The state is a core of malevolence surrounded by a thick cloying crust of incompetence
-Perry de Havilland
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November 7th, 2001 | Comments are closed
 Whilst I am far too modest to tell anyone how many notches I have on my bed’s headboard, someone can reasonably add two more notches now that Dale and Natalie have lost their virginity by blogging (presumably the ‘someone’ in question is the seemingly omnipresent ‘Joe Blogs’… who obviously ‘swings both ways’ it would seem, unless Joe is short for Josephine). Good to have you (oops) both aboard. Regarding the Samizdata displacing the Libertarian Alliance Forum, I don’t think so. A blog is not really as interactive as a forum and thus suggests we post in a less ‘immediate’ way. I think blogging is more akin to sending a letter to the editor of some dead tree publication. When we blog, we are letting the world know what we think either by re-posting something we have found of interest or, primarily, by writing our own editorial on the events that are of interest to us as critically rational individuals. I regard a forum such as the LA-F as more akin to public conversation. November 6th, 2001 | Comments are closed
Tony Blair addresses the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) on the 5th of Novermber and says his policies of ‘restraint’ and ‘prudence’ are going to continue. Yet we are in the middle of an explosion of non-military public profligacy. Government spending is increasing at a much faster rate than the economy is growing and surely every member of the CBI knows that. Now I realise Blair is a statist politician and thus dissembles by profession, yet the ‘great and good’ of British capitalism just sit there and listen politely. Was it something about the acoustics that nobody except the TV microphones actually heard what he said? Why were there not hoots of derision and gasps of disbelief from the bovine CBI members, given that it is their companies that in large measure will actually have to stump up the money for this spending binge? And now I hear that our political ‘masters’ are maybe/maybe not planning to ‘raise taxes’ but will most likely be increasing National Insurance ‘contributions’ (i.e. a tax on employment). So let me get this right… the LABOUR Party wants to make it more expensive to employ people’s labour just as the economy is starting to go into recession. On that day of all days, Guy Fawkes Night, the 5th of November, the people listening to him should have been making a bonfire of their conference programmes and telling Tony Blair the best thing he can do for the economy is to go fight his war in Afghanistan and leave the business of creating wealth to the people who actually create it. Please, someone. Wake me up! November 6th, 2001 | Comments are closed
Articles like this are always useful when trying to make up one’s mind in the ever interesting ‘nature vs. nurture’ debate UCLA brain mapping researchers have created the first The team found that the amount of gray matter in the More importantly, these are the first images to uncover how Brain regions controlling language and reading skills were This tight structural similarity in the brains of family We were stunned to see that the amount of gray matter in The brains language areas were also extremely similar in The scientists employed magnetic resonance imaging Using a high-speed supercomputer, they created color-coded To create the maps of genetic influences on the brain, the In a national initiative, the Finnish team tracked all the Their genetic similarity was confirmed by analyzing 78 Recent research has shown that many cognitive skills are These genetic relationships persist even after statistical The UCLA researchers are also applying this new genetic Other UCLA researchers involved in the project are Tyrone November 5th, 2001 | Comments are closed
Guy Fawkes (1570-1606) Remember, remember – Traditional English 5th of Novermber chant as the bonfire is lit. Guy Fawkes was the only honest man to ever enter Parliament. Have an excellent bonfire night. November 5th, 2001 | Comments are closed
(Here is some interesting tech info sent to me by Walter earlier) Ready, aim, wired — information is a weapon U.S. armed forces are developing the strategy and systems to turn every With so much information at their fingertips, soldiers in combat would Editor’s comment: Given the power that information has to break down Corporations have discovered that ready access to critical information Digital doubles debut Digimask has developed a method for creating a virtual twin, BBC News Face recognition effectiveness is challenged The face recognition technology that airport officials are rushing to November 3rd, 2001 | Comments are closed
or how to make the traditions of the left our own Libertarians come in many hyphenated flavours, but very few genuine libertarians see themselves as being on the political left. So called ‘Socialist’ libertarians are not libertarians at all. They are as oxymoronic as meat eating vegetarians: any value set that would deny economic free association and true several property, denies personal liberty, and you are not a libertarian unless you advocate personal liberty as first amongst civil virtues. Thus from this fairly self-evident proposition, most libertarians see themselves as either being on the ‘right’ or at least they do not see themselves as being on the ‘left’. However just what does left and right really mean in this post-cold war era? I would contend that within the context of libertarianism, left and right are actually meaningless ideologically speaking. Conservatives and socialists ascribe various meanings to these terms based on their respective statist perspectives. However as we do not share those views, we can safely look beyond their definitions and see rather different essential differences and similarities for ourselves. Whilst conservatives and socialists see what differentiates them, as libertarians our perspectives allow us to see the shared statist axioms that in fact make them so similar in modern