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.
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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)
I was cruising the besotted Dawson‘s blog whereupon I saw this little paean to one of the delectable Capitalist Chicks:
Tara (‘that’s Tear-ah, not Tar-ah’), let that lovely word roll off your tongue…Tara, just emailed me a very intimate note. I should not do this, but I’ll (sigh) share it with ya’ll: “Glad to see you like the site! We’re going through a major rennovation at the moment, so expect to see a more dynamic bit of site coming up in the next week or two with some new content. I’ll let you know when it’s up! ~Tara J.” Think she likes me? (The Site in question is Capitalist Chicks btw, and since I go there ALL THE TIME, I’ll let you know when she let’s me know, you know…)
I hate to burst your bubble Dawson, but that is the e-mail she sends to everyone who sends an enquiry to the site.
They are rather delectable, though.
The Capitalist Chicks site is very much ‘under construction’ (it does not work properly with IE and has various layout problems), but like the moon-struck Dawson, we shall report loudly when the site is presented in a ‘combat ready’ form.
Just out of curiosity, I e-mailed our own delectable contributor, Natalija Radic to get some female feedback on the Capitalist Chicks site. Her last e-mail of the exchange was:
Oh, shame on you. Why you surprised I like it? Am I not a capitalist chick too? You nickname me ‘Versace babe’ but can only be a Versace babe with lots of MONEY. Not all Capitalists have fat tummy like you.
Ouch.
To read an editorial piece like this in the Guardian, of all things, is nothing less than a thing of wonder to behold. Tomorrow’s editorial will be dealing with hell freezing over, cats and dogs living together and the new range of Vaticantm brand contraceptives.
Whilst perusing Bryan Preston‘s worthy junkyardblog, I came across this
Jonah Golberg has a lot to say about the Europeans. Dead on. The last good thing to come from the Continent, excepting the Beatles and U2, is the United States of America.
The Beatles were from Britain and U2 are from Ireland. Last time I looked, both were islands off-shore of said Continent.
Call me a chauvinist but I would also like to point out that all three ‘good things’ are a product of the Anglosphere, not ‘the Continent’.
I just saw over on Muslimpundit that Robert Fisk was attacked and beaten up by a mob in Pakistan. My heart bleed for him. Not. You may be sure he will try to find some way of blaming the US for what happened. Fisk and his dismal newspaper, the oh so ironically named Independent, have been amongst my pet hates for rather a long time. A tip of the turban to those guys.
On the other hand, respect to pundit Jeffrey Simpson. There is a good post on Daimnation about how he admits he got it all totally wrong about the war in Afghanistan. There are very few pundits who are willing to do that. An honourable journalist in BigMedia(tm): what a concept!
Addendum:
I was correct. Fisk did indeed blame the US for what happened to him: “It doesn’t excuse them for beating me up, but there was a real reason why they should hate Westerners.”
Well I’m also a Westerner, Fisk, and I hate you too.
Over on Fevered Rants, bloggista Alex del Castillo has dug up some interesting legal references pertaining to the John Walker affair in Afghanistan. He has some good links on the subject.
The owing allegiance phrase could likely be debated as to what it means exactly, but I think intent is clear. What would be the purpose of a law against treason if the act of treason automatically renounced one’s citizenship and conceivably made one merely an enemy of the state rather than a treasonous citizen? Actually, I think citizenship at the time of trial is a red herring, it is the act that counts.
However the issue of citizenship at the time of Walker’s alleged treason is rather more important legally I assume as the actions cannot be ‘treason’ if he had renounced any allegiance to the US earlier. I am no lawyer but if that is the case, why is be being held by the USA at all? Why not just leave him in the tender cares of General Rashid Dostam‘s Uzbeks?
I must confess I have always declined to accept the idea of the state-centric notion of ‘citizenship’. I see nothing wrong with loyalty to a society with which one has affinity but I for one feel no such thing for any state, which is quite another matter. My outrage over September 11 was not because the United States was attacked, but because fellow members of an extended civil society of which I am a member were murdered without cause by some sociopathic collectivist Islamic terrorists. Nationality per se is really not the issue.
