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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Actually I do not mean Sauron at all, I mean Noam Chomsky (I know, I know, same thing).
What do they have in common? Flit, an interesting new blog run by Bruce R., that is what. I found this polished looking little jewel via Dawson, whom I was checking out to see if he had any new Ann Coulter pictures <snigger>.
There is an excellent article critiquing the Horowitz attacks on Chomsky and I must say I largely agree with him on all but a few minor points. I think Christopher Hitchens‘ attacks were far more damaging to Chomsky than those of Horowitz, though he does indeed land a few blows on the Vile One too.
In an earlier Flit article, had I started blogging sooner than November, I would have made much the same points regarding the historical analogies in Afghanistan. Much of the ill informed punditry fretting US involvement in view of the disastrous Soviet and before them, British Afghan wars missed something rather importent… Britain learned the lessons of the horrendous First Afghan War and kicked the crap out of the Pashtun in the Second Afghan War. Likewise the military ‘template’ of successful colonial style warfare, namely using the synergy of friendly local forces and a smaller but highly professional British force with higher technology (the famous mountain warfare ‘screw gun’ light artillery) is exactly what we have seen in Afghanistan once again with the Americans (and some Brits too) operating with the various anti-Taliban forces. It is gratifying to see someone else make those points. However it also backs up what I have also pointed out myself in earlier Samizdata articles, the trick after victory in the Second Afghan War was to install ‘friendly’ local leaders and then get the hell out before an insurgency developed…so why oh why does that cretin Tony Blair want to stick around ‘peacekeeping’? The Americans clearly understand the relevance of British military history better than the half-wits in the Foreign Office… no surprise there I suppose.
But Bruce, as for Kylie and that song… resistance is futile, you have been assimilated.
Generally rational content, sheer variety and remarkable quality, that is why. Although sometimes certain stories get widely blogged, the differences in style and perspective makes it interesting to read them all.
Überblog Instapundit‘s often sardonic style contrasts with The Fly Bottle‘s head-on philosophical deconstructions. Natalie Solent‘s irony intensive and highly ideological approach makes an interesting juxtaposition with Dawson‘s anarchic Ann Coulter fixated streams of consciousness. Over on Where HipHop and Libertarianism meet we are just likely to be presented with a statement of home truths as we are to read a brief exegesis of some rap singer that I have never heard of. Tim Blair‘s dependably hilarious daily roundup of the sundry ruminations in blogland is an absolute ‘must see’. Combative Ken Layne is a treat as he ‘fact-checks the asses’ of the talking heads in medialand… and he may well have introduced a new verb into contemporary on-line English. Muslimpundit delivers intermittently updated but chunky analysis from a perspective that is Muslim and yet unmistakably British. Mind over what matters ponders with a style that is often querulous and analytical in equal measure. Transterrestrial Musings displays a style reminiscent to Instapundit (no bad thing) but tends to target different subject matter. Matthew Edgar reminds me of a splendid economics professor I knew, but hopped up on far too much caffeine. Daimnation heaps expletive ladened abuse upon moral relativists and would-be invaders of Canada. What is it about Canada that it produces so many pissed off bloggers?
And the list goes on and on and on and on…
Receiving junk snail-mail and spam e-mails can certainly be irritating, particularly when it is yet another pyramiding scam/’teen-slutathon’/debt consolidation/shyster solicitation/weepy group-hug chain letter or whatever the annoyance-of-the-week is. As a result the urge to legislate over what is frankly a pretty trivial matter is on the agenda on both sides of the Atlantic.
Matthew Edgar wrote a worthwhile piece on this as it pertains to the USA. In Britain, ever since 1832, Election Rolls have been for sale and have been used by marketing professionals as a source of information and ‘list cleaning’ ever since. In this age of spam, we sometimes forget that marketing is an essential aspect of capitalist economics. Restricting it with regulations that go beyond anti-fraud measures adds unnecessary costs that we, the consumer, inevitably end up paying in the end via more expensive products.
Under the absurd British Data Protection Act, the recording of marketing data has been made subject to ever more bureaucratic red tape and imposed cost. This has made Election Rolls a particularly valuable source of reliable data. Yet now there are plans to require local authorities to produce a severely edited version of the Electoral Roll, which will be available for sale, whilst the unexpurgated version will be available only to the government and for ‘election purposes’… in other words, parties will have unrestricted access to your personal information in order to market their political candidates, yet people who want to sell you something you might actually need are told to get stuffed. If I dislike a piece of junk mail I can bin it; if I an annoyed by e-mail spam I can delete it… oh how I wish we could remove the intrusions of our political ‘masters’ so easily.
Over on muslimpundit there is an interesting analysis of Arafat‘s self-serving objectives for Palestine and his ‘credibility gap’. Adil Farooq administers boot-to-groin therapy where it is needed as usual.
Over on Cal Ulmann‘s blog Where HipHop and Libertarianism meet, he points out a simple truth
Bush says quitting drugs will stop terrorism. Well then why can’t marijuana that is grown on American soil be given to medical marijuana patients?
Quite so.
