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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The Iraqi Minister of Information, whose ability to defy reality has made him something of a cult figure in the West, has had a website dedicated to his pronouncements which is already drawing massive numbers of hits.
His ability to work for a doomed cause and show fortitude in the midst of great strain is already triggering commentators to wonder about where his talents may be most usefully employed in future. Here are some of my suggestions:
- Manager of Sunderland Football Club (with apologies to Iain Murray)
- Tory Party campaign manager (no explanation really required)
- The manager of George Galloway’s campaign to be known as a great British patriot
- Tony Blair’s humility counsellor
- Spin doctor for the Democrat’s presidential candidate (that’s my top choice)
- George W. Bush’s elocution coach (sorry Dubya, I could not resist)
- Robert Fisk’s psychiatrist (a tough assignment, admittedly)
- Michael Moore’s obesity counsellor (another tough one)
- Chief coach to the English cricket team
And finally,
- Management consultant to the BBC’s news service.
The estimable Stephen Pollard writes that the sheer shamelessness of parts of the anti-war crowd means they are unlikely to learn a good lesson from the fall of Saddam’s regime. Hence we (by which I assume he means pro-war types) should be prepared to get nasty against our opponents, launching personal attacks, emplying savage ridicule, and the like.
This is mighty tempting, but it causes me problems. Yes, taking the p**s out of thugs like Michael Moore, Ted Rall or the latest Hollywood lame-brain is good fun and occasionally worth the effort, but I am not sure that simply using the very same tactics used by our opponents (such as character assassination, etc) is really going to work. Others may disagree (please comment below) but I think that part of the reason why our libertarian meme is spreading is because of clear-cut events like the collapse of the Berlin Wall, globalisation, etc, as well as decades of hard intellectual slog by folk with weird surnames like von Mises or Rand. I also think that being decent human beings actually helps, although by “decent” I certainly don’t mean we should be meek or not jump to anger in the face of obvious idiocy.
I must admit – and I share the frustration of Perry de Havilland, Stephen Pollard and others – to being annoyed by the moral and intellectual bankruptcy and sheer brass neck of those who even now decry what the Americans and British forces have achieved in Iraq. But I am keeping my cool (well most of the time!). We are better than our opponents, and I suspect, deep down, they know it.
And I also think it worth pointing out that although many of those who opposed the military campaign in Iraq are motivated by hatred of the West and its freedoms, many inside the libertarian parish had doubts or opposed it outright for good and honorable reasons (fears about civil liberties, public spending, deaths of innocent civilians, etc). Let’s not forget that.
I attended a conference on business ethics today. Interesting experience. The world’s big investment houses, like the U.S. giant pension fund Calpers, are increasingly using their muscle to force firms to stop certain activities which they deem wrong – such as using child labour or wrecking the environment – and do more in other areas, such as cleaning up their accounting standards.
This is a big and growing area of business reporting and activity. I have mixed views about all this. On the one hand, I question some of the arguments used by folk to decry certain businesses as unethical, such as those which use child labour, for instance. If a shoe manufacturer hires 13-year-olds in Malaysia, for example, we rise up in horror. But the question that should be asked is, what else would these youngsters be doing if no such jobs existed? Would they be in school? In fact, when investors boycott firms which employ such youngsters, they may unwittingly be making life worse, not better.
Yet clearly, if people feel strongly about certain issues, such as preserving wetlands, avoiding pollution or boycotting the arms trade, for instance, there is nothing wrong at all in them using their economic power to do so. So long as they do not at the same time demand government coercion, one can have no complaints.
In fact, using the forces of the market to bring about outcomes which we favour is surely a good way for us gung-ho capitalists to show those often traditionally hostile to capitalism about how the market can be a force for good. A useful meme to spread, I’d have thought.
A lot of focus on corporate behaviour, of course, centres on how to avoid repeats of the collapse of firms like Enron and WorldCom. Avoiding fraud is, as several speakers at today’s conference suggested, incredibly difficult. What is clear, however, is that in today’s increasingly service-orientated economy, one of the most valuable things a firm has is its reputation. Reputations take a long time to build but can be destroyed in days. Take the collapse of accountancy giant Arthur Anderson, which fell soon after its involvement with Enron’s accounting scams was disclosed.