By my way of seeing things, Walker chose to join the Taliban and thus should be of no more consequence than any other captured Taliban soldier. It should be remembered that the US/UK are at war in Afghanistan to destroy Al Qaeda and attacking the Taliban was only done because that proved to be a pre-requisite for achieving that objective. If Walker were a member of Al Qaeda, well, that would be different. He would be part of the organization responsible for September 11 and should be treated accordingly…but that does not seem to be the case.
As a defeated Taliban member, however, he should have just been left to get on with his new ‘friends’ in what is left of Kandahar, if Dostam’s people were inclined to let him go. If they were not, and he died in some fly infested prison cell in Mazar-i-Sharif, I do not see how it would be the concern of anyone in the USA. I would hardly describe that as being let off lightly! Alex del Castillo sums up with a similar view, but more because he views it as what he deserves. I take the view that it is the correct thing to do, which is a somewhat different sentiment even if the result may be the same.
I just got around to reading the PoliticalCompass.org FAQ in which they ‘answer’ the question of “You can’t be libertarian and left wing” by claiming otherwise. Well before we even start with the body of the FAQ that is, yet again, a false dichotomy. Why? Because libertarians are neither ‘left wing’ nor ‘right wing’. For my personal views on why ‘left’ and ‘right’ are just meta-contextual frames of reference which are really meaningless in actual ideological terms, read my Giving libertarianism a ‘left hook’. Allow me to casually dissect the FAQ:
This is almost exclusively an American response, overlooking the undoubtedly libertarian tradition of European anarcho-syndicalism. It was, after all, the important French anarchist thinker Proudhon who declared that property is theft.
For one, I am British. For another, PoliticalCompass.org was the subject of informal discussion at a well attended and very British Libertarian Alliance meeting a few months ago and it was treated with complete derision.
To describe anarcho-syndicalism as ‘libertarian’ is preposterous as there is no individual liberty to do anything or even exist beyond the collective’s needs. It is a system that refuses to recognize the existence, much less the possibility of ownership, of several property beyond that which you have immediate use of. Let me put it this way: if you claim you own something that you are not in actual use of, you are thereby depriving someone else of using it, the anarcho-syndicalists regard it as perfectly legitimate to use force to take your stored goods for the collective’s perceived good. None of this ‘freely entered contracts’ or ‘freely associated trading’ nonsense for them. Although claims are made to the contrary, you do not in reality even have the liberty of owning your own labour, as if you produce something, you cannot freely trade it with another individual and acquire several property with it. Anarcho-syndicalism is communal living that is enforced with violence against any who claim ownership of any means of production with sophistication beyond the level of the hunter-gatherer (i.e. nothing less that primitive tribal Communism implemented at a local, rather than national, level).
Yes, yes, I realise theorists will leap up and down to disagree with my characterisation of anarcho-syndicalism but when you boil away the inane verbiage, that is the truth. That the people at PoliticalCompass.org cannot grasp that individual liberty and anti-collectivism are the defining characteristic of libertarianism is just an indication of their lack of comprehension of the words they use.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the likes of Emma Goldman were identified as libertarians long before the term was adopted by some economic rightwingers. And what about the libertarian collectives of the mid-late 1800s and 1960s? Americans like Noam Chomsky can claim the label ‘libertarian socialist’ with the same validity that Milton Friedman can be considered a ‘libertarian capitalist’.
The concept of Chomsky, an apologist for the genocidal Khmer Rouge, as a libertarian is beyond parody. Presumably they regard a policy to slaughter class enemies by the million as a form of ‘liberty’ and hence libertarian? That they quote Chomsky is not surprising however. It is his linguistic theories that were to some extent responsible for the term ‘liberal’ changing meaning (in the USA) from an advocate of limited governance to a socialist. Chomsky is nothing less than an advocate of linguistic incoherence as the only non-oppressive way to use language. His views are best summed up as ‘Truth is Oppression’. Thus the name for Communist East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, was perfectly acceptable to him. Never mind that it was neither democratic nor a republic. Sure, Chomsky may have called himself a ‘libertarian’ but that does not make it true. PoliticalCompass.org use the word ‘libertarian’ in much the same way, stripping it of any meaning which inconveniently falls outside their own meta-context.
