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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“Until he is forgotten, Mailer should be remembered not only in a fool’s cap and bells but also in a scoundrel’s midnight black. For in an age crawling with intellectual folly, he was one of the reigning dunces, even his best works were shot through with adolescent fatuities, while the worst of his words and deeds were stupid and vicious without bottom. One is torn between wishing that his memory would disappear immediately and wanting his remains to hang at the crossroads as a lasting reminder to others.”
Algis Valiunas, on Norman Mailer. One of the most scathing items on a novelist I have read for a while. Ouch.
US-based academic Stephen Hicks, whose excellent website I occasionally check in on, is taking part in a conference in Las Vegas on 11-13, April, next year. And he is raising the issue of what are the ethical issues stemming from the turmoil. As he rightly notes, a lot has been said and written about the economic, political, even legal sides of the drama. But the ethics? Not so much. If you want to mix a bit of food for the brain with a few sessions at the blackjack tables and the odd show, this might be a fun few days.
It is certainly like to be more intellectually and sensually stimulating than watching the latest offerings of Michael Moore or the Hugo Chavez fan, Oliver Stone. Update: talking of which, how interesting it is that Mr Stone should champion a regime that exercises media censorship.
“John, talking about a Hare Krishna group who’d been painting a little temple in the grounds of Tittenhurst Park near Ascot, which was briefly his home, was typical. “I had to sack them. They were very nice and gentle, but they kept going around saying ‘peace’ all the time. It was driving me mad.”
John Lennon, as remembered by Ray Connolly. I have mixed feelings about John Lennon – who could support some strenously foolish things at times – but I loved his razer-sharp wit.
A 9/11 “truther”, appointed to a government job by The Community Organiser, has resigned. The guy was, among other things, a communist.
Of course there are causes we might have supported in our youth that we would rather not put on our employment CVs. But there are causes and there are causes. And this guy seems to be a fully paid-up moonbat.
“If your child is incapable of handling a 20-minute haranguing from a self-important public servant, he will be tragically unprepared for the new world. (Whom do you think he will be dealing with when he needs that hip replacement in 60 years?). Even if you oppose the president on a political level, it is empirically evident that the more one hears his homilies the less inclined one is to trust him. And Obama’s penchants to lecture us endlessly, to be the center of attention endlessly and to saturate the airwaves and national conversation are clear indications that he believes government is the answer to every societal, religious, economic, and cultural question we face. Why should your kids be immune? . .Why should we deny that he can elevate our schoolchildren from the abyss so they finally, after decades of neglect, can learn again? And who better to dictate the lesson plan than the president’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, a man who left Chicago’s school district with a meager 40 percent dropout rate? Honestly, if I’m going to be badgered and browbeaten by the president every day, kids should suffer a bit, as well. “
David Harsanyi, commenting on the recent Obama broadcast to American schoolchildren.
The Libertarian Alliance made a bit of a splash during the week, after a Daily Mail journalist conflated the LA’s regular blogger, David Davis, with a man of the same name who happens to be a senior Tory MP. Sean Gabb, one of the head honchos of the LA, has had a bit of fun with this, and very enjoyable it is to watch the discomfiture of a journalist who, plainly, did not do the necessary checks.
But during my reading of this silly saga, I came across Sean Gabb’s thoughts about the start of the Second World War – 70 years ago – which the Daily Mail journalist came across, and which no doubt prompted some sharp intakes of breath. Here is his opening paragraph:
“Today is the 70th anniversary of our declaration of war on Germany. My own view is that this was the greatest single disaster in British and perhaps world history. It beats the decision to go to war with Germany in 1914. That was a disaster in its own right, but did not necessarily mean the destruction of western civilisation. By 1945, around fifty million Europeans had been killed in battle or murdered or starved or bombed, and Bolshevik Russia was supreme across half the continent. British liberalism and world power had collapsed. Their best replacement was American corporatism with its increasingly ludicrous fig leaf of “human rights” and “democracy”. None of this would have happened had we stayed out of another European war.”
Repeat that final sentence: “None of this would have happened had we stayed out of another European war”.
