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 am sitting next to the beach at Lyme Regis, south Dorset. The sun is out, the Brits have a public holiday due to the Royal Wedding, and I have deliberately fled central London to be down here. A good choice, as it turns out. This has to be one of the nicest parts of the UK.
The Daily Telegraph has one of those gushing, pro-Royal editorials written, I sometimes think, with the deliberate desire to wind up the malcontents out there. It seems to have succeeded most admirably, judging by this fellow in the comment threads by the name of “tyburntree”:
“….a nation with much to celebrate…”
Er, like what exactly? Treason committed at the highest levels. Illegal wars. Thoughroughly undemocratic parliamentary system. Deliberate population replacement and destruction of indigenous identity and culture ( contary to international law). Islamic extremism. Children killing children. Strutting Peacocks and thieves in our House of Shame. A three party dictatorship. Useless police. Useless courts. Useless schools. The refusal of our political class and courts to deport foreign criminals. Holiday camp prisons. Mulitculturalism. And last but not least a series of broken coronation oaths that have left this country at the mercy of an EU dictatorship.
Independent English Republic now!”
This is what might count as a sort of grumpy, right-wing kind of anti-royalist. I suspect that Samizdata regulars might agree with some of the sentiments expressed here – although the stuff about “deliberate population replacement” sounds a bit hysterical to me – plus the line about “illegal” wars (what, so it is okay so long as we get UN approval for them?). And for a person who seems to be concerned about the loss of “indigenous” identity and culture, why does this man want a republic? Like it or not, a constitutional monarchy is part of that “indigenous culture” of the UK, and has been for a long time. To be a republican, as this guy must surely know, is to make a pretty big break with tradition.
I am an agnostic about republics and monarchies – I think the system we have now is no worse than any likely alternatives. Republics have not, by and large, been noticeably less prone to the follies of socialism and big government than constitutional monarchies. Arguably, the reverse.
Anyway, I’ll unashamedly be raising a glass to the happy couple today. We can resume normal service tomorrow, whatever that means.
I am pleased that Barack Obama has decided, somewhat late on, to nail the nonsense that he did not have the right basic birth certificate details to enable him to hold his office. Good. I think that some characters on the fringe have provided a free gift to opponents by turning this into an issue.
The real problem is that the US electorate, by a mixture of self-delusion and misplaced enthusiasm, voted for a man unqualified for the responsibilities of high office, and a socialist in terms of his political doctrine. For sure, he continued the high spending of his predecessor, and the TARP policies, but he stepped them up. He still seems to be in denial about the scale of the fiscal hole the US is in.
The US is not, at root, a socialist country, although its universitieis and certain towns contain a lot of people who wish the country was like their imagined Western European social democratic welfare states. The irony being, of course, that these states are falling apart, with Greece being the most egregious example. For all his supposed modern appeal, Mr Obama is a strangely old fashioned figure. I am convinced that Obama is a one-term president. In the end, silly speculation about his birth certificate will not affect things one way or the other. And let’s be honest: some of the people who were going on about this subject struck me as racists; it enabled the pro-Obama camp to claim that parts of the right did not like Obama for discreditable reasons.
Meanwhile, our own Brian Micklethwait has thoughts about who he’d like to run against Obama.
I had better make sure my little nephew does not hear about this, because he’ll want yours truly to put in a bid for this crazy car.
Fortunately for us spendthrifts, this classic Aston Martin has already been sold.
As part of a continuing series where yours truly tracks down particularly barmy comments on the Web that deserve to be protected for posterity:
“Jefferson was certainly a slave master, owning and inheriting as many as 250 at one time, although he professed to have great qualms about the morality of slavery. Thre is also the ongoing mystery of his relationship with one of his Octaroon slaves, Sally Hemmings and her children. She was by all accounts exceptionally attractive. I agree with Taki’s supposition that life in antebellum Virginia must have been a particularly beautiful and wondrous epoch.”
(emphasis mine).
Written by someone called John Bidwell in response to an article by Taki that I link to below. I love that final sentence; at first, the paragraph might appear quite reasonable but the final sentence gives the lie to that. The slave-owning South was “particularly beautiful and wondrous”. You know, a part of the world in which humans were bought and sold at auction, flogged, or worse, for trying to escape.
What the fuck is wrong with these people? What next: the slave-owning society of ancient Rome was “particularly beautiful and wondrous” unlike, say, the boring, materialist world of the liberal West?
Here is my comment the other day, on the US Civil War, prompted by a Taki article.
The impact of these devices on our civilisation has been immense, whatever certain Luddites might claim. Wired magazine has a nice item about the 50th anniversary of the first microchip to be patented.
As regulars may know, I delight in finding and occasionally republishing barking moonbat comments, since they are, in their little, sad way, a marker for our times. Take it away, music maestro!
“You mean, the anti-war movement that is comprised of the political action groups, the infiltration of which by the CIA, FBI (and now branches of our military) that Commander-in-Chief Ronald Reagan provided for by signing E.O. 12333 in December of 1981, which infiltration is “for the purpose of influencing the activity of [those groups]?” Don’t worry – it’ll be back. Our military dictatorship knows it has to keep up the pretense that America is still a free and open society in which dissent is possible, so they’ll trot out their anti-war movement whenever they instigate another conflict for profit – because, like the ancient barbarians, they believe that war is the organizing principle of society, which is why George W. Bush declared never-ending COVERT war for “hearts and minds” against those who dissent against them in 2003.”
