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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Some of those opposed to the military ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime, such as libertarian isolationists like Jim Henley, for instance, have repeatedly maintained that there was little or no regular and operational contact between the unlamented dictator and operatives of al-Qaeda and other radical islamist forces. The lack of a clear link remains a central plank of opposition to George W. Bush’s doctrine of going after regimes which sponsor terror. At most, such critics contend that the Iraq links were no more than low-level and no justification for military action. Of course, much of the evidence for a link prior to 9/11 was circumstantial at best.
Well, if it were the case that no link existed, why did the statement purporting to be from al-Qaeda after the Madrid atrocities make such a big deal of Spain’s involvement in the Iraq liberation, when, according to the naysayers, Iraq had nothing to do with al-Qaeda? In fact, the Islamo-fascists seem more convinced of a common cause with the fate of Saddam and his regime than antiwar types seem to do. Curious.
Of course, it may be that the islamists are opportunists, perceiving that anything that can sow discord between European nations and between Europe and the US is a good thing. It may also be the case that the islamists believe that any incursion by western, secular forces into a region they deem off-limits is a dishonour to them, and hence justification for retaliation. They obviously do not extend their islamic embrace to Shiite muslims, whom they have massacred in the hundreds.
Even so, the very fact that the Iraq and Afghan operations were mentioned as ‘justifications’ for the Madrid massacres ought to give pause to those who claim that those countries’ regimes had had no direct connection to islamist forces. Ousting the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were two major blows against fundamentalist terror. The terrorists know this better than anyone, which is why the message coming out of Spanish politics today is so troubling.
One of my favourite films, which I watched again last night on my DVD machine, is The Right Stuff. It superbly captures the era spanning the end of the Second World War and the mid-1960s, when test pilots like Chuck Yeager and astronauts like wisecrackin’ Alan Shepherd put their “hides on the line” to test new limits of speed and height in the early parts of the space race. Among the many things that jumps out of this marvellous film, made about 20 years ago and based on the book of the same title by Tom Wolfe, is the almost blase treatment of risk.
Right at the start, when Yeager is testing the Bell X-1, he manages to hurt his ribs through a late-night horseriding incident (he was racing his missus from the pub, like one does in Nevada). Next morning, on the day in which he eventually becomes the first man to officially break the sound barrier, Yeager is in agony. He realises he cannot shut the door on the plane with his right arm because of his injury. So he gets a colleague to cut him a length of stick so he can slam down the door with his only useful arm.
That’s right. The world’s most celebrated test pilot hit Mach One using one functioning arm. Not the sort of thing a modern health and safety bureaucrat would approve of, I am sure.
International news agency Reuters reports that a van, containing Arabic language tapes and detonators, has been searched close to the scene of today’s mass murders in Spain. So far, the authorities have maintained that the atrocities were the handiwork of terror group ETA, but there could be a possibility that Islamo-fascists had a hand in this affair, possibly even to the point of directing the operations.
The truth is that no-one can be certain for sure, and we must be mindful about jumping to conclusions. But given Spain’s support for the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, and Spain’s proximity to north Africa, there is a serious possibility that Islamists may have played a part in this.
There is also the worrying thought that terror groups, who have come under growing pressure from law enforcement agencies and the military since 9/11, are becoming more desperate and hence willing to co-operate with those they would have previously ignored.
If true, it makes the sneering article by Simon Jenkins in today’s Spectator, in which he mocks Blair’s concerns over global terror networks and their access to WMDs, not only wrongheaded, but frivolous in the extreme. London, Paris, Berlin or Rome could be next. Nothing to worry about eh, Simple Simon?
A black day for Spain. My heart goes out to the people of that wonderful country.
The other day I came across this article during some random Web surfing, which contained a fairly familiar conservative hammering of what is loosely defined as the Baby Boomer Generation, that portion of the mostly Western population now on the verge of hitting the age of retirement.
In essentials, the argument runs like this: baby boomers are self-obsessed, adopted some mind-bindingly dumb (mostly left) political views; undermined respect for any kind of authority; addled their brains with drugs during the infamous Sixties and now expect we younger folk to shoulder the burgeoning cost of keeping them in retirement. Blah, bloody blah-blah.
