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.
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“How and by whom do you wish to be governed?”.
Such was the simple and sharp question posed to a mostly grey-haired audience of eurosceptics at a meeting of the UK’s Bruges Group in London this evening by noted thriller writer, journalist and former RAF pilot, Frederick Forsyth. Your humble correspondent turned up to a packed audience to hear about Forsyth’s and noted EU legal expert Martin Howe on the subject of a possible new Constitution for Europe. It made for alarming hearing.
While partly overshadowed by the recent war on terror and the Iraq campaign, a group of senior European politicians and bureaucrats have been working to set up the framework for a new European Constitution, which would effectively destroy the present EU member states as sovereign self governing nations. There can be no doubt about the outcome. The result would be an undemocratic, unaccountable monster.
Here are some of the comments by Forsyth which I particularly liked: “I always took the view (during the development of the EU) that there was something to come, some finality, some point to be reached. We have now reached the stage….a single European nation state.”
Martin Howe: “It (the constitution) will destroy the sovereignty which the UK parliament ultimately possesses.” Another: “It is very difficult to see how any democratic control can be exercised over the organs envisaged in this Constitution.”
Howe said that the draft of the treaty for a new Constitution should be ready by the late summer of this year and could be ratified by member states in about two years’ time. That is right – just two years.
My impressions: well the audience for the two men last night was packed and I would imagine that about 99 percent of those present agreed with more or less everything said by the speakers. I heard no dissenting voices there.
Where does the libertarian meta-context relate to all this? After all, the desire for Britain to remain a parliamentary self-governing democracy is not the same thing as being, say, a minarchist libertarian who wants to get the State off his back. However, I would say from a pragmatic point of view, we have more chance of pushing forward our libertarian ideas within the framework of a common political entity underpinned by a shared culture and history than in a multi-lingual, multi-national behemoth headed by bureaucratic institutions with very sluggish lines of accountability. Hence I support the Bruges Group folk, even though my nose my wrinkle in distaste at some of the more reactionary language employed by some of its members.
I don’t get much impression that the issue of the EU Constitution is grabbing a lot of attention in the mainstream British media, although some of the tabloid press (let’s not sneer at them) are beginning to get on to this. No doubt Prime Minister Tony Blair is betting that he can sleepwalk us into his European nirvana. Let’s not let him get away with it.
I detect a distinct air of despondency in the ranks of the libertarian camp in ever seeing any point in voting for, or co-opting with, right-of-centre parties such as the Conservatives in Britain (see David Carr’s remarks) or the Republican Party in the U.S. (see Jim Henley in similar vein).
I see no reason for being surprised. Even if you support Bush on the war, as I do, albeit while detesting the Patriot act and the Dept. of Homeland Security, what is there to like? The vast increase in the budget deficit is a real worry – and I say that as a supply sider, not as a ‘deficit hawk’ – we have had the steel tariffs, the Farm bill, etc. Okay, the first tax cut was better than nothing, but not as good as a cut to marginal tax rates across the board. Oh, Dubya did at least stiff the Kyoto Treaty. But while he is probably a tad better than the likely alternatives, his GOP makes an unlikely suitor for libertarians.
As for the Tories, I despair utterly of them being in a fit state for any outreach to us. With the sole and erratic exception of shadow Home Secretary Oliver Letwin, there is not a single top-ranking Tory MP I come across who seems to have a thorough grasp of the extent to which our civil as well as economic liberties have been crushed.
Which leaves us with the usual cul-de-sac of a possible new party. And I cannot see how that is going to work.
As a fan of the the sci-fi dystopian film thriller, The Matrix, I am looking forward to the sequel, due out next week in Britain. This report via CNN suggests the next instalment is sure to be a rip-roaring treat for high-tech movie fans like me.
Of course, part of the appeal of such films to many folk is the way they play on fears about the growth of Big Brother powers by the State, and also by corporations, many of which behave almost as if they were governments. Similarly, it helps explain the appeal of Stephen Spielberg’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story, Minority Report about a year ago.
…and, er, it appears that men and women will have, er, plenty to drool over in the next Matrix performance, judging by the publicity shots. Heh-heh.
Roll on May 15.
Rod Liddle in The Spectator was unimpressed by the BBC’s recent coverage of the British local municipal elections, saying that the BBC seemed determined to play down the Tory Party’s success in winning a lot of seats, and played down the losses suffered by Labour.
The BBC is biased? Noooooooooooo! Say it ain’t so, folks.
Today, it is May 1, the day when we celebrate the greatest thing to benefit the living standards, opportunities and happiness of ordinary working people – capitalism.
I could wax lyrical, cite lots of clever books and such like, but I thought this item, via Reuters, surely says it all.
Shares of the bordello enterprise, which hired Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss to spice up its stock listing and touts itself as a recession-proof, five-star hotel, doubled on their first day of trading on Thursday.
