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 used to read Theodore Dalrymple (aka, Antony Daniels) quite a bit, and some of his collections of essays, such as “Life At The Bottom”, are searing and very honest depictions of problems in the modern world, even though I find them to be short on remedies.
But while I can share some of his horror at certain trends – such as welfare dependency – there is an increasingly marked level of sustained, Daily Mail authortarianism and the sky-is-falling-in hysteria in his work, a sort of constant refrain that everything in the world is getting more “vulgar”. (A certain amount of vulgarity is, if you think about it, a sign of health, or life generally). A particularly good example of this sort of humourlessness can be found in an article about the attractive sister of one of the new UK royals.. In that article, he made a generally good point but as is increasingly the case, overdid it to such an extent that he seemed to be doing what a lot of British grand journalists do: wallow in disgust at his fellow countrymen and women while at the same time keeping the object of his supposed disgust in continued view.
His current obsession is the “vulgarity” of modern culture, and, presumably, a desire that something less vulgar takes its place. Some idea of how Dalrymple thinks that might be achieved can be seen in this not terribly convincing defence of France’s draconian privacy laws, which muzzle the media in its coverage of the shenanigans of public figures, such as the disgraced former head of the International Monetary Fund. He writes of how Mr Strauss-Kahn’s personal life was kept private by the French media:
“Had the French press and media failed in their duty, or had they maintained the correct distinction between private and public life? The French often pride themselves that they are more respectful of the private life of public figures, more mature about sexual matters, and generally less prurient, than les anglo-saxons, who are at one and the same time libertine and puritanical, in short grossly hypocritical.”
“It is obvious that the two opposed policies – to tell all or say nothing – have different disadvantages. The first leads, when carried to excess, to a general vulgarisation of the culture, well-illustrated by Britain, the most vulgar country in the world (at least that is known to me). The second, when carried to excess, leads to the impunity of the powerful in a sphere well beyond the private. Since most policies are carried to excess at some time or another, the question amounts to this: do you prefer the vulgarisation of culture to the impunity of the powerful? Within limits – and clearly there are limits in France – I prefer the latter.”
He then writes about a tax issue as it affects journalists in France. I was not aware of this tax issue, but if true, this proves that French civil society is even more buggered than I had imagined:
“One of the reasons, not generally adverted to in the foreign press, for the journalistic silence about the behaviour of the elite is the special tax regime that journalists enjoy in France. In a country with very high tax rates, where a visit from the fisc is viewed with about as much pleasure as a visit from the Gestapo, this is a considerable privilege, definitely worth preserving. It creates an identity of interest between the elite and the journalists, who are inhibited from revealing too much about anyone with powerful protectors.”
Here’s another paragraph. I love the silkiness of how TD talks about the “tolerance” of French society:
“Should the French press have told all before the events in New York – with the implication that the events might then have been averted? It seems that Strauss-Kahn’s behaviour went considerably beyond the normal even for a tolerant country.”
No kidding.
“It might be argued that his private behaviour in France made him unsuitable for his post in the IMF, not because he was incompetent, but because he was incapable of conforming to the mores of the country in which the IMF had its seat.”
Ah, ze great seducer cannot be allowed to live in eeevil, puritan Amerika. Seriously, is the author of this piece arguing that a man who uses his power and influence to not just seduce, but allegedly attack, women, would be suitable in any part of the world, be it New York, Paris or Tokyo?
“As in so many matters, the relevance of a man’s private life to his suitability for a position of public trust is a question of judgment, rather than of hard and fast rule. Public figures are not, and will never be, plaster saints; and wisdom before the event is always considerably more difficult than wisdom after it. Boring as happy mediums no doubt are, I should wish for just such a happy medium between corrupt French indulgence towards the elite, and vulgar, hypocritical, prurient British interest in the elite’s private affairs. If, for some reason, a happy medium were not possible, I should prefer the French way.”
In other words, a largely ineffective press. For all its many faults, I prefer the British way. After all, in the end – after a lot of attempts – the UK media were able to bring down a number of bent members of parliament over the expenses issue. As I write, there remains coverage of the venality of officials at FIFA, the global football organisation; the UK media has also in the past been willing to cover the corruptions, major or minor, in places such as the EU. And in the US, the First Amendment means that the shortcomings of politicians are covered. Yes, such a “muck-raking” press can be hypocritical, but for example, does anyone imagine that a journalist such as Bob Tyrrell could have hammered Bill Clinton under a French system of law?
