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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I have been labouring under the impression that the growth of Home-Schooling is a purely US phenomenon.
Not so. A refreshingly illuminating documentary programme was shown last night on UK’s Channel 4 about the rapidly growing popularity of Home-Schooling here in Britain. Sorry, it was a TV show so no link.
Actually, this should not come as a surprise given the current educational choices faces parents in Britain. Whilst private schools are widely available in Britain they are ferociously expensive so people of modest means have no choice but to process their precious charges through the state meat-grinders that HM government so kindly provides. The repute of the latter plumbs lower depths with each passing year.
The Home-schooling parents were all interviewed at length and, unanimously, they declared that their motivation was entirely due to the way they felt their children were being harmed or hindered by being sent to school in the ‘traditional’ manner so they just upped and decided to take matters into their own hands. Judging from the kids they were gloriously right; without exception these children were articulate, bright, curious, well-behaved, ambitious and highly-motivated. Furthermore, the time-worn prediction that Home-schooled children would grow up shy and withdrawn was proven to be egregious nonsense.
Now it might be said that the documentary-makers wanted to put a positive slant on things but programme-makers and TV producers in this country are notoriously hostile to free market ideas so if there was any bias it would most certainly tend towards the opposite.
Watching this show was a revelatory joy for someone like me but I almost had to be peeled off the ceiling when I heard some of the things these parents were saying. One mother said:
“I wouldn’t want any money from the government because I wouldn’t them involved in any way in what I am doing. That’s what’s so nice about what we’re doing; the government has no juristiction over me….They have no involvement in what I do and I’d like to keep it that way”
And another mother said:
“What tends to happen is that when parents grow more confident they question not just the type of schooling we’re given but also the type of health care we’re given and how Councils are run. It leads to you saying, hang on, if I can take this large amount of responsibility back into my own life, why can’t I live in a different way?”
Why indeed?
Apparently, somebody claiming to represent the Scottish National Liberation Army has admitted responsibility for sending packages of ‘caustic substances’ through the post to Tony Blair and several other MPs.
I wouldn’t go as far as to call this an attempt on the life of Our Glorious Leader (especially as he is in Australia at the moment) or, if it was, then it is a pathetically ham-fisted one.
No, if reports are accurate, then it is obviously some sort of pointed message. But what message?
Things are getting a bit racey over here.
Someone terribly raffish and clever (it was probably Oscar Wilde or Samuel Johnson) once said that a man should be judged not on the quality of his friends but on the quality of his enemies.
I cannot recall having heard any previous exposition on the Internet from the Vatican before, so this must be of some significance. For me, the following quote of Page 2 stands out:
“But the church also finds fault with the Internet’s embrace of libertarianism. “The ideology of radical libertarianism is both mistaken and harmful,” the Vatican said. “The error lies in exalting freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute, which would then be the source of values…. In this way the inescapable claims of truth disappear.”
A few years ago, I had a discussion with another Libertarian the result of which was that we agreed that the Internet was the new Printing Press. I don’t imagine anybody is going to be burning at the stake but the parallel is looking more prescient every day.
[My thanks to Samizdata reader Boris Kuperschmidt for the link.]
I have only a fuzzy and rather amateurish understanding of Chaos Theory but I do believe that it attempts to explain the process whereby a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and, some time later, as a direct result, a hurricane lays waste to Poland. Or something. In other words, it is an exposition on how tiny, insignificant events can, through a cumulative series of knock-on effects, eventually become really big, major, world-changing events.
On the assumption that I am right (or, at least, not too hilariously wrong) then I think we are witnessing something in reverse by the UK governments sudden resurrection of the proposed ban on fox-hunting.
Now it is fair to say, that fox-hunting has been under the cosh for some time now. It has been priority No.1 for animal rights groups for years but, since Labour came to power in 1997, it has also been the target of the Labour left who see it as a decadent hobby for the cruel and arrogant rich; a totem of class privilege. This is a charge which is neither true nor fair but it has played well within the context of the Politics of Envy and, even if it were true, it deserves to be protected from state bullying.