About 1.4 million shares of the company — called The Daily Planet — changed hands.
“Obviously the price is going to go up. It’s sex…and everyone knows sex is a smart investment,” Fleiss told reporters just before the shares started trading.
God bless capitalism!
I came across this article, via Jim Henley, and the piece does raise some uncomfortable – to put it mildly – questions about how advocates of the recent Iraq war should feel if it turns out that Bush and Blair told untruths (perish the thought) about the existence and scale of WMDs in Iraq.
If Bush, Powell and the Rest lied deliberately to us to boost the case for war, then that is baaaaaad news, in my view. For starters, pro-war folk like me who took the stance we did on proactive self defence will feel betrayed. We have been made to look like twerps. Yes, I know that you might argue that we should not have been so naive in the first place (ever trust a politician?), but the WMD threat seemed to be pretty genuine, if only because of what happened under Saddam’s rule these past two decades or more. And of course the onus was on him, not us, to comply with the terms laid down by United Nations weapons inspectors. He didn’t as even Hans Blix’s report made clear shortly before hostilities commenced. Even so, the feeling of betrayal will be immense if turns out that Bush and Blair seriously exaggerated the evidence.
Which may suggest that our whole approach to self defence needs a major rethink. It suggests to me that the CIA and other intelligence services in the west require a massive overhaul, if not outright abolition. I haven’t seen any examples in the media of such folk getting the sack. Far too many of them have been allowed to stay in their cushy jobs despite manifestly screwing up. If it turns out that they gave false info to gin up the case for war, that is very bad.
And in case any warbloggers’ blood pressure is rising dangerously about the above two paragraphs, no, I am of course thrilled we stiffed the Ba’ath regime in Iraq, but forgive me, that wasn’t the original reason why we committed blood and treasure to deal with Saddam.
Nice article in Wired on how playing video games is helping youngsters to think better, therby overcoming the obstacles put in their way by our dumbed-down education system. Hmm. Food for thought. Any, this screed by James Paul Gee perhaps suggests that homeschooling parents should ensure their children play certain types of game as a key element of the learning process. I must say I never thought that Doom or Grand Theft Auto as agents of learning, but the world is a strange place.
I liked this paragraph:
We don’t often think about videogames as relevant to education reform, but maybe we should. Game designers don’t often think of themselves as learning theorists. Maybe they should. Kids often say it doesn’t feel like learning when they’re gaming – they’re much too focused on playing. If kids were to say that about a science lesson, our country’s education problems would be solved.
In other words, all those kids out playing computer games are no cause for concern. They are our next Edisons, Feynmans and Bill Gateses.
Okay, enough about Iraq. Something even more unpleasant – the sheer din experienced these days while shopping. I am not talking about the noise caused by the clack of shoes on a floor, or the natural bustle of a busy marketplace. This is all part of the deal and can often create a buzz which is almost pleasant. No – and I sense this is my old age creeping in – what gets on my nerves is the loud pop music din which seems to be a standard feature of shops these days.
Example. At lunchtime today your humble scribe went to a shop in central London to get a new mobile phone. Okay, the staff were no more surly, badly dressed or inarticulate than most, but that was not the problem. The problem was that it was if I had strayed into a particularly bad nightclub by mistake. I could hardly hear myself think as I went through the options of a mobile phone deal. Craziness.
My grouches besides, what motivates the owners of shops to blast out music like this? Is there some philosophy which has worked through the shopping world in the UK – I cannot vouch for other nations – which says that the more loud music we have, the more we will buy? I don’t honestly know about that, but for me, the sheer loudness of some of the music played these days often encourages me to leave a building as soon as possible. I guess I am not the only person to feel this way. Maybe some shrewd shopping entrepreneur could steal a march on his rivals by setting up calm, music-free shops.
If anyone reading this actually works in the retail business and can explain the current fashion for piping loud music in shops, your comments would be most welcome.
The Christian Science Monitor, which is not exactly a regular read for yours truly, says it has further documents alleging that Labour MP and all-round jackass George Galloway was on the take from the late unlamented Iraqi regime. Well – we shall see.
A point strikes me – is a man’s views about certain issues automatically more suspect if he has been receiving cash payments? It is sometimes claimed, for example by anti-smoking fanatics, that the views of libertarians on the smoking issue are invalid if they have, for example, been working for a big tobacco firm like BAT or Philip Morris. But surely we need to focus on the validity of the views themselves, and not whether they were given by people receiving money.
Ultimately, whether Galloway did or did not receive payments will not substantially alter my views of him. Even if he had not received a single penny from Saddam, I still regard Galloway as a vile individual for his shameless defence of Saddam’s regime over many years. In some ways, if he held his views for free and was truly sincere, it almost makes it worse.