It seems to me that Sean Gabb is seriously overplaying the argument and as a result, has rendered it seriously defective, in my opinion. For a start, it is far from clear to what extent Britain, and its then-empire, could have “stayed out” of a conflict involving various European nations only a few hundred miles away. For instance, one question I would put to Sean and others is this: how neutral could Britain have been, and to what extent would it have been endurable, either morally or practically, for Britain to stand aside while millions of refugees, such as Jews, sought a place of escape? For example, suppose that Hitler had demanded, as a condition of UK neutrality, that the UK ban any of its citizens from joining anti-Nazi resistance movements, or even promoting causes designed to weaken Hitler’s regime?
It is also, in my view, verging on outright nuttiness to suggest that had Britain stood aside, that Western civilisation would have been saved in some way. Western civilisation necessarily includes the West, ie, Western Europe – you know, places such as France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Scandanvian nations, and so forth. It is not just about the UK, North America and the Anglosphere diaspora. And consider this point: had Hitler defeated Soviet Russia, and the whole Eurasian continent, from Bordeaux to Vladivostok, fallen under his iron hand, it is naive to suppose that this would be a great result for “Western civilisation”. At best, the remnants of that civilisation would have lived under the shadow of a huge and menacing empire, based on racial and socialist dogmas that are too obviously horrifying to need spelling out.
So while I can heartily endorse Mr Gabb’s disgust at some of the outcomes of the war and its cost, his argument does not convince me. That is not to say that there are not revisionist interpretations of WW2 that do not deserve taking seriously, nor do we have to denigrate those men, such as former UK prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who worked so hard to avert a conflict. But unlike Sean Gabb, I am glad that the young Winston Churchill escaped a violent death during his soldiering days, and ignored the advice of those who imagined that Britain could cut some sort of deal with a revolutionary racialist-socialist with a proven record of deceit.
Victor Davis Hanson has a good take on WW2 revisionists like Pat Buchanan. I also recommend this post by Patrick Crozier, taking on, and taking apart, the arguments of Ralph Raico, another revisionist, but unlike Buchanan, is a libertarian.
Rod Liddle, in his role as knuckle-dragger-in-chief at the Spectator, has an article bearing a most arresting headline. Now the writers of such articles often don’t get to choose the headlines, so this might even have taken Mr Liddle aback somewhat:
“We should seize whatever opportunity we are given to be racist”.
The Spectator now has a new editor in the form of Fraser Nelson, one of journalism’s good guys. Well, I know it is good to start one’s term in the editor’s chair with a bang, but er, isn’t this a bit off? Actually, if you read the article, it is quite clear that Rod Liddle, despite his salty turn of phrase and spirit of cheerful nastiness, is not saying that being a racist is a good thing.
The US Securities & Exchange Commission, which regulates US-based financial institutions, has been blasted by a report for failing to act to stop the massive Ponzi scheme fraud of Bernard Madoff, who has been jailed after admitting his crimes. The SEC, like Britain’s own Financial Services Authority, has not exactly covered itself with glory during the financial crisis.
A point worth making – since I doubt it will occur to much of the MSM to make it – is that this episode will hardly deflect policymakers from the idea of loading even heavier regulations on financial services. Our own Financial Services Authority, in the form of its chairman, Lord Adair Turner, recently reminded people of how bureacratic mindsets work by calling for a tax on financial services which he says have become “too big”. Politicians and commentators routinely describe the crisis as somehow proving that “unregulated capitalism” has failed. And yet the SEC failure over Madoff proves a very different point: you can have all the regulations in the world, but if you don’t enforce them, and financial watchdogs are run by people lacking a bit of common sense, then the regulations will be useless.
As I keep reminding people, the credit crisis and the subsequent fallout occured, primarily, right under the noses of the world’s most powerful regulators and central banks, and not some obscure Caribbean tax haven or Alpine principality. And yet the impression given is that we have lived through a sort of re-run of a Wild West movie. The truth is very different.
“I think we should not have put off shrinking our financial sector. The result of the bailouts is that we are maintaining credit markets based on false information and artificial prices. You may have pulled the airplane out of the dive, but you are flying with faulty instruments, and I don’t think you are going to be happy about where you wind up.”
