Samizdata

Andrew Ian Dodge has feelings of déjà vu when he reads Johnny Student’s Samizdata article.

Johnny Student‘s latest post (Thursday, Jan 24^th 2002) is no surprise to me, having been on the front-line of the PC wars in the 80s. I was at Colby College in Waterville, ME at political correctness’ flowering.

It does amaze me now, to see how much Republicans in the US complain about political correctness in higher education. They were given the chance to help fight it in the 80s and they ran away. Those of us on the front line were left by ourselves to face the onslaught.

Just like Johnny Student, I routinely got in trouble with the administrators and professors for expressing my right-of-centre opinions, both verbally and in written word. Let us hope that JS does not suffer the academic abuse I endured. I fear his anonymous postings may not fully protect him. In a bizarre episode, I managed to get called to the Dean’s office for smoking a cigar in a designated area. I was let off, and the next year they changed the rules to exclude cigars and pipes, but not cigarettes (of any kind).

For even more depressing reading on the subject, I recommend The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses by Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate. You can read more about my experiences in my book Statism Sucks! Ver 2.0

Samizdata reader Rob Smith has some interesting observations about a common psychological link between the IRA, street gangs and Islamic terrorists:

I was born and raised for a number of my formative years in a coal mining camp in Harlan County, Kentucky. Buried deep in the armpit of the Appalachian Mountains, “Bloody Harlan” is famous for the fussin,’ feudin,’ and fightin’ that went on for years there, first between families that just flat-out didn’t like each other, then between the moonshiners and the sheriffs, then between the Company and the Union during the Mine Wars.

A common thread ran through every one of these battles. The “Code of the Hills” dictated that no one could abide any sort of insult from anyone and maintain the family’s dignity. Honor was at stake if that insult was given, and everyone knew that honor was much more important than life. So, a lot of people were killed by crazy hillbillies following their “code,” and I was raised to believe they were all heroes for either killing or being killed.

I grew out of those beliefs, but they give me an interesting perspective on Islamic Holy Warriors and IRA members and a lot of other misguided fools who continue to follow their own personal version of the code today. Some people may have a legitimate grievance against someone else, but taking to the trees and the hollows with a squirrel gun and shooting at anything that moves on the other side often is counterproductive. Sometimes, a lot of people are killed and you’ve gotta pay ’em back for that, so more people are killed, and you’ve gotta pay ’em back for that, and soon the snake is eating its tail, making a vicious circle.

The Al-Qaeda, Sinn Fein and others of their ilk are not very different from drug dealers in the ‘hood who are “dissed” by a rival gang and feel that a drive-by shooting is the only possible response to this insult. They all remind me of the hillbillies I saw do the same thing, because they never used their brains to control their behavior. Everything came from the gut.

Some things are worth fighting for. Given no other option, that’s exactly what I would do. But I would always explore other options first, then fight because my brain told me to, not my gut.

Rob Smith

As has been argued on the Samizdata in previous articles, liberty is not genuinely advanced by legal maneuvers but by cultural shifts. I am all for the overturning of laws that infringe civil liberty on-line and certainly I wish well to groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation which fights the good fight against attempts to censor the Internet and the monstrous Digital Millennium Act in the USA… but this is not an American or a British or an Australian problem. It is a global problem and the solution is a global one.

Encryption cracks, DVD decoders and all that good stuff can be made illegal in the USA but so what? If it can be found on a server in Romania or Taiwan or Indonesia, who cares what the law says in America? You want what the US called non-exportable ‘weapons grade encryption’? No problem, if you know where to look: there are several servers in Eastern Europe that offer you crypto as good as or better than what is commercially available in the USA, plus it is less likely to have a NSA or GCHQ backdoor. Much of the good stuff of that nature is written outside the USA and EU to begin with. If a server gets shut down, there will be another with the same software up and running a day or a hour later somewhere else. Peer-to-peer transfers make this an even more robust process.

Liberty is furthered by simply making unreasonable laws unworkable and this happens when enough people refuse to comply and find viable ways to circumvent them. This can take form from minor disobedience all the way up to Boston Tea Parties. Let the democratically sanctified congresses and parliaments of thieves spew out ever more regulations: if the reality is that continually evolving technical means of distributing the codes of liberty continue, then we win and they lose regardless of who wins in the courts.

Sure, they can find a few people using these unauthorized things and throw them in jail, but if a code crack for a DVD can be downloaded for free in a matter of seconds off some off-shore server and used in the privacy of your own home, the fact is 99.999% of the people who do that will go undetected regardless of the huffing and puffing of the large US media companies and the finest politicians their money can buy.

But no, do not write to Samizdata asking where to find this stuff… that is what UseNet and Search Engines are for.