The assumption that Social Darwinism delivers more social freedom is questionable.
So here we are told that libertarians, by rejecting the welfare state, favour a system that will lead to less social freedom. That is of course the socialist (and fascist) view of the result of non-state centred society. But how does that change the fact that rejecting welfare states is indeed a view held by libertarians? All libertarians (and some conservatives) regard alternative ways of dealing with social problems as being better: ways that involve liberty rather than state imposed laws. If they do not think that, they are not libertarians.
Yet it is clear from the FAQ that PoliticalCompass.org think the alternative to a welfare state is people starving in the street rather than the growth of charitable institutions. Again, that is fine for socialists to think that…they are socialists after all. But for them to fail to understand that libertarians do not think that because a libertarian view of ‘social justice’ is based upon non-coercion is just proof that when they use the term ‘libertarian’ they do not actually know what they are talking about.
Which of these two views are correct is utterly irrelevant as all that matters within the context of what PoliticalCompass trying to do is to correctly characterise what the views associated with each label they bandy about actually is.
The welfare states of, for example, Denmark and The Netherlands, abolished capital punishment decades ago and are at the forefront of progressive legislation for women, gays and ethnic minorities – not to mention cannabis and anti-censorship. Such developments would presumably be envied by genuine libertarians in socially conservative countries – even if their taxes are lower.
It does not seem to occur to these people that genuine libertarians might not be any more at ease with ‘conservative’ statism that ‘socialist’ statism. So called ‘progressive’ legislation for women, gays and ethnic minorities are just more violence backed statist interposing between private social interactions: there is nothing ‘libertarian’ about that, regardless of how commendable or not the objective is.
I do not expect the socialists at PoliticalCompass.org to agree with libertarian views. But if they cannot even understand that the essence of the libertarian position is that state legislation (i.e. violence based government action) to mediate the nature of voluntary interpersonal civil relationships is the antithesis of social liberty, then they are so uninformed, so ignorant of the political spectra they are purporting to describe with their ‘compass’ as to be completely incoherent and worthless as a measure of anything. It is not a matter of whose world view is correct, just a matter of knowing what other people actually think.
The illuminated and transcendent John Weidner on Random Jottings tells all you benighted PC users that computer use need not be synonymous with masochism (though being a libertarian, I naturally have no problem if that is actually why you use a PC… hey, different strokes for different folks).
…is a complete and utter load of bollocks. It claims to have a method of portraying a person’s political position outside the narrow confines of ‘left’ and ‘right’. Nice idea. It asks a series of questions to which you reply that you “strongly disagree”, “disagree”, “agree” or “strongly agree”.
However just take the first question:
If globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations?
Sorry but my answer is both as that is a totally false dichotomy. Trade carried out by trans-national corporations does far more benefit than harm to ‘humanity’ (and we all know what that is a code word for… peasent farmers in Guatamala).
Or how about:
Controlling inflation is more important than controlling unemployment.
Again, a false dichotomy, so my answer is neither as unimpeded markets do both within the business cycle. The question also presupposes that either can be meaningfully ‘controlled’.
PoliticalCompass.org is just another group of flat-earth socialists using sloppy methodology to say nothing worthwhile about anything in particular. The questions are just a series of propositions based on a resolutely statist meta-contextual view of political dynamics. PoliticalCompass.org is not just irrelevant to libertarians, it is just plain irrelevant. I have no idea why worthy blogs like Andrew Sullivan and Daimnation give them the time of day. I guess they were slumming.
Tony Benn, who is an apologist for collectivist mass murderer Mao Tse-tung, is more ‘libertarian’ that Michael Portillo? These buffons do not know what ‘libertarian’ means. Also anarcho-syndicalism is not a form of libertarianism, it is a form of incoherent violence based communism. PoliticalCompass.org is a complete waste of pixels.
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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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