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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Here is a telling quote from a recent Observer article about violence between (South) Asian and Somali schoolchildren in Birmingham:
‘This issue arises because it is a high density area,’ said Farrukh Haroon, a project worker at the YIP. ‘Communities are scrapping for scarce resources …’
Here is another:
‘It is complicated – there is not one pattern, not one trend and not one answer,’ said Simon Blake from the National Children’s Bureau. ‘But we have to bust these myths about who gets the best housing and how resources are allocated.’
Sorry, Mr Blake, but myths with a core of truth are hard to kill. Communities will always “scrap” for government resources because they are correct in their belief that if group A gets more of the pie then group B gets less. Scrapping, with or without bricks and broken bottles, is an excellent way to get more pie. Nor is it wise to hope for a day when resources are no longer scarce; in most of the country the economy is more sovietised than many countries that not so long ago were actually part of the Soviet bloc. If you will forgive an earthy metaphor, an economy based on drinking one’s own urine can only go on so long.
Laban Tall, commenting on the same article, congratulates the Observer for having finally discovered that not all racism is white on black. I am a good deal more optimistic than he that multi-racial – and even, to some extent, multi-cultural societies can be made to work. Just not where there is socialism.
God help us if the world ever becomes one multi-cultural society under socialism, as it looks as if it might. I forsee a future of low-level suppurating conflicts that never heal because the reason for their existence never goes away.
We have had a foretaste. A recent report that examined the causes of the riots in Burnley five years ago says that the government handing out “regeneration” money in the 1990s created rivalry and anger that helped create the conditions for the riots.
“Positive regeneration had an unintended side effect,” the report says. “Ironically, it contributed to social fragmentation by increasing neighbourhood rivalries …
You know what they say: first you screw up. Then you screw up again in the same way again to prove that it really was a screw-up first time round. You guessed it: Burnley’s problems in 2006 are to be dealt with by handing out regeneration money. But fear not!
Regeneration programmes now cover wider areas and are based on themes, rather than simple ward boundaries.
Themes. Assuredly these themes will make all well and no one will whisper that some communities are more thematically challenged than others and hence are getting more than their share.
However, never let it be said that government always screws up in the same way. Sometimes government screws up in new ways.
Elevate East Lancashire, one of the government’s nine housing market renewal pathfinders, is working – sometimes in the face of opposition from furious homeowners – to demolish inner Burnley’s too many terraces and provide sites for commercial builders to create new homes.
It does not say whether those “furious homeowners” are black, white or brown. It does not matter. Whatever colour their skins they will be embittered by having their homes taken from them for the greater good – the greater good of other people – and in a place blighted by regeneration it takes but the weight of the feather to tip the balance from general bitterness into racial bitterness.
Look, I have got a cold coming on. I do not really want to post about this. But, for the record (and because this is Samizdata, dammit! We may not be able to stop the passing of liberty but we of all people should toll the bell) David Irving should not be jailed. Historical opinions, however deluded and malevolent, should not be criminalised.
“The defence of a free society is the defence of its procedures, not its output.”
– Oliver Kamm
“They won’t publish cartoons, but they will run anything they can get out of Abu Ghraib. Both sets of images provoke Islamic anger; note how the media behaves when that anger is directed at them.”
– Tim Blair, referring to the Australian media – although the same could be said of the British, in contrast to those papers in Europe that have showed solidarity with their Danish colleagues.
The contributors and most of the commenters to this site actively defend the free speech rights of fanatics, bigots, blasphemers and pornographers. Where the shield wall falters, that is where we go to fight. I think we have the right to be proud of that.
But I wonder if even we do not still have our sacred cows – sacred cows that need to be slaughtered.
I am fully aware that the disclosure I am about to make may cause outrage even among people who think of themselves as absolutists when it comes to free speech. I must apologise in advance to Perry and the others who have extended me the hospitality of this site for what may seem to be an abuse of it. I realise that there are some people who may think that, having said in public what I am about to say, they can never associate with me again. Forgive me. I feel I have to say this. → Continue reading: The limits of free speech
“On sighting an elephant Selous would instantly remove his trousers as he found it easier to pursue them in his underpants.”
As one does.
The quote is from Tom Quinn, Shooting’s Strangest Days.
I often slag off the BBC, so let me praise them today. The BBC are banned from Zimbabwe. In the best traditions of journalism, back in August correspondent Justin Pearce went there anyway.
Following the mass evictions from and destruction of Harare’s squatter camps, hundreds of thousands have been sent to their “home” villages. Never mind that the evictees are city people who may not have seen the village since childhood, or at all. Naturally, they become paupers. The lot of those who do not have even that much of a home village is even worse. People whose parents or grandparents originally came from other African coutries have been left in limbo.