“The serf first obtained chattels and then land in property; on them he won his first power, and that meant his first liberty – meaning thereby his personal liberty. His title to these things, that is, his right to appropriate them to his own exclusive use and enjoyment, and to be sustained by the power of the state in so doing, was his first step in civil liberty. It was by this movement that he ceased to be a serf. This movement has produced the great middle class of modern times; and the elements in it have been property, science and liberty. The first and chief of these, however, is property; there is no liberty without property, because there is nothing else without property on this earth.”
– The Essential Essays of William Graham Sumner, “On Liberty, Society and Politics”, (Edited by Robert C. Bannister), page 247.
The Business Secretary, and member of the Liberal Democrat Party, Vincent Cable, likes to let us know he supposedly predicted the recent credit crunch (I am not sure he did, actually), and still manages to be presented as a sage voice on current affairs. Never mind that many of his views are nonsense.
Anyway, the Daily Mash satirical website has nailed him.
This item about Mexico, via the ChicagoBoyz group weblog, is shocking. The scale of violence in Mexico – largely centred on the drugs trade – is rising rapidly. It ought, really, to be the top security issue for the United States. It is hard to justify actions in the MidEast with this sort of crap happening just across the border.
The war on drugs is proving an even bigger disaster than libertarians typically state.
“You heard it here first – we were not born in the Garden of Eden.”
– Tara Smith, talking at the Adam Smith Institute last week, with reference to the idea that we get to inherit something called Original Sin.
Here is an interesting take on the two mainly libertarian-leaning candidates for the Republican presidential ticket: Gary Johnson and Ron Paul. Our own Brian Micklethwait has thoughts on Johnson (he’s a fan); I certainly would be more inclined, if I were a US voter, to go for GJ rather than Ron Paul. Mr Paul is sound on issues like the Federal Reserve but on a lot of stuff, his classical liberal credentials strike me as a bit suspect, although people whom I respect, like Brian Doherty of Reason magazine, say nice things about him.
Of course, the fact that such persons can have a crack at a presidential nomination is in itself a fact that separates the US from the UK. I cannot at the moment think of a single major UK Conservative politician who comes close. And as for continental Europe…….oh dear…..Silvio Berlusconi? (That was a joke).
“A cleaner (janitor) at a London gallery cleared away an installation by artist Damien Hirst having mistaken it for rubbish. Emanual Asare came across a pile of beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays and cleared them away at the Eyestorm gallery on Wednesday morning.”
I still treasure that story, which appeared in this item about the art world (thanks to Tim Sandefur for the pointer. He is on a bit of a roll at the moment).
In thinking of art and tracing out the trends, good and possibly not so good, you can do a lot worse than read this book by Ernst Gombrich.
We seem to be having quite a lot of referendums at the moment in the UK and Europe. As we might note with a sort of grim amusement, the largest recent ones – on the EU Constitution – were airily ignored with customary insouciance by the EU political elites, and therefore fill many people will understandable cynicism. Over at the EU Referendum blog there is a long item about protest movements, violence, referendums and political change. I may have more to say when I have the time to study it. It looks a good piece, and I recommend it.
Talking of protests, here is a nice collection of photos of recent “rally against debt” held in central London a few days ago, as taken by our own Brian Micklethwait.
“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
– Tacitus
“The man must be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and in any event, there is still some chance that the whole sordid affair turns out to have been a political set-up, in which case he might even emerge from this bizarre scandal with credit and sympathy. Yet it is about time Europe’s ownership of the International Monetary Fund, and particularly France’s apparently divine right to the top job, was brought to a close. If Mr Strauss-Kahn’s nemesis in a New York hotel room loosens Europe’s grip, then that may be no bad thing. Whatever the truth of otherwise of the allegations, Mr Strauss-Kahn’s spectacular fall from grace is widely seen as a near catastrophe both for the IMF and the delicate negotiations around further rescue packages for the stricken eurozone periphery. This it is definitively not. To the contrary, it might even bring about a rethink of the currently doomed strategy of throwing good money after bad.”
– Jeremy Warner
The historian and libertarian writer, Robert Higgs. is most upset that some Americans had celebrated when Osama bin Laden was killed by US special forces a few days ago:
“The caretakers who comfort the sick and dying are often great. The priests and friends who revive the will to live in those who have lost hope are great. The entrepreneurs who establish successful businesses that better satisfy consumer demands for faster communication, safer travel, fresher food, and countless other goods and services are great. The scientists and inventors who peer deeper into the nature of the universe and devise technologies to accomplish humane, heretofore impossible feats are great. The artists who elevate the souls of those who hear their music and view their paintings are great.”
“But mere killing is never great, and those who carry out the killings are not great, either. No matter how much one may believe that people must sometimes commit homicide in defense of themselves and the defenseless, the killing itself is always to be deeply regretted. To take delight in killings, as so many Americans seem to have done in the past day or so, marks a person as a savage at heart. Human beings have the capacity to be better than savages. Oh that more of them would employ that capacity.”