Arnold Kling, reflecting on the financial turmoil and the missteps of policymakers. It is quite a shock to realise that the demise of Lehman etc happened almost a year ago. The ensuing 12 months have gone past very quickly.
There have been a flurry of articles in the press in recent days about the significant risk that in a decade’s time, possibly sooner, the UK will suffer from power blackouts as electricity generating stations fall out of use and as there is nothing – apart from some renewable energy sources such as windmills – to pick up the slack. The trouble for the Tories, of course, is that assuming they are in power by then, the blame for the disaster will fall on their shoulders, rather than on those of politicians who have chosen to play to the Green gallery by not giving the go-ahead to new power supplies, such as from nuclear energy. Of course, Mr Cameron’s own flirtation with the Green movement may come back to haunt him.
The problem, as I see it, as that not only do we not have a genuine market for energy in this country as the current setup is heavily regulated. Even if the industry were freed from worrying about complying with Green restrictions on CO2 production, there is still not enough of a genuine market to ensure that supplies keep up with demand. To say this is an urgent issue for any incoming administration next year is an understatement.
A question that I have is there anything that can be done to generate electricity on a smaller scale. rather than on the model that has operated for decades? I mean, could a group of firms join up to pay for a small nuke station, for example? (I am assuming that the security issues to that will not be a barrier).
Here is a new blog on the issue by the politician, Greg Clark. Meanwhile, Christopher Booker is in fine form on the same topic here.
“Mock the Week tells me something about the British I would rather not know. It commands an audience of about three million. As I watched, it occurred to me that Britain may well have three million people who would happily go along with the mob if we ever had a government that incited violence against the vulnerable.”
Nick Cohen, who loathes the alleged “comedy” programme Mock The Week as much as I do. An interesting theme, that Cohen does not explore much after raising it, is how entertainment thugs such as Frank Boyle consider it now acceptable to be extremely unpleasant about the elderly, and why this might be. Now that so many groups of humans are considered politically off-limits for jokes, only the old are left, provided they are middle class and white. Cohen muses that this trend of being vile about the old might be a sort of pent-up frustration about the rising costs of paying for an elderly population. He may have a point. But Boyle should remember that he is going to be old one day. And by the time he is in his dotage, who will remember him?
Cohen evidently loathes Mr Boyle. I rather enjoyed this piece of invective:
“Boyle is the show’s strutting cock. A gaunt, aggressive, slit-eyed Scotsman with a neurotic determination to be heard first and always, he seems to have grasped that the critics will hail him as “edgy” if he courts the porn market.”
Dearie me. Oh for the days of Dave Allen, a real comedian who understood that making people laugh is not the same as drawing blood. Well, at least I now have Family Guy to look forward to later on. Right now, Britain does not produce many funny people, in my view, with the possible exception of the cast of The Fast Show. There is a seething sort of anger and thuggery too much in evidence. I struggle sometimes to wonder where it has all come from. Explanations?
There have been so many incidents that some have described as being the death blow to the current UK government that one wonders whether any single news event will finish this lot of creeps off. But for a glimpse at the sheer, wanton corruption and venality of this administration, the story of the various relationships between those involved in handing over a convicted mass murderer to Libya gives you some idea of the morality of this government. It is appropriate that the article was written by Andrew Neil, a proud Scot and Anglospherist who is justly appalled at the behaviour of both the UK and Scottish administrations.
And yet the capacity of such stories to shock, while it should not be underestimated, needs to be put into some sort of perspective. Let’s face it, governments of Left and Right, be they French, American or British, have sold weapons and munitions to often odious regimes in the past, or done commercial deals that don’t bear too much scrutiny. Remember the UK Matrix-Churchill “supergun” affair of the 1990s? Remember the 1986 Iran/Contra kerfuffle that marred the second Reagan term, or the recent issue of British defence firm BAE Systems and sales to the Saudi government? There has been a history of Western governments willing to set aside certain scruples in the name of exports.
The Libyan affair is a grubby business, to be sure. But there is, alas, nothing remotely surprising about how the various parties have behaved.
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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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