Over on National Review, Jonah Goldberg remains in the hole and appears to be digging with all his might. He writes in The Libertarian Lie:
Virginia Postrel suspects that my “anti-libertarian outbursts” stem from a desire to get her and other libertarians to link to my site. Well, we can put aside the suggestion that it’s a web-traffic bonanza to get linked on something called “Libertarian Samizdata” (I actually lose traffic when I indulge my anti-libertarian bent). But Postrel seems to believe my arguments are so silly that they’re better explained by some sort of cynical ploy.
Gosh, I wonder why she might think that? Could it be that she actually has a genuine objective philosophical underpinning to her ideas? Just a guess.
In fact, he makes libertarianism sound like a warm bath you can slip into to melt all your political cares and concerns away. And that’s all fine. Except for the fact that when criticized, all of a sudden libertarianism becomes this deeply complex body of thought with all sorts of Kantian categories and esoteric giggling about “rational fallibility” flying all about (many of my blogger critics actually sound like self-parodies). On offense, you guys are like the “Drink Me” bottle in Alice in Wonderland, or Morpheus’s pill in The Matrix. But on defense, you turn on the smoke machines and cloud the room up with faculty-lounge verbiage. You can’t have it both ways.
Of course not for a moment did I expect Goldberg to actually recognize Karl Popper‘s theory of rational falliblism. Those sort of ideas inevitably lead to the rejection of irrational dogmatism of the sort which underpins Mr. Goldberg’s flavour of anti-intellectual intuitive conservatism. So what does his defence upon finding his views challenged intellectually amount to? “No fair! You’re using big words!”
Thank you for living up to my expectations, Jonah. And by the way, if you are going to insult the Samizdata, you could at least have given us a link! Sheesh.
Prof. Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago opines against the Internet in his article The Daily Me, due to its ability to present ‘customised’ news that is pre-filtered to suit the readers preconceived ideas.
Of course the power to personalize makes life much more convenient and in some ways much better. But from the standpoint of democracy, the rise of “The Daily Me” is a mixed blessing. For democracy to work, people must be exposed to topics and ideas they would not have chosen in advance.
[…]
In short, good citizenship requires far more than countless editions of the Daily Me. Democracy is undermined when people choose to live in echo chambers of their own design. The task for the future is to find ways to ensure that the Internet reduces, and does not increase, the risk of social fragmentation.
This does indeed raise some interesting points and I too have sounded off about how unwise it is to reside in a news-ghetto in which one is fed a diet of insular pabulum. Yet the ghetto that I had in mind is actually the mainstream media which, even more in the USA than in Britain, is in reality a near intellectual mono-culture of recycled received wisdoms presented within a profoundly statist meta-context. Nothing in print or on TV even approaches the variety of superb insights, loopy conspiracy theories, pedantic disections and pointers to obscure stories that can be found on-line.
Thus I would argue that there is a subtext to Sunstein’s remarks. Perhaps the source of his disquiet is that people will no longer choose to allow themselves to be propagandised quite so easily as was the case when BigMedia(tm) ruled the ink and airwaves unchallenged. I suspect that customised news from the established media’s on-line outlets is not all that perturbs the good Professor. Although news collection remains the realm of well resourced established media companies, the oligopoly of interpreting what the crude news data actually means has been broken forever. Just refer to Glenn Reynold’s article on instapundit a few days ago announcing his millionth visitor (1). I suggest to you that in our own small but growing way, the newsblog movement is contributing to this disquiet in academia who are, even more than the media companies themselves, the distilled essence of the ‘qualified’ purveyors of opinions. Yet the Internet can, and indeed has, provided a true market place for punditry that is aggressively non-deferential, fact-checking and dissecting the ‘experts’ in near real time… and some people out there do not much like it.
The new wave of ‘instapundits’, for Glenn is indeed the one who started humming the note picked up by the ever growing swarm, are saying things the main stream media would regard as commercial suicide regardless of what they actually believe to be true. For example how many mainstream journalists would admit to being profoundly ambivalent about democracy or admit to rejecting the very concept of exclusive national citizenship that Prof. Sunstein thinks so important? Yet that is what I think and I can say so without incurring the ire of a media proprietor. You do not have to agree with either of these views and that is the beauty of it all: I don’t really give a damn either way because I have no pecuniary interest in your views as a reader. I am not selling your eyeball time to advertisers or worrying about ratings, so if you decide the articles on the Samizdata are just so much pixilated flatulence and thus decline to come back, we will still be propounding our views of the world come what may. Regardless of whether or not Cass Sunstein approves, new and controversial voices are indeed being heard: after all, you are reading this!
Thanks to Basia Jedrzejowicz for pointing out the orginal article.
(1) = Editors update, September 2003: Instapundit had its 25 millionth visitor & Samizdata.net is well past one million visitors ourselves
Over on The Fly Bottle blogista Will Wilkinson writes about Totalitarian Chic.
Resistance is futile. You will be commodified. Attack us with ideology and we will sell it as nostalgia.