But, faced with some determined opposition, the government has shied away for forcing through a ban of the sport in England and, until the last few days, the issue appeared, if not dead, then dormant.
All of a sudden, though, it is back on the agenda and with indecent haste, the government announcing a House of Commons Free Vote on March 18. Not through any sense of principle, mind. Tony Blair is known to be, at best, agnostic on the issue. No, it has everything to do with the War on Terror.
Blair has committed himself to supporting a US attack on Iraq but knows full well the unholy ruckus that support is likely to cause within his own party. This is a trade-off. Blair is telling the left that, if they keep quiet over the fate of Saddam, he will throw them some red meat in the form of the ban on fox-hunting they have always lusted for. In other words, give me Baghdad or the fox gets it.
It may not work. First, cynical ploys are the life-blood of the left and this may simply not be enough to buy their silence. Secondly, the principled opposition that rallied before is already rallying again and dark mutterings of civil disobediance fill the air.
But is this not an example of Chaos Theory only in reverse? Crazed terrorists kill thousands of people in America and, as a result, an old English tradition faces state-mandated oblivion.
Something has been bothering me for a while now and I regret to have to say that the source of my concern emanates from across the pond. Wonder what it is? Well, it’s the use of the word ‘Liberal’ when referring to someone of the leftist persuasion which is nothing less than a complete inversion of the term.
It gives me pleasure, therefore, to link to a campaign being undertaken by Bureaucrash, a group of seriously well dug-in and commited US student capitalist activists (and it feels so good to be able to type those words in earnest).
“Here in the birthplace of modern freedom, liberalism has come to identify a view that favors the use of force — force exercised by the bureaucratic state — to achieve supposedly noble ideals.”
I could not have put it better. Just what happened to the word? From 18th Century up until around the 1960’s ‘Libertarianism’ in this country was called ‘Liberalism’. It denoted support for free trade, limited government, low taxes and property rights. But these trends being what they are, Britain has been influenced by the US terminology and now the word denotes, regulation, nanny state, high taxes and hate speech laws. The latter is not ‘liberalism’ it is ‘socialism’. The very word ‘Libertarian’ was conceived as a means of distinguishing us from them.
You can test this theory if you ever go to Continental Europe where the term ‘Liberal’ has retained its original meaning. Just go up to any European socialist and tell him/her that you are a ‘liberal’. Note how their faces swifty transform from the customary rictus of hate to a rictus of seething hate shot through with horror.
I don’t know if was an underhand tactic by the left, a cruel happenstance of fate or mere sloppiness that allowed our political foes in the Anglosphere to grab our cloak and wrap it around their own bodies but it is way past time that we grabbed it back.
So I support the Bureaucrash campaign and, whilst I know it will stick in many a craw, I invoke all my fellow Capitalists, Libertarians and, yes, even you Conservatives to join in and declare; “Say it once, say it loud, I’m a Liberal and I’m proud!!”
In the early Spring of 1998, when I was still a jobbing scriptwriter, I was invited to a showbiz party held in the home of a TV producer who had hired me to work on some his projects. During the course of the evening I got into conversation with an actress who had just finished filming an episode of a TV cop drama. She told me that she had been trained to handle a gun convincingly and I replied that that was the type of training we could all do with and for real. I could not have caused her more offence if I had stuck my hand up her skirt.
“So you think we should all go around shooting each other then?” she exclaimed.
That’s what it is like over here. Anti-self-defence is the default position. It is the accepted norm. It is so universal and unquestioned that even unarmed self-defence is often referred to as ‘vigilantism’. It is uncivilised and neanderthal. We don’t need to defend ourselves; we have our marvelous police to do that for us.
Prior to today, promoting the right to bear arms was only marginally less controversial than promoting legalised child sex abuse. Given that context, the appreance of this column may reasonably be regarded as something of a turning point.