Yes, you may have guessed it – this writer (born in that greatest of years, 1966, about a month before England won the soccer World Cup) is not entirely sold on the conservative critique, even though I share some distaste at the dumb political and cultural stances that were taken by said generation. But one thing which I frequently note is this – the BB generation is often attacked for being self-interested and focussed on acquiring self-esteem. But wait a minute. As a libertarian and unashamed individualist, I have to ask: what is wrong with wishing to improve one’s life, exactly? After all, one of the most widely books in that stiff-necked era, that of the Victorians, was Samuel Smiles’ hymn to self-improvement.
Surely, anyone who believes their life is their own, and not that of the State, Volk, proletariat, God, Allah, or the Great Green whatever, will embrace the notion of self-improvement. After all, much of the libertarian movement we know today, with all its different strains, acquired a considerable amount of energy during the 1950s and 60s. David Friedman, for example, who is the son of Milton Friedman and a leading exponent of anarcho-capitalism, might be regarded as a baby boomer. A good number of those who were inspired by the ideas of author and philosopher Ayn Rand were baby boomers. The Libertarian Alliance’s own director, Dr Chris R. Tame, and LA editorial boss and Samizdata.net scribe, Brian Micklethwait, were of the boomer generation.
To put it another way, let us avoid the groupthink mentality that would bracket a whole generation under one heading. The BB generation contain a fair share of boobies, charlatans and fools. It also contains folk I greatly admire and am proud to call my friends.
Blogger and libertarian authoress Virginia Postrel, in her recent book, The Future and Its Enemies, made a telling point that having fun and free enterprise are increasingly being fused in the same activities.
She cited the example of sports like professional beach volleyball. Now, there are few activities which might excite the moral scorn of the miserablists of the left and right more than a group of young men and women (the latter in rather fetching garb, ahem) punching a ball to and fro over a net. Well, if the idea of volleyball as part of an enterprise culture offends the scolds in our midst, then how about skiing?
I have recently had my annual fix of shooting down ski slopes in the French resort of Val D’Isere, a magnificent resort . I enjoyed a fantastic week. There are few adrenalin-boosting activities to match it, in my view. And putting aside the obvious points about this activity, one thing struck me – skiing is a classic part of a capitalist, fun-loving, life-affirming culture.
Skiing is ‘pointless’ to those who think we should devote our energies to ‘higher’ activities, or who think that all those resources spent on ski lifts, skis, hotels and airliners should be diverted to other, worthier goals. Skiing is a vast industry these days. Unlike spectator sports such as football or cricket, skiing is 99 percent participant sport. Millions of people of all ages – mostly being relatively fit – go skiing in places all over the world every year.
Many of the people who work in ski resorts – guides, holiday reps, lift attendants, bar staff and so forth – all seem to form part of a new culture remarkably similar to the sort of laid-back surfing culture made legendary in southern California. While affecting a sort of casual demeanor, most of the people seem in deadly earnest about ensuring they serve the skiers well. A lot of the holiday staff, many of whom have taken big salary cuts to go to the mountains, seem to speak a sort of ‘leisure industry slang’, a sort of hybrid of Australian ‘matespeak’, Californian ‘coolspeak’, and in France of course, overlain with that Galoise-smoking sang froid of the expert skiier with his nonchalant posture.
Skiing is a major triumph of capitalist organisation and enterprise. And even in the French Alps, in the homeland of the 35-hour week and dreaded bureaucracy, it seems one of the most successful businesses in France. In fact, I got the impression that many staff in the French ski businesses have to work for far longer than is permitted under the nation’s job-destroying regulations.
And as a final observation, skiing is risky. Good grief, allowing folk to go down a slope without a State licence – are we mad?
Like many people, I recently thoroughly enjoyed that rather silly movie romp, Pirates of the Caribbean, full of English toffs in redcoats, ghostly pirates with bad teeth, not to mention luscious wenches relying on the dubious chivalry and charm of Johnny Depp. However, lest we think piracy belongs to the era of men in wigs with parrots on their shoulders, I have news to report.