A commenter called “Saoirse”, writing in response to a comment by the Wall Street Journal on the strange behaviour of the so-called “anti-war” movement in the age of Obama. (H/T, Econlog).
Gordon Brown as the next head of the IMF? What a splendid idea – at least as long as Charlie Sheen is not available.
– Detlev Schlichter
This will not surprise some of our regulars here, but I see that Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency has cut the debt rating and outlook for the US. (What kept you? Ed).
I’ll be intrigued as to how cheerleaders for current administration policy, such as Paul Krugman try and spin this. “Those evil bond market vigilantes…”
Time to start dusting off the “D” word.
Update: Talking of defaults closer to home, in Europe, Tim Worstall has been writing that it would be better for countries to openly discuss, and then manage, the chances of default rather than bury their heads in the sand. Meanwhile, Bloomberg columnist Matthew Lynn argues that the demise of the euro can and could be handled much more smoothly than many people believe. I hope he is right.
Another update: Dan Mitchell – of the Cato Institute, talks about lessons from Argentina. Oh great.
The US Civil War, a bloody conflict in which more than half a million people perished, started earlier this month, 150 years ago. I have occasionally written before about how historians, given their regional or ideological opinions, have revised the accounts of what happened, and some of the revisionists – especially from the Confederacy -friendly side, have been counter-attacked themselves. A book that stands in the revisionist tradition but which avoids some of the sillier forms of name-calling against Lincoln, while not downplaying the centralisation of power that came after the war ended, is a very fine study by Jeffrey Rogers Hummell, which I have started to read.
I see that Taki, the mega-rich columnist for the Spectator who is very much a part of the isolationist, paleocon Right, repeats the accusation that slavery, as an issue, never really emerged as a causus belli in the war until at least two years after the conflict started. That may well be true: the idea that the fight between the Union and the Confederacy was some sort of simple war between the forces of Northern good against Southern evil is wrong, or at least does not recognise the genuine grievances that some on the Southern side felt. Let’s not forget that war histories tend to get written by the victors. I can even see why some libertarians, for instance, look favourably upon the Confederacy in terms of the issues of states’ rights – if not the evil of slavery, obviously. But there are times when the enthusiasts for the Confederacy do make fools of themselves, and Taki does it with this little line in his Spectator column this week (behind a subscriber firewall)(page 55): “Lincoln did everything for effect, and his death even got him on the back of the five-dollar bill, whereas in my opinion he should have been tried in absensia for the crimes he committed during the war and the destruction he caused to one of the loveliest societies that ever existed, the antebellum south.” (Emphasis: mine). It is tempting to write Taki off as a bit of joke, a sort of ultra-conservative clown. Any man who can write of a society in which a large number of people were owned as slaves and subject to all the humiliations of slavery, as “one of the loveliest societies that ever existed”, deserves to be treated with the utmost contempt.
The scars of the Civil War still exist, and the issue has also roiled the libertarian movement in recent years. A case in point being the observations about the Lew Rockwell crowd by Timothy Sandefur, for instance.
Update: Sandefur has more thoughts.
“If any place should be concerned with a robot takeover, it is the red-light district.”
– PW Singer, Wired For War, page 419.
Ayn Rand’s classic novel, Atlas Shrugged, which was published in 1957 and has sold vast copies, is released in a film version – or at least in a first instalment – this coming Friday in selected cinemas across the United States. I hope we can see it here in the UK. Interestingly enough, parts of the media are picking up on this. Here is an interview with an investment manager who is inspired by Rand’s “radicals for capitalism” philosophy and worldview. I am definitely going to make a point of seeing this film, whether it comes out at a UK cinema, or via DVD.
The reaction to the Financial Panic of 2008, with its massive bailouts, calls for “unregulated capitalism” (!) to be regulated, banker-bashing, etc, has certainly given Rand’s novel new resonance. I often heard it said that her villains are more convincing than her heroes, although Hank Rearden has always struck me as a well-drawn character. As for the likes of Barack Obama, Rand would have recognised what he stands for, instantly.
Praveen Swami, diplomatic editor of the Daily Telegraph, has a good piece – although I might quibble on one or two points – concerning the problem of Somali piracy, about which I have written several times here at Samizdata. I am not going to add further comment to what I have already said, but I was impressed by this article and a longish comment attached to it by a person with the signature of “IgonikonJack”. It is pretty good. And another, by “itzman”, refers to the issue of “letters of marque”.
A related point is that I have been reading Wired for War, by PW Singer, and it has fascinating things to say about some remarkable new technologies as apply not just in areas such as robotics and pilotless aircraft – those “drones” – also in the innovations now under way in the nautical world. They will surely play a part in any move to suppress piracy, but as Singer points out, the bad guys can increasingly get their hands on technology as well, and often by entirely legitimate means. This is all the more reason why libertarians, who are sometimes at the cutting edge of thinking about alternatives to government-imposed laws, as in the case of legal writer Bruce Benson, should get involved in how to address issues such as piracy.
In the Daily Telegraph article I link to, is the fact that, at the time of writing, more than 1,000 people are being held hostage by Somali pirates. If the same amount of people had been taken hostage on civil airliners, say, I think the major powers of the world might have adopted a more robust view by now.
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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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