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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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.
Me!
You think I jest? Far from it. I have figured it out, I’ve got it sussed, I’ve cracked the code. Yesterday I wrote an article excoriating the Turner Prize judges for their choice in finalists for this prestigious £20,000 ($30,000) award for the ‘cutting edge’ of British art, sneering that one of the entries was just some lights going on and off in an empty room. Well guess who won. That’s right: Martin Creed won with ‘Light going on and off in a room’. I kid you not. Not only is this art, we are to believe it is the very pinnacle of British art!
And so, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I take it all back. What I mistook for incoherence is in fact genius! Not the judges, who are everything I said they were yesterday, but rather Martin Creed, who has also ‘cracked the code’. When asked to explain his creation he replied:
I can’t explain it, except to say that the lights definitely go on and off.
No, I am not making this up. Then when asked what he thought of the fact this prize purports to be the very best of contemporary British art, Creed replied:
It’s a stupid prize.
And what will become of the £20,000?
It is going straight in the bank.
Quite so, Martin. You will note that Creed makes no pretentious claims that his work is imbued with any meaning at all, other than a means by which he convinces the Brahmins of British art to enrich him to the tune of 20,000 pictures of Her Majesty the Queen.
Next year, however, that money is coming my way. I will enter my work called ‘Pervasive Space’. When the judges ask to view it, I shall gesture to the Tate Britain gallery. When they look and say that they see nothing, I shall reply:
Exactly! I knew that people such as yourselves, breathing only the rarified air of the art literati, would understand. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present you with ‘Pervasive Space’ by Perry de Havilland. A dynamic space of variable proportion and indeterminate location, unconstrained by bourgeois limits of form, colour, space and time.
Cash, cheque or credit card are all just fine by me, thanks.
Now I do not want worthy yeoman blogger Dawson to start thinking we at Samizdata are picking on him, but over on Random Jottings, there is a hysterical exchange regarding delectable überpundit Ann Coulter. A ‘must read’.
Now I am not one of those people who thinks the term ‘modern art’ is an oxymoron. I have been to the superb Tate Modern several times and find much to commend it. I was a great admirer of Louise Bourgeois’ Spider and there is a wonderful piece of kinetic art (the artist’s name eludes me) that involves an upside down piano that, well, disembowels itself every few minutes, for want of a better description. A ‘hidden life of pianos’! Very surreal and quite enjoyable.
Yet when I see the nominees for the inexplicably prestigious Turner Prize, to be presented by Madonna in the Tate Britain gallery right about the same time as I am writing this article, I am at a loss to explain what the judges were thinking when they picked the finalists. The most astonishing entry is ‘Light going on and off in a room’. This as a piece of ‘installation art’ in which a light goes on and off in an unadorned room. And nothing else. Art?
My theory is that some people develop theories of essential meaninglessness, and as a result take meaningless positions in art (and politics, philosophy, epistemology, fly fishing etc). Sometimes, when another person encounters some manifestation of these meaningless theories, they are filled with a complete lack of comprehension. As the proponent of that manifestation seems to take it all quite seriously, the hapless person then adopts the view that the seeming lack of comprehensible meaning is merely a profundity beyond their current understanding, sort of the way many react to counterintuitive quantum theory.
In many cases, that which is true is also entirely counterintuitive. Much of physics and economics falls into this category: our intuition may (or may not) point us in the correct direction but it cannot lead us all the way to the truth. However, in many other cases, that which is counterintuitive is a complete load of bollocks. The hapless person’s first impression, that of an inability to divine any coherent meaning, was in fact quite correct: there is no meaning and there is nothing to understand beyond that fact. The Emperor has no clothes… and neither do the judges of the Turner Prize, intellectually speaking, of course.
I was going to wait a few minutes before writing this article to see who actually won the prize…but then I realised it really doesn’t matter. For some rational thoughts on art, check out Unexpected illustrations of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of aesthetics by Christian Michel on the superb Liberalia website.
I have had several e-mails taking me to task over my remarks in A matter of geography and culture. Methinks some people took me a tad too seriously.
I also am a great admirer of:
Czech beer (real Budweiser)
Italian clothes (Armani is God)
French wine (St. Emilion Grand Cru)
Lebanese food (Just call me Shawama dude)
Herzegovina baklava (nectar of the Gods)
Croatian women (sublime…mad, but sublime)
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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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