“Given this scandalous situation, it is time for the Government to confer a new right on the people: the right to bear arms. Gun control in this country is in any case a joke. There is far more gun crime now than there was before the idiotic law passed by the Major government to ban handguns after the Dunblane massacre”
One has to be living in Britain to appreciate exactly how ground-breaking that statement is and it is made all the more significant by the source. Simon Heffer is not a Libertarian, he is more of a traditional paleo-Conservative but he is a high-profile commentator and is generally regarded as a serious voice. He is the kind of man TV producers want on their talk shows when they need a bit of gravitas. He can be excoriated and villified and, indeed, he will be both but he can’t be ignored and that matters.
Despite this pleasing development, I have a quibble and an important quibble. Mr. Heffer invokes the state to grant us a right to bear arms. This is wrong. It is not a licence and what the government gives, the government can take away again. We already have a right to bear arms, bestowed upon us by our ancient common law heritage and exercisable by the mere act of being born. All the government has done is to deprive us of it. Now, if Mr. Heffer can get his head around that concept as well, we will really be cooking with gas.
That said, he is to be heartily congratulated for saying what was, up till now, not even thinkable. In doing so, he has prised open a door that was previously glued shut, nailed over and padlocked. The restoration of our common law rights is still a journey of a thousand miles but the first few steps have been taken.
Courteous policemen, red telephone kiosks, afternoon tea, cap-doffing and genteel bucolic stability. That is the cartoon image that many non-British people seem to have of Britain.
I don’t suppose they will want to read this
“Gun crimes during the first 10 months of the annual period have trebled in most of the urban areas which have so far submitted statistics to the Home Office. Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said gun gangs were spreading across the country whereas, until recently, they were confined to a handful of London boroughs”
Drug running, gun culture, drive-by shootings, rampant robbery, burglary and car-crime. Not very ‘Mary Poppins’ is it?
I would, ideally, like to write something satirical and witty about all this but I can’t. First of all, because the galloping erosion of our civil society is no laughing matter. Secondly, I am just too furious. I am furious at the way that the failure of one government prohibition (drugs) reinforces the failure of another government prohibition (guns) and to the detriment of all.
But I am even more furious at the despicable lies that were foisted on us during the campaign to ban private gun ownership. “It will make the streets of Britain safer” they said; “It will put an end to gun culture” they promised; “It will reduce crime” they assured us; “Criminals will find it harder to procure weapons” they proclaimed.
Ad-hoc justification was heaped upon egregious falsehood by every politician, pundit, lobbyist, talking-head and self-appointed ‘expert’ as they all jostled with each other for a place in the Pantheon of the Righteous.
But they won the day. It was no-contest. We few voices of principled reason were pilloried as apologists for child-murderers and psychopaths and who wants to line up with people like that?
So you foreigners can just disabuse yourselves of any lingering image of ‘genteel Britain’. This is a country where, on one side we have a national police force that is overstretched, politically hamstrung, misdirected and, like all nationalised industries, primarily concerned with protecting their own monopoly. They have guns. On the other side, we have growing gangs of ruthless and violent bandits set loose in a playground of grabbable booty. They have guns. In between, is the hard-working, law-abiding taxpayer, naked, and hoping for the best.
I do not believe that this is what was intended.
I always believed that I would have to live a very, very long time indeed to witness better laws in Russia than we have in Britain. Well, I am a mere sapling of 40 and, to my not inconsiderable amazement, that day has arrived.
“On Friday the State Duma passed amendments to the Criminal Code that are to increase the rights of the Russians for self-defense. For example, a new norm has appeared: “if an attack has posed a threat to the life, the harm to the assailant can not be treated as a crime”
Contrast this to the situation in Britain, where, despite a right to self-defence being enshrined in law, the police act with almost indecent haste against any citizen that manages to successfully take advantage of it. And, lest we forget, British citizens may have this wonderful theoretical right to self-defence but they are forbidden to wield so much as a toothpick to exercise it with.
I would like to believe that this change of heart by Russian politicians has come about as a result of some great degree of enlightenment but the truth seems far more prosaic.