western societies. This sort of observation is hardly ground breaking. In the 1940’s Hayek pointed out in ‘The Road to Serfdom’ the truism (to us) that far from being the antithesis of the left, the Nazis were just another form of socialism. Similarly early 21st Century libertarians can see that there is actually little to choose between Tory ‘Conservatism’ and Blairite Labour ‘Socialism’ circa 2001 in real terms of policy and underpinning assumptions as to the role of the state. What libertarians need to understand is that there are indeed important differences between the ‘left’ and ‘right’, but they are meta-contextual rather than ideological now that we no longer live in a simpler bipolar world. That is to say, the left and right come from very different traditions that strongly colour their respective views of how the world really works and thus how they interpret any ideological issue presented to them. Bearing this in mind, libertarians need to realise that by mentally allying themselves to the ‘right’, they are actually not making a useful ideological distinction at all. In fact, by doing so, they run the risk of clothing themselves in cultural meta-contextual baggage that is often profoundly unhelpful. What is needed is a more dispassionate analysis as to what other people understand by ‘left’ and ‘right’ and a more pragmatic, or dare I say, even cynical use of that meta-contextual baggage for our own purposes. For example, a key ‘vibe’ of the ‘left’ tradition is the view of the world as a struggle from the bottom against forces of hierarchy. Thus an anti-business proposition that portrays the corporate boardroom as an essentially hostile power centre to the ‘common man’ employee is an ‘easy sell’ when presented to someone who views the world from within that meta-context. However, a meta-context is just a tradition of thought, not a philosophy per se. Let us take the fact that as the airline industries across the world are said to be in dire troubles, various interventionist governments are pouring tax monies into flag carriers to prop them up. This is not really the sort of issue to greatly exercise people on the traditional ‘left’, who view economic intervention as perfectly normal or the ‘right’, who view ‘helping’ companies as perfectly normal, provided they are big companies. However, this issue can indeed be made to resonate with the ‘left’ by framing it precisely in the terms that fit their traditions of thought:
What have we just done? We have just made a seemingly “anti-business” argument designed to fit within the meta-contextual world view of the left. We have also just made an argument in favour of laissez-faire. Many on the ‘left’ are actually natural allies of the libertarian view on civil liberties, yet they cannot extend the same logic to economic liberties. Part of the problem is the fact that libertarians, largely speaking from the meta-context of the ‘right’, frame economic issues in such a manner as to predispose opposition from the ‘left’. If we are to rescue the ‘left’ from collectivism, we must learn to speak the language of the left and tap into deep traditions of resistance and non-deferential social values that could serve us well. It is not just a case of picking the issues to attract people from the left but how we present them. Hostility to business regulation is almost invariably presented as a ‘right’ issue and framed in the language and meta-contextual frames of reference of the ‘right’. Yet why not pitch this very issue to the left in terms that resonate for them as well?
Rather than the usual ‘right’ arguments involving imposed costs to the established business being regulated, we take an equally true consequence of regulatory imposition and serve it up with a left spin. Whilst the use of language may be cynical, no ideological compromise is required and there is nothing dishonest about the argument being made. Once we realise that ‘left’ and ‘right’ are just traditional meta-contextual frames of reference and do not have any real objective political content in and of themselves, we can effectively inject our libertarian memes into both the ‘left’ and ‘right’ world views. By doing this, we broaden our ability to communicate with people who might otherwise see us as being ‘one of them’ rather than ‘one of us’. When in the ring and fighting the good fight, do not deny yourself a good left hook. [This article is also available in slightly expanded form as Libertarian Alliance Tactical Note pamphlet no.29 in pdf format. Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader or similar] November 2nd, 2001 | Comments are closed
If we can eventual get enough people posting to this blog, then we will be able to attract interest from outside our circle of heavily armed capitalist libertarian illuminati. Initially I expect we will be ‘preaching to the choir’ but if the Libertarian Alliance Forum is anything to go by, libertarian choirs tend to like singing out of key As for your tech oriented posts, Walter, I suspect you will find Dale Amon a kindred spirit. Hopefully we can induce him to post techie items as well for us techno-weenies to go ‘ohhhh…ahhhh’ over. Blog away, me heartie! November 2nd, 2001 | Comments are closed
The objective of this blog is to disseminate news and views of interest to people who view the world from a critically rational libertarian perspective. Blogs can give us a means to break free of the old meta-contextual world views of ‘left’ and ‘right’ and establish a meta-context of our own, independent of statist and collectivist assumptions and underpinning. Samizdata wants to receive content that deals with libertarian issues, but we also want to read whatever is of interest to critically rational people, from the deadly serious to the utterly frivolous. We are a group of people with wide interests and highly divergent backgrounds: a motley crew of Libertarians, Extropians, recovering Neo-Conservatives and wild eyed anarchists. Post away and remember… let’s NOT be safe out there! November 2nd, 2001 | Comments are closed
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