And this surely rams home another good meme from the libertarian side – if you want to pursue self interest and achieve wealth, then being ethical about it is not a luxury which only the rich can afford – it is a brute necessity.
Maybe we all need the occasional Enron event to remind us of that fact.
A Reuters journalist Taras Protsyuk from Ukraine, has been killed and three Reuters colleagues injured after a shell from a U.S. tank hit the media hotel where they were working. A Spanish journalist for a seperate news organisation was also hurt, Reuters reports.
The rollcall of good and experienced reporters for organisations like ITN, Channel Four, Reuters, the Atlantic Monthly and others is long and depressing. Yes, I know these folk had a choice to work in dangerous places, but it doesn’t make their deaths any less sad. May these fine news gatherers rest in peace.
Last night the British television channel, Channel 4, gave us another superb documentary history programme with a great twist – the story of the Dambuster raid on the German dams in WW2. It relayed the story of how Wing Cmdr Guy Gibson (a mere 24 years old) led a squadron of Avro Lancasters to smash two dams using the famous “bouncing bomb”.
The programme makers got a group of present-day serving RAF aircrew, including two women, who work in the very different airforce of today, to try to repeat the feat of Guy Gibson’s men, using a flight simulator and a real-live Lancaster. These modern flyers are used to state-of-the-art navigation technology rather than the old pencil, map and compass techniques that had to be used back in the 1940s, when radar-based techniques were in their relative infancy.
It made for compulsive viewing. And one thought stuck in my head. Most of the flyers are about on average 10 years younger than me (I am 36). Gibson, as noted above, was just 24. I don’t think – as the Iraq campaign demonstrates – that the best of our young folk today are any less capable of performing heroic and dangerous feats than our forbears. And while I would prefer to see such talents used for peaceful purposes like entrepreneurship rather than flying a bomber, I think recent events bode rather well for our future.
That’s something to remember when London gets infested with the usual rag-bag of anti-globalistas and Saddam mourners on May 1.
Reports coming in on the wires that about 2,500 Republican Guards have surrendered to American forces, while other US forces are closing in on Baghdad. Interesting to see that gold and oil prices are skidding down while stock markets are chugging higher.
Amazingly volatile state of the financial markets. My prediction – if this war really looks to be won, expect the Dow to hit 9,000 by Labor Day.
Meanwhile, shares in Robert Fisk plc are suspended, pending Chapter 11.
Next week we are due for the annual ritual of watching the British government’s finance minister (Chancellor of the Exchequer) tell us how far he intends to stick his fingers into our wallets. No doubt funding the cost of military campaigns in the Middle East will provide a convenient excuse, although I would guess that Gordon Brown’s huge public spending increases on health and education have more to do with it. Remember he made such increases against a backdrop of crumbling stock markets.
A good article in the British weekly, The Spectator, lays out the lunacy of where public finances are currently headed.
And an article at Reuters suggests that owners of property can expect another kick in the shins from Labour.
Some nice things have been said about Premier Tony Blair in recent weeks from the right-wing side of the political tracks due to his hard-edged realism about dealing with Saddam. We all knew it could come at a cost in blood and treasure. But on pretty much everything else, this government, like 99 percent of them, remains a menace to liberty and property.
Of course, non-interventionist libertarians would say that war is the health of the state and therefore advocates of military action vs Iraq like yours truly can have no complaints about the size of my tax bill. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Domestic spending, much of which is wasted, dwarfs UK spending on the military as a proportion of the total budget.
Longer term, of course, any overhaul of public spending (ie, a stonking big cut) must include a willingness to look at private sector options in providing for our defence, including use of mercenaries, even. I’d be very interested in what readers have to say on the latter point. I’d guess even opponents of the current war might want to say how minarchists or even anarcho-capitalists should look at how military forces should be paid for.
