalities of globalised capitalist consumer culture will snow them under with a blizzard of addidas shoes, MP3 players, porno DVDs, air conditioning, satellite videophones and silicon enhanced actresses in very short skirts. Worst of all, we can quite happily tolerate and actually absorb the Islamic world’s best and brightests in ourcivilisation. In the final analysis either way they’re screwed.
An article in New Jersey Online (NJO link here no longer works) reports that President Hugo Chavez‘s ongoing strategy of bankrupting Venezuela and ensuring only a moron would invest their capital there is gathering momentum.
Chavez says his land reform law will correct the injustice of only 1 percent of the population owning more than 60 percent of the country’s arable land. But business leaders says it violates private property rights by forcing farmers to conform to a national agricultural strategy or risk having their land confiscated. Fedecamaras is also protesting a law that requires the state-owned oil company to own a majority stake in all future joint ventures with private corporations.
Now this, boys and girls, is what is known as fascist economics. Nominal ownership is retained in private hands but de facto control over the means of production is in the hands of government agencies. The term ‘fascist’ is often used as an epithet meaning ‘bad guys’ or ‘statist’ but that merely devalues the term, leaving us with fuzzy stereotypes of Nazis á la ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’. Understood properly, fascism or ‘right-socialism’ is a form of socialism that concerns itself with control of assets rather than ownership. Often there is a mixture of outright left style nationalisations of ‘essential’ industries (such as oil companies), but a fiction of private ownership persists at lower levels.
To understand Chavez, and any number of other modern ‘socialists’ in Latin America, Europe or elsewhere, it is important to understand they are a mixture of left and right socialism… naturally modern socialists or ‘social democrats’ dislike being told some of their economic policies are fascist but there you have it. Whilst there is vast body of definitions of what constitutes fascism, most are written by self-described leftists keen to differentiate ‘nice’ socialism from ‘nasty’ national socialism/fascism. Yet as early as 1940, Fred Hayek in The Road to Serfdom exposed fascism for what it was… a variant of socialism. The often quoted slogan that ‘Fascism is late capitalism’ is not just wrong, it is incoherent. An economic system in which the means of production are allocated by the state’s commands, regardless of who ‘owns’ the bloody things, is not, by definition, capitalist, late or otherwise. The defining characteristic of CAPITALism is that CAPITAL is allocated via markets in accordance with the priorities of owner of the capital.
So let’s call Hugo Chavez what he really is: a fascist.
Once more, Adil Farooq of Muslimpundit takes conspiracy theorists and the ludicrous Tony Benn to task for incoherent thinking
I am having a bit of an argument with a friend at the moment. Among a number of other things, he insists that the U.S. is fighting this war for oil, as stated some time ago by Tony Benn. This latest conspiracy to do the rounds is getting really irritating. For I thought that perhaps we are at war simply because the Al-Qaida terrorist network, which we understand to be aided and abetted by their puppet Taliban regime, were the cause of the attacks on the WTC on September 11, not to mention the Pentagon attack, and a possible attack on the White House through Flight 93.
However, should Adil mistakenly think such convoluted interpretations are the exclusive preserve of Islam’s wacko fringe and their secular socialist counterparts such as Anthony Wedgewood Benn, that is not the case. Alas similar dark prognostications can be found in the more loopy eddies of libertarian thought as well.
One example is Emmanuel Goldstein of Airstrip One, who is a well thought out, largely coherent quasi-libertarian who writes a lot of very good and insightful stuff. Yet it seems to me he become unhinged at the first whiff of US or UK military involvement in pretty much anything. I realise he thinks me far too trusting of the state (a novel concept for me) but I regard his approach, like that of many Muslim conspiracy theorists, as a ‘theory of reflexive disbelief’ rather than one of skeptical rational analysis.
Of course the irony of sharing some aspects of world view with Emmanual’s strain of libertarianism might be lost on Muslim extremists, unless they also have a sense of humour. I certainly think it is funny.
Back on December 6th, we reported in Grim tidings in blogland, that Natalie Solent was hors de combat with a busted brain box. However the world is once more running in well oiled grooves: she is is back in action and blogging her heart out!
…He chortled in his joy.
Over on Matthew Edgar’s blog, you can hear the sound of grinding teeth every time mustachioed Rivera prances across the screens at Fox.
As an aside, I was watching the news with my extraordinarily bright grandmother the other day. She was surfing through the cable channels and came to Fox News. As Rivera is completely unknown in Britain, she was unaware he is a fairly well know, even if not widely respected, ‘investigative reporter’ across the puddle. She watched him declaiming about the situation in Kandahar for a few minutes and then turned to me:
“I think this is an American version of one of those news parody shows like ‘Not the Nine O’Clock News’… can you get me a real news channel?”
…whereupon she handed me the remote control.
She was rather perplexed when I started rolling on the floor laughing uncontrollably.
Over on Daimnation there is a good piece that he has picked up about the feelings of a Muslim American from New York who is with the US 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan.
Those two towers were special. Me and my family, we used to take the ferry, go to Staten Island, and on our way back, you could just see the skyline, at night time, it was just beautiful.
His views come as no suprise to me and should shame the ‘kill all towelheads’ crowd into silence.
Dale‘s points are well made, particularly the one that when Walker joined the Taliban, he could hardly have reasonably expected to find himself at war with the United States! I have a slightly different take on it, however.
I think many of the comments regarding the dismal Walker begs the question of why is he being regarded as having any particular affinity or duty of loyalty to the USA at all? Just because he originated from there, how does that somehow make him irretrievably beholden? People come from all over the world and emigrate to America and the US has no problem with them ‘becoming Americans’. So why is it so hard to see the process in reverse?
For goodness sake, if going to Afghanistan and joining the Taliban does not constitute the complete and utter repudiation of not just the United States but the entire western world, then I guess I don’t know what does. When he was captured, as far as I know he was certainly not yelling “I’m an American! I wanna see the nearest American consulate!” Far from it. There should be no expectation that he still owes the US anything or the US owes him anything.
If it turns out he is a member of Al Qaeda, then he is still very much our enemy and should be treated in the same manner as we treated captured members of the SS or Gestapo or Nazi Party after WWII. If he is just a member of the defeated Taliban’s army, as seems likely, then just question him and then dump his sorry arse back in the hell hole we found him in. Even if he was involved in the death of CIA man Mike Spann, so what? Walker was a soldier with the Taliban and we were the Taliban’s openly declared enemy. People get killed in war. That is what soldiers do. Big deal.
I do not think Walker is ‘just a misguided kid’. I think he is a misguided adult who made his choices freely and should reap the consequences of supporting a vile regime in Afghanistan. But his crimes are again the Afghan people who suffered under the Taliban, not the US. Unless he turns out to be a member of Al Qaeda, leave it to to the Afghans to deal with him.
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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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