It reminds me of someone catching sight of my collection of pretty enameled Soviet Political Activists Pins, Red Army Hats and ‘Heroic Soviet Worker’ posters. As he was well aware of my anti-communist background, I saw his eyebrows raise. Heading off his question I interjected.
Headhunters keep the severed heads of their enemies as trophies.
He understood immediately.
In an EU Observer report, the authoritarian nature of the European ‘Union’ is demonstrated yet again as Swedish citizen, Per Johansson, has been expelled from Belgian and can no longer travel in 14 European countries after pasting up an anti-EU poster at a Belgian police station.
The Belgian police in Brussels arrested the Swede, who is an active member of a legal Swedish left wing party, just three days before the Laeken summit. The police expelled the man for only one reason: he had been helping friends putting up the poster, announcing an anti-EU meeting.
Hopefully such cack-handed suppression of dissent will just encourage more resistance against the EU by people who value freedom of expression, free association and reject unaccountable socialist diktats governing every aspect of civil life.
Prankster Samizdata reader James Bennett wrote in with a suggestion that was alarming and amuzing in equal measure:
Excellent post on Sammy’s Data (as I think of it) about the Star Trek Federation. I think Rodenberry and the original Star Trek writers didn’t think very much about the future they were creating; they just took some cliches from pop science fiction that ultimately go back to H.G. Wells and Things to come. I have always thought of, as a prank, submitting a script for a show involving the Ferengi (which is, by the way, an Arabic term for “Westerner”) which would be a straight steal from some Nazi anti-semitic story from the 30s, maybe “The Jew Suss”, substituting one stereotyped money-loving minority with a oversized facial attribute for another. Then if it got produced, reveal the source. The Ferengi meet almost every element of the Nazi stereotype about Jews, they even lust after our women.
Now that is funny. Pulling that off would be a superb cultural ‘hack’ of the highest order.
Just the other day I saw a Next Generation episode and already in my mind I am seeing cringing, hand wringing Ferengi runts (Nazi ‘Jew’ image) contrasted with tall lithe Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby: Nazi Aryan ‘superwoman’ image) along with broad shouldered small brained Will Riker (Johnathen Frakes: Nazi Aryan ‘superman’ image) declaiming about the Federation’s cultural superiority (kulturkampf) to the capitalist Ferengi (Jew).
Appalling. Damn you, Bennett, I will never be able to see that show again without feeling rather uncomfortable.
Prominent Libertarian Alliance member Sean Gabb has just produced a very useful and quite lengthy missive called Arguments Against British Membership of the Euro.
Also by Sean Gabb, see A Case Against the European Union and Uniting Europe without the Union
Highly recommended to anyone who refuses to accept the accelerating rate at which authoritarian European principles and institutions are being forced on British society. What is being done by our ‘masters’ with breathtaking extra-parliamentary manoeuvres in the name of European integration would, in less dissembling times, have been called treason.
Natalie is quite right that there is a noticeable lack of real religions in Star Trek. The only two sets of religious beliefs seem to feature prominently:
First there are the Bajoran in Deep Space 9, who follow an (invented) organised national religion that, it must be said, is presented extremely plausibly and without either sentimental support or anti-religious bias: some of their religious leaders are shown to be wise and honourable, yet others (Kai Winn) are portrayed as venal and corrupt. Significantly, the Bajorans are not, however, part of the Federation.
Then there is Chakotay (Robert Beltran), whose ultra-PC North American Indian spiritualism must appeal to the California ‘liberal’ (meaning socialist) sensibilities of the script writers. It is useful to note, however, that Chakotey is not in fact a member of Star Fleet even though he has been co-opted by it. Quite the contrary: he is an anti-Star Fleet Maquis rebel! There is an interesting subtext there for sure.
I would not include the Zen-like Vulcan philosophy shown in the shows as ‘religion’ as it is little more than a sophisticated and somewhat ritualised form of self-control with a set of attendant logic based ethics.
Yet I must disagree with Natalie that Star Trek’s lack of religion in the Federation will cause “less sympathy with the Samizdata crowd”. Libertarian views are in no way antithetical to religious ones and I find the complete absence of overt Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Hindu influences (let alone obvious adherents) indicative of a society that must surely be suppressing them. Even an atheist such as myself must accept that the religious impulse will not completely disappear quietly into the night unless forced there at the point of a loaded phaser…hardly something calculated to bring the smile of reason to libertarian lips. As evidence of it is completely absent in what is posited as mankind’s sole military service, the implications are clear.
Even if Star Fleet is aggressively secular ‘at work’, in many episodes we are shown the private quarters of crew members…can anyone recall an episode in which a crucifix is seen on someone’s table or a mezuzah by the door? You do not have to be religious yourself to find seeing religion completely edited out of the human experience more than a little sinister. As Natalie points out, Babylon 5 had a great deal of fun with real world religion, even to the extent of showing peevish squabbling between the leader of the resident Catholic monks and a prominent Jewish scholar. Likewise, Commander Susan Ivanova (Claudia Christian) on several occasions referred to her Jewish identity in various episodes. Although religion was not central to the show, it did not deny its very existence.
Next time I see a Star Trek show, I will scrutinize the credits for any references to Leon Trotsky.
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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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