Seaborne piracy is rising fast in many parts of the world. It is particularly virulent in parts of Southeast Asia, for example in and around the coastlands of the vast stretch of islands making up Indonesia. Today’s Caribbean and the Indian Ocean are also dangerous. A while back, while I was spending a wonderful day ogling at unattainably expensive sailing yachts at the London International Boatshow, I grabbed hold of a book warning amateur sailors about the perils of being held to ransom by pirates in oceans all over the world. At the very least, you would be nuts to embark on a long passage without carrying at least two workeable firearms.
But as the report I link to makes clear, there is increasingly an ideological slant to modern piracy. In Indonesia, it appears that Islamic militants, like terrorists the world over, are mixing their religious fervour with the juicy temptations of crime.
I am frankly surprised that there has not been more written on how easy it would be for a terrorist group to get hold of even a small sized motor boat, fill it chockfull of explosives, sail it up the Thames, the Rhine or any other major river you can think of, and blow it up. As an aside, I continue to be amazed at how relatively easy it is to sail into a marina without necessarily having to immediately declare any ID. On a recent trip to France by yacht I never once was required to show so much as a passport.
Whatever happened to the phrase, which I believe was coined about a year ago by his überblogger highness, Glenn Reynolds, “A pack, not a herd” following his pointer to a Jonathan Rauch article?
If you recall, Reynolds attempted to show how the idea that there is a negative tradeoff between liberty and security is based on an error and that free societies, because they let citizens be vigilant as well as rationally self interested, are typically safer against threats than those in which folk assume the State will see to every issue.
What is so clever about Reynolds’ argument is that it means that opponents of Big Government measures to make us ‘safer’, for by example, crackdowns on various civil liberites, can instead point to positive examples of people figuring out problems without the need for endless government programmes.
I think that coming up with lots of positive examples of how individual men and women have worked voluntarily with others to fix problems normally felt to the province of the State can do more to advance the cause of liberty than a library of classical liberal tracts.
And if there is a supreme British example of voluntarism, heroism and the advantages of encouraging a “can do” philosophy in our lives, it is surely that favourite of libertarians, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI).
And the depressing question which arises for me is, if the RNLI were being contemplated now rather than in its time of birth in 19th Century Britain, would the health and safety bureaucrats try to kill it at birth?
Dear readers, you are ahead of me on that one.
Well, lovers out there, St. Valentine’s Day is rapidly approaching. For those in the mood I heartily recommend the new CD by that wonderful young diva, Norah Jones, who’s debut album has already sold a reported 17 million copies worldwide.
Ms Jones’s success and background got me thinking on an important cultural point. We are led to believe, for example, that globalisation will lead to the extinction of local, unique cultures and the replacement of a sort of mushy global soup. And yet as the writer Tyler Cowen showed in a recent excellent book on the cultural riches possible via globalisation, the growing mix of different cultures possible on today’s world is making possible new directions in areas like music and art. Norah Jones, with her mixed ethnic background and her fusion of country and western, blues and soul music styles, is a living embodiment of what Cowen means.
And she is certainly rather easy on the eye, in case you wondered.
Update: The new album, “Feels Like Home”, which has a more overtly country feel, is excellent, in my view.
I have just been working my through a collection of essays by the noted British writer, Theodore Dalrymple, (that is not his real name, from what I can guess), who has spent much of his professional life dealing with muggers, burglars, murderers, drug addicts, the homeless, the variously abused, and other inhabitants of that twilight zone we might generalise as “the underclass”. It is a great book, full of harrowing detail, often illuminated by mordant wit and unintended humour.
Dalrymple could, I think, be fairly characterised as a social conservative. That a Britain full of grammar schools, nuclear families and draconian punishments for infractions of the law is his desired state of affairs cannot be in doubt. He subscribes to the view, unless I have misread him, that the social reforms of the 1960s, while perhaps containing some good elements, were taken as a whole a social catastrophe for the working class. But were they? Do we really want, for example, to a return to when homosexuality was a criminal offence? And has some of the loosening of old social taboos been quite the disaster he claims? I am not so sure.
Some of his targets – such as state welfare and education systems – deserve all the muck he heaps on them. But I have problems with the relentlessly gloomy tone of the publication, and this goes, I think, for a lot of commentary one gets to see from the conservative side of the cultural spectrum these days. Apart from the usual hints that we should go back to some sort of social order resembling the 1950s of myth and memory, there is very little in the way to any positive solutions to the ills on display.