“The crime rate has considerably increased in Russia, and law enforcement authorities fail to cope with it. The passing of the amendments means, the government, probably rather unwillingly, has to shift the defense of lives on the people themselves”
Facts on the ground have a knack of knocking high-minded ideals off of their lofty perches. If people feel themselves to be in danger they will defend themselves regardless of what the laws say and that puts politicians in a dilemma: do they preside over a state of mass disobedience and resultant loss of legitimacy or do they relent and give the people what they demand?
The answer from Russia seems to be that they relent and give the people what they demand. But, we all know what people are like; give them an inch they demand a mile. Now that Boris and Irina have a meaningful right to defend themselves they will beg the question, what with? How long, I wonder, until the State Duma is ‘reluctantly’ allowing Russians the right to bear arms?
A point of principle all Libertarians understand as a given is that self-defence is a right not a licence. It it is not within the gift of politicians either to bestow it or expropriate it. But I would be churlish to nitpick over this news. Given the way Russia was ruled just a few short years ago, I can only applaud enthusiastically.
A 16 year-old boy has been killed in a drive-by shooting in Nottingham. At this stage, there appears to be no motive.
I was fully expecting Steve Thoburn and the other ‘Metric Martyrs’ to lose their appeal before the Lords today. That they did, however, still resulted in my spending almost the entire day in a bug-eyed rage. I spent the afternoon doodling designs for giant siege engines that we could use to surround Brussels and reduce it to brickdust.
But, upon examining the actual rationale behind the verdict, the veins in my head have stopped throbbing with quite such gusto. I am forced to examine the small-print as both a Libertarian and a lawyer and I find myself largely agreeing with Brian Micklethwait below.
The application of EU Directives in British Law is, in fact, governed by British Law, namely the European Communities Act 1972 which rendered all British law as being subject to override by European Community Law. However, the Communites Act itself is a Constitutional Act. As such, it cannot be side-stepped by any subsequent legislation but it can itself be amended or even repealed by the British parliament.
There is a way out of the EU; all that is required is the parliamentary will.
I will disagree with Brian, though, that the Lords ruling is an implied ‘Declaration of Independence’. That ‘Declaration’ can only be made by a sovereign British parliament and, given the near-blanket commitment of our current political class to the EU project, the manifestation of that ‘will’ is still along way off.
Having verbally horse-whipped me to within an inch of my wretched life, Scott Rubush has been magnanimous enough to pen not just an apology but a generous offer.
Whilst I remain stubbornly proud of my satirical side-swipes, I must confess that I often find myself sympathising with Scott’s lament. When one contemplates, even for a moment, the sheer ubiquitousness of the egregious sewage that passes for so much of what we call ‘modern culture’, it is very easy to form the view that, despite the wealth of technology at our disposal, we are nonetheless living in a cultural and intellectual stoney-desert.
But step back, and a wider panorama can be seen. As my fellow Samizdatista, Perry de Havilland has pointed out, the cultural and intellectual worth is out there, you just have to look for it. Is that any different to the way it has always been? I suspect not. I believe that gems have always been hard to find and the only reason they seem so much rarer now is because the staggering growth in material wealth and technological development has made the desert we live in so much bigger and more diffuse. The gems are still there, you just have to dig through more dirt in order to find them.
And I believe a lot of people feel the same despair that Scott feels at the conspicious absence of anything that even passes for serious thought in our mainstream media. But, believe it or not, I take this as a good sign not a bad one; it reflects the sclerotic nature of the established orders not the debasement of the human mind. That human mind is exercising itself here, in cyberspace. This is where the great debates are happening; this is where new ideas and radical thinking are being forged. If you want to know who will be the next Socrates or the next Aquinas then keep blogging, Scott, it may be you.
And whether you keep blogging or not, I will be both happy and honoured to share that ‘pint’ with you if you ever fetch up here in the ‘Big Smoke’ (provided the EU hasn’t forced us all into drinking litres by then).
If the Americans want to continue to be a Great Power then they must surely adopt European methods.
In order to be a feared and mighty force in the world the EU:
“…should become a great power that will not take up arms at any occasion in order to defend its own interests”
When will these arrogant, unilateralist Americans learn to grow up and stop using military power in order to defend their interests? Doh!
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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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