I have been taking a break from blogging, writing about Iraq and All That this past week in exchange for a much more enjoyable time working for a sailing examination off the south coast of the UK. But a few incidents and conversations with my fellow yachties got me thinking about some connections to this wonderful pastime and political stuff.
For starters, many nautical enthusiasts like me get into sailing because it embodies a form of freedom. For sure, there are thousands of complex rules operating at sea, many of which have accumulated like barnacles on the underside of a ship over the centuries, rather like the evolution of the rule of the English common law. And while they appear to be initially baffling, the rules of the High Seas make sense and actually liberate those who follow them. (Rules such as avoiding collisions and the use of navigation beacons, etc.)
Beyond such rules, what I like about sailing is that you have to obey and respect nature to master it. You are reliant on your own skills and knowledge and the voluntary co-operation of others in the same vessel. A skipper of a boat has and requires authority to operate a boat efficiently, but he or she cannot compel folk to be on the same boat in the first place.
Drawing big cultural implications out of all this has its limits, of course, but I cannot help feeling that those cultures most infected with the spirit of liberty have strong seafaring traditions. Sailing over long distances requires a natural spirit of enterprise. It requires skills and knowledge not best acquired at the point of a gun. It encourages the spread of language, particularly flexible languages like English. And seafaring folk have, in my experience, a robust, independent attitude towards life which sits well with the liberal outlook.
I spent a fair amount of money, not to mention a lot of energy, getting my sailing qualification ticket. I feel mighty pleased to know that I can now charter out a yacht in any part of the world’s oceans. That’s freedom.
A quick detour from the war – I came across this fine new blog under the intriguing name Banana Oil (eeerrr, right!) while flitting around the Web. Excellent blog put together by film nut and anti-idiotarian Ian Michael Hamet. Give it a look. His latest post starts with this sentence:
Some things just honk me off. People who refuse to admit reality are one of them.
My god that is so true.
He then goes on to deconstruct the odious Michael Moore, who sadly, could pick up an Oscar from those luvvie airheads in a few days’ time.
Polly Toynbee, doyenne of the transnational progressive movement and all-round-leftist prig, is shocked, shocked! that Tony Blair’s forthright denunciation of France’s perfidy over Iraq is damaging our prospects of getting deeper into bed with the Eurofederalists…
Once again <drums roll!> – excellent! Let’s hope that a woman who is so consistently wrong is actually correct on this one!
Here in my office, the early stages of the war in Iraq are accompanied by a sort of low, whining tone of complaint from colleagues seated all around. Some are actually joking about Saddam’s taunts at Bush. What big men and women they are.
I have tried in my own mind to figure out what goes on inside the heads of supposedly intelligent people – folk with university degrees, who can produce work of great skill and complexity, but who, on this terrible issue of the day have the moral intelligence of total imbeciles. A sort of collective death wish seems to have gripped whole swathes of the smarter elements in our population. I am not just talking about the usual assholes on the far Left, mind you. Let’s not forget the head-in-the-sand isolationists with whom we occasionally mix in the libertarian parish. Not to mention the Pat Buchanan-style wackjobs either.
When this whole dreadful period in our history is over, and I hope really soon, I would like to renew my request to the anti-war folk who I would broadly classify as libertarian as to what they would actually do when confronted with terror and state sponsors of terror. And let’s have answers instead of the usual “we had it coming in the past so in future we should keep our heads down” evasions.
As the decibel count rises amid the drumbeat of war, we try to do what we can to see the cheery side of things. These are grim times, but my fervent hope is that in a few decades, Baghdad will be the Hong Kong of the Middle East, al-Quaeda and Saddam will be a distant memory, Iraq will be one of the richest countries on the planet, Jacques Chirac will have been put behind bars, the EU will be just a free trade zone and Samizdata will have more readers than Fox, CNN and the BBC combined.
But what has really fired my determination to be optimistic is the report, in today’s Financial Times (only available in print edition), that quintessential British media megastar Basil Brush, emblem of all that is finest about this island, is to release a pop record. Magnificent.
(Apologies to non-Brit readers. The last paragraph will be totally meaningless).
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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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