What in this sorry tale can count as a sign of hope, you ask? Only this: even soldiers and policemen go hungry says a more recent BBC report. When even those who take service under the tyrant cannot be sure of their next meal, one may hope the end is near.
Do not expect the good times to roll once Mugabe’s obsequies are done – or his noose is cut down. Chaos can be an ugly thing, and Zimbabwe’s political culture has been brutalised. But without Mugabe’s megalomaniac desire for tidiness, so typical of dictators, this campaign to sweep human beings aside as if they were rubbish will probably lapse.
I became very familiar with that phrase when participating in online debates about guns. It is an odd thing that many of the same people who make the argument that whatever might save one life must be done when advocating gun bans are so scornful of government efforts to give advice on self-protection in the event of disaster. Their scorn is based on the premise that having a supply of bottled water will avail you nothing in a nuclear explosion or catastrophic flood. All it will do, they say, is give you a false sense of security. That is quite true near Ground Zero, but the bottled water could easily make the difference between life and death for some people at the edge of the catastrophe. Why not put some by?
I do not often defend government efforts on anything, but pamphlets on basic precautions seem to me to be a great deal more useful than so much else they do. Cheap per life saved, too. Perhaps that is the problem. The mockers feel that the pamphlets are a substitute for whatever action (which usually means tax-funded government action) they would like to see taken. Could be, could indeed be, but if it saves just one life…
→ Continue reading: If it saves just one life…
I have been tipped off by Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber that he is taking issue with this post of mine. His post has the title you see above and can be found here. He writes:
The title, btw, is not meant to be a personal dig but rather a play on the title of Jerry Cohen’s book (see the post). Still, I think there’s a real question for you guys: granted, you think it would be wrong for the state to force you to do good, so why don’t you do it anyway, unforced?
I anticipate a range of answers to that one, including that the good I’m thinking of either (a) isn’t really good at all or (b) wouldn’t be achieved by the means I’m suggesting. But I’m saving responses for a later post.
Bertram says that I was not entitled to assume that the protestors are strict egalitarians or that they necessarily believe that the Third World is poor because they are rich and that money transfer is the way to correct that situation. He continues, “They may, of course, believe the true claims that some Third-World poverty is attributable to the action of wealthy nations and that money transfer can be part of a solution to that problem.”
I cannot resist saying that I am at least as entitled to my assumption that protestors at a protest agree with the rhetoric of the protest leaders as he is entitled to his assumption that libertarians do not do good unforced.
In his next paragraph he very neatly cites protectionist regimes such as the Common Agricultural Policy as an example of the action of wealthy nations that he correctly states I believe causes poverty. A little too neatly: if the protestors’ foremost demand was the abolition of the CAP then I might head up to Edinburgh myself, but it is not. Where they do make that demand at all, it comes way down the list after a lot of actively harmful demands such as that Third World governments make their own people pay more than we do for food and fridges. (Or “Third World countries have the right to protect their farmers and infant industries” as they quaintly put it.)
→ Continue reading: “If you’re a libertarian, how come you’re so mean?”
In Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose it says:
Of course, an egalitarian may protest that he is but a drop in the ocean, that he would be willing to redistribute the excess of his income over his concept of an equal income if everyone else were compelled to do the same. On one level this contention that compulsion would change matters is wrong – even if everyone else did the same, his specific contribution to the income of others would still be a drop in the ocean. His individual contribution would be just as large if he were the only contributor as if he were one of many. Indeed, it would be more valuable because he could target his contribution to go to the very worst off among those he regards as appropriate recipients.
I have a question for all the protestors planning to give up their time and money by going to Edinburgh for the G8 summit. Why is what you are doing better than just giving your spare money to the poor?
A very small silver lining to the very large dark cloud that overshadows these violent times is that the war on drugs – that is to say the “war” on a particular form of unhealthy behaviour – no longer gets the prestige it once did. I think someone is feeling left out.
Police have claimed new successes in the war on drugs in central Scotland.
Officers have swooped on nearly 20 homes in the Falkirk, Stirling and Clackmannanshire areas in the past week as part of Operation Overlord.
They called it Operation Overlord?
In today’s Times Daniel Finkelstein reminisces.
There used to be a free-market libertarian bookshop in Covent Garden. It sold pamphlets on things such as how to cut crime by giving criminals tradeable vouchers. Or you could buy a T-shirt with a Warhol-style print of Friedrich von Hayek. You should have gone while you still could. It has closed down now — supply exceeded demand.
Little does he know where a new supply can be found, bwa-ha-ha-ha….
What’s wrong with tradeable vouchers for criminals anyway? Works for Ankh-Morpork.
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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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