Well, the hunt is still on for possible instruments of Mass Death in Iraq, and so far, from what I have seen and read, not a great deal has yet been found.
Should advocates of military action to deal with this possible menace like yours truly be now eating vast amounts of humble pie, agree that non-interventionists like Jim Henley were correct all along? Well, not quite.
For starters, it hardly needs to be pointed out that one cannot fight or not fight wars on the basis of 20/20 hindsight. Nothing that Saddam did over the past 12 years, including his devious treatment of UN weapons inspectors, led one to think that simply keeping Hans Blix and co in situ for another year or so would suffice. And I think that Saddam’s past record, such as his gassing of Iraqi villagers, made me doubt he was either deterrable or that he could be made to bend to the will of the arms inspectors.
However (gulp) I am beginning to detect among some pro-war types a clear shift in their stance. We have, so it appears, shifted from the “war is justified to rid Iraq of WMDs and then getting to terrorists” stance to a “Let’s bring peace and democracy to Iraq”. The first stance can be clearly based on self defence, which as a libertarian I have no quarrel with, though interpretation is the hard part. The latter stance, though, however idealistic and admirable as an ideal, smacks of hubristic social engineering.
The folk at the U.S. techie magazine Wired have been celebrating 10 years of existence. On the whole I have enjoyed reading that publication, notwithstanding its occasional teenage-like cockiness, obsession with fashion and suchlike. On the whole I regard their particular northern Californian brand of breezy optimism to be a tonic compared to a lot of doom and gloom stuff that comes our way. They are also consistent defenders of privacy and exude a pretty strong libertarian cultural vibe, though many of their authors could not be classed as out and out libertarians.
In the April edition, Wired got two authors, Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall to write about the need for the U.S. government to launch a $100 billion venture on getting the country linked up to hydrogen power in order to wean Americans off their addiction to oil. A lot of reasons are given, many of them pretty obvious, such as reducing reliance on oil from the instable Middle East and reducing carbon dioxide emissions because of the so-called Greenhouse effect.
Their article contains a lot of impressive facts and figures as well as calls to embark on a hydrogen project with the same fervour that JFK asked Americans to put a man on the Moon. But that is my problem with this article, as it applies just as much to Britain as it does to the U.S.A. Surely, do we really want vast amounts of taxpayers’ money spent encouraging big energy firms to move into this technology, when that is bound to provide endless opportunities for pork-barrel politics, and the like? And while it was a magnificent achievement, putting men on the Moon came at a vast cost and the bloated bureacracy of NASA is surely a warning of what can happen with such projects, as Rand Simberg has pointed out many times before.
Ultimately, if the price of oil rises to a level which means sharp entrepreneurs think hydrogen-powered energy solutions make sense, it will happen. After all, the oil industry got started in the late 19th century without a vast government-led project. The best thing governments can do in this area is like pretty much everywhere else – GET OUT OF THE GODDAM WAY!
The recent war in Iraq has of course thrown up many examples of actors and actresses, many of them from Hollywood, who have taken a stand against war. What is interesting is that there appears, according to David Skinner in the Weekly Standard to be a divide in public life between the acting and sports communities, if one can use such a collectivist catch-all term like “community” (yes, I am aware there are nuances here). For example, while “documentary” producer and all-round blowhard leftist (I refuse to be polite) Michael Moore denounces Bush and the war, golfing god Tiger Woods (one of my heroes) takes a diametrically opposite stance, saluting the bravery of American soldiers on his personal website.
What is going on here? For example, I don’t really know what British sportsmen and women like Manchester United’s David Beckham or English cricket captain Nasser Hussein think about such things, although Hussein’s recent decision not to play against Zimbabwe during the World Cup attests to a moral fibre not usually seen among the thespian community. And I admired the fact that Beckham, apparently, asked for the Stars and Stripes to be laid in the mddle of Old Trafford, Manchester United’s home ground, at the start of a match just after 9/11. Skinner reckons that sportsfolk, unlike actors and actresses, have to deal in reality of a sort that makes them better suited to taking a view on issues like war.
I particularly liked this paragraph:
As competitors who directly face opponents, athletes may have less trouble accepting the probability of enmity between nations. They become famous over the strenuous opposition of other people. Their professional lives are in fact defined by antagonism and opposition. They have to individually dominate other players, and help their teams dominate other teams.
While with actors, he says:
when show-business types triumph, victory comes on a wave of public admiration that can make it seem like they were just elected the public’s favorite human being. If competition is the watchword of sports, adoration and acclaim are the watchwords of show business. This kind of career makes for a weak political education as one grapples to understand why a president would take actions certain to make him unpopular in important parts of Europe and elsewhere.
I think he is definitely on to something. Maybe libertarians should forget about ever trying to network in the artistic community and get on the golf course instead.
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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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