I agree utterly with the first paragraph. We should celebrate goodness more than we do. Absolutely right. But come on. I really have had it with the moral posturing of people who wax indignant about their countrymen feeling pleased because an evil man has been killed. When an evil person, in a confrontation such as occurred a few days ago, is killed, then why should not the admittedly rough justice of what happened be marked by a certain degree of grim satisfaction? I don’t imagine for a moment that anyone who voiced satisfaction at OBL’s death is under the illusion that this can possibly put right the evil that was done on 9/11. There are times, however, when grim satisfaction at what happened to OBL is not only the understandable reaction, but the just one.
It interests me how some on the almost pacifist wing of the libertarian movement – if I can call it that these days – have reacted to the demise of this man. After all, such folk often complained that “neoconservatives” who supported the overthrow of Saddam or the Taliban, say, were going beyond just retribution in response to the 9/11 attacks. So what I would ask of Higgs, and for that matter, would-be POTUS Ron Paul, is what exactly do they suggest should have happened in the case of OBL, had by any chance a pristine, moral libertarian regime have managed to find him and track him down? File a lawsuit? Suggest he surrenders to the nearest police station where he can be read his Miranda rights? That was not going to happen: the most probable outcome for a person such as this would be a messy arrest, and the charade of a trial and lifetime jail term/execution, or a firefight. Welcome to reality.
Higgs finishes with this:
“Glory to the USA, glory to its hired killers, glory above all to its heroic Great Leader. The whole spectacle is profoundly disgusting. Yet we can see that many Americans have enthusiastically fallen for this trick, dancing in the streets in celebration of a man’s death in faraway Pakistan. Such unseemly behavior is not the stuff of which true greatness is made.”
“Unseemly”. Oh get over yourselves.
Here are some more thoughts over at Pajamas TV. I particularly enjoyed Bill Whittle’s comments. I share his take.
The Daily Telegraph – which in my view continues to go downhill as a newspaper – has this decidedly mixed quality article by Jim White about the alleged evils of a large sporting institution being owned not by its “local community” but, horror of horrors, by a US family living in the sleazy state of Florida, no less. Words such as “leeches” are used. We are talking about the Glazer family, owner of Manchester United. Perhaps someone at that newspaper might gently remind Mr White that the Glazers are of Jewish origin, and that it is not terribly clever to use words such as “leeches”, given the historical demonisation of Jewish speculators as “bloodsuckers”. To be fair to White, I am sure nothing untoward was involved and he got carried away. Even so, this paragraph should have set off some editorial alarm bells:
“I believe United’s success has arrived in spite of the Glazers, not thanks to them. Rather than astute custodians, they are merely monumental leeches, blessed, in their endless requirement for blood, to be attached to such a healthy host body.”
Mr White struggles to lay out how awful it is that the club, purchased earlier in the ‘Noughties in a leveraged buyout, is now a privately held firm with a large debt interest bill. Indeed, it does seem eye-watering that since the day of purchase, interest charges of around £300 million have been paid on the debt, financed through things like rising ticket prices and the like. And yes, the days when factory workers could watch the likes of Duncan Edwards or George Best in the 50s and 60s for a relative puny sum have gone. There are even software engineers and financiers watching football these days (how vulgar!). But surely, the Glazers bought the club in a free market – no gun was held to anyone’s head when that transaction was made.
Mr White does not, as he could have done, argue that the tax rules could be changed so that equity financing is put on a level playing field (excuse the pun) with debt; arguably, some of the more foolish-looking leveraged buyouts that arose just before the credit market debacle of 2008 were encouraged by favourable tax treatment of debt. But he should realise that had ManU remainded a listed business, then the shareholders would want to see return on equity and for those returns to increase. They also want a dividend occasionally. This growth has to come from somewhere. With many sporting institutions, that growth requires things like rising ticket revenues, sponsorship, and the like. I personally think that outside of a few very big sporting institutions, such capital growth is questionable and that sport is subject to all manner of vagaries that make it an unappealing investment, in my view.
Now, if Mr White wants to make the case that the state should somehow decide and regulate the ownership of sporting institutions, then he should have the courage of his convictions and argue for sport to be run on socialist principles. Let’s see how far he can go with that.
I don’t like much of the modern professional footballing world, and yes, the lure of big money has made some players behave with particular foolishness in recent years. But Mr White should remember that if people really detest the vulgarity of modern sport as much as he claims they do, there is a simple solution. Don’t go to matches and do something more edifying instead. Or even play some football with your kids in the back yard.
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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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