What struck me about Dalrymple’s book is how different he is from our Victorian forbears. As well as setting out the problem, the generation that brought us the gospel of “self improvement” looked at the ugliness around them and said, more or less, that “it doesn’t have to be like this”. And they acted.
And it doesn’t have to be like this. We have seen, in New York for example, a dramatic fall in violent crime, due to a determined effort at proper policing.
And in that, I think, lies the point that the United States, unlike Britain, has not yet given up. If we are to deal with some of the issues Dalrymple mentions, it will not be enough merely to point out the ugliness around us from the elegant citadels of the Daily Telegraph’s editorial offices. We will need to sketch out how we get to a better place. For if we don’t, then Dalrymple will become nothing better than a very articulate bore.
In our ceaseless quest to track down fine examples of modern capitalism, I lift my hat and salute blogger Andrew David Chamberlain , who has recently returned to blogging after a haitus, for pointing out a stupendous example of modern factory design in Dresden, Germany. The new Volkswagen plant is amazing, and if you follow the Car & Driver site he links to, you can see just how far things have come.
At one stage, car factories, like factories generally, were grim, smoky and frankly ugly buildings. We all know the images from old school textbooks about the Industrial Revolution, with rows of workers grinding away in massive structures belching out smoke. (Of course the same textbooks were often written by historians hostile to free enterprise, such as R.H. Tawney and Stalinist apologist Eric Hobsbawm but that is another topic on its own).
Well, for a variety of reasons, not least the massive rise in working condition standards, the quality of surroundings in a modern manufacturing plant has moved a light-year away from the Dark Satanic Mill cliched image of old.
I find it rather amusing that Germany, not a country which gets the credit it perhaps deserves for its futuristic design skills, should have come up with this terrific building. And of course the building also prompts thoughts about how styling of buildings, even supposedly very utilitarian ones like a car plant, is now a perfectly normal feature of life, as libertarian writer Virginia Postrel has already pointed out in her recently published book, The Substance of Style.
A leading British police officer has argued that heroin should be legalised, according to this report.
To which I can only say – wow! Of course, the usual suspects in the political world and media will throw up their arms in horror, demand this officer’s resignation and so forth. But to those of us ‘loony libbos’ who have been arguing about the utter futility of the war on drugs for years and pointed out how it has massively boosted organised crime will be pleased that someone from the Boys in Blue has had the moral courage to make this point.
Let me say straight off that I recognise that this is not a straightforward issue. Some who are sympathetic to the legalisation argument will nevertheless argue that our society has been so infantilised by the modern welfare state that it would be dangerous in the extreme to legalise what are seen as the most harmful drugs without at the same time making important social reforms. There is no doubt in my mind that if heroin were legalised straight away with no other parallel changes, a lot of vulnerable people could die. Any reform of public policy has to take that into account.
But for far too long any discussion of drug policy has occured in a sort of fairy-tale land, in which a whole area of debate has been shut down in advance. I find it a sign of the times that it is now even thinkable for a senior police officer to broach the subject of legalisaing heroin in public. Ten years ago it would have been unimaginable. By the standards of British public life, that is progress.
One of Australia’s greatest golfers, Greg Norman, is among a number of male golfers who want to limit, if not resist completely, the number of women golfers playing men in top-class tournaments.
Straight off, before the equal opportunities industry kicks into gear, we should remember that however dumb and sexist many golfers are said to be (or in some cases, actually are), golf clubs are, by and large, private associations. If women are annoyed at missing out on playing golf against the best, then by all means let golf clubs be opened which cater for both sexes, but we should also resist all attempts to ban the right of clubs, however fuddy-duddy, to set their own rules.
Also, a point for Norman and his ilk to recall is this – the handicapping system. So long as the golf handicap of a man is treating equally – on a par (heh) with that of a woman, then why are the guys getting upset? After all, if you have to be a scratch golfer to make the cut at the Masters, say, then if women really aren’t good enough to play, then the handicapping system in play will expose this rather quickly.
In truth, I suspect that Norman and his fellows probably fear that women are getting better at the game and will give them a serious run for their money.
But like I said, this issue is strictly for the clubs, the members, and the paying customer. Message to government – stay out of it.
Right, time I went to the driving range.
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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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