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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‘Les 4 Vérités’ is a French libertarian/economic liberal magazine published weekly with 10,000 subscribers in paper format and also available online. The title comes from the French expression: «dire ces quatre vérités à quelqu’un» (“to speak home truths to someone”), in this case to a complacently statist France. Archived editions (about a month old) are available free and one can subscribe (paper or pdf) for the first month free.
In the current issue: Various denunciations of Iraq; Guy Millère’s piece on ‘France’s Debt to America’ and a review of Pierre Kohler’s ‘L’imposture verte’ (the Green Scam): a scientist’s attack on the various eco-scares.
One of the two things I also like on the site are the cartoons – almost every French site seems to have a cracking cartoonist: this week’s has Saddam welcoming the arrival of puppets on strings saying “At last! The return of the useful idiots!”.
The other is the box which advertises the (street) demonstration of the week and offers two recommended web links. Plugged this week are a new current affairs site called ‘Choc-info’ and a pompously witty ‘libertarian bureaucrat’ with the outlandish name, even in French of Aristophane Triboulet.
I now have over 120 links for French libertarian groups, publications, blogs and online forums. ‘Les 4 Vérités’ may not have the most polished web site, but it provides the free market view unashamedly, in a country that needs it badly.
I have a message for all British cigarette smokers and for those thinking of taking up smoking: when you next pop down to the supermarket or your local tobacconist for a packet of smokes, why not try Richmond Superking Lights for excellent quality and flavour at a very competitive price.
You may also be interested to note that, since I am not making this recommendation in the course of a business, I have not broken the law:
“The government’s long-awaited Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act comes into effect on Friday 14 February.
The Act outlaws ads in magazines, newspapers and on billboards.
Like most other petty prohibitionist tyrranies this one has been foisted on us by Brussels. Inspired and enacted, I daresay, by people who think of themselves as the ‘great and the good’ and believe themselves to have been charged with the task of rescuing us from our own atavistic tendencies towards self-destruction.
I realise that I can do nothing to deflect them from their mission, but I can do my bit to help undermine them.
This is the first occasion upon which I have picked out a comment for further comment, as it were, but this comment from Natalie Solent sharply claimed my attention:
“Just possibly the miracle may have been helped along by the power of the blogosphere. Er, specifically, by me.”
The ‘miracle’ that Natalie is referring to is the appearance of a vigourously pro-gun essay by Professor Joyce Malcolm on the website of the BBC and which I have blogged about euphorically here.
The part that Natalie might well have played in this moment of glory is set out in greater detail on Biased BBC:
“Dare we at Biased BBC hope that we had some role in its appearance? It is possible! The BBC’s clutch of articles published on the subject last October were, in their utter failure to even consider why anyone might oppose gun control (other than through an idolatrous reverence for every word of the US constitution), a disgrace to the BBC Charter. I fisked them with all the brio I could muster, and quite a few blogs linked to the fisking. I then sent the url to Prof. Malcolm, whose e-mail address I found at the bottom of an article about British media perceptions of gun crime published about the same time. She was kind enough to reply, so we may have helped bring to her attention a specific and recent example of a point she has long made, that the British media ignore the case against gun control. On the BBC side of the equation, we do know by various small indications that the Beeb’s watchful eyes do occasionally fall upon this site, so perhaps someone was stung by the realisation that one significant strand of opinion had been very ill served.”
Well, perhaps Professor Malcolm had already decided to write her essay and perhaps the BBC had decided, in any event, to make some concession to the other side of the argument. But I prefer to think that Natalie’s efforts did not go unrewarded. It gives me a delicious frisson of satisfaction to think that maybe one of us Lilliputians tied down the broadcasting Gulliver if only for a brief while.
It also illustrates the importance of communicating ideas and weaving the gossamer fine networks between sane, intelligent people who, whilst still acting individually, can eventually set off an avalanche. From the BBC to Natalie to Joyce Malcolm and back to the BBC. Thanks to the net, those degrees of separation get smaller all the time.
Central London was the venue for another demonstration by the Countryside Alliance today, timed to co-incide with a parliamentary debate on the proposed regulation of fox-hunting.
“”We don’t want an unjust bill, which does not have the support of the community to which it applies and I think we are looking at a serious amount of trouble if that happens…”
Judging from the latest reports from the broadcast news, that ‘serious amount of trouble’ is upon us as some 1500-2000 countryside insurrectionists are locked in battles with police and traffic in and around Westminster has been brought to a standstill.
If, like me, you avidly devour everything this man ever writes, but get a little impatient trawling the blogosphere seeking out his hitherto-elusive brilliance, then get ready to be happy.
Mark Steyn now has has his own website!
Now that’s what I call progress.
[My thanks to Tim Blair for the link]
I have been alerted to the existance of a new website called Conservative Liberty.
For those of you who regard the words ‘Conservative’ and ‘Liberty’ as oxymoronic, I should add that it does appear to be genuinely ‘devoted to representing the under-represented voice of Libertarian Youth within the Conservative Party’, and is therefore worthy of a welcome.
Looks like a blog, though, doesn’t it?
[My thanks to Sean Gabb for the alert]
Next Sunday I expect to be headed with a crowd of French libertarians, from the place de la Bastille towards the headquarters of the French finance ministry at Bercy in the eastern districts of Paris.
Interest in the event seems to be building up, with emails buzzing around asking for a lift from places like Pau (almost in Spain), or has anyone got a couple of flag poles? The Gadsden and the Culpepper flag should be flying.
Meanwhile, in London, not a sausage.
There is a tendency among Libertarians to worry obsessively about every infringement by the state, to link up instances of state oppression, and to deduce from this either that there is a vast campaign to destroy freedom, or that we’re powerless to combat the tide of enslavement. This makes us seem obsessive, paranoid and miserable company, except to others of a similar emotional condition.
One of the problems is that it is literally possible for a single libertarian activist to discover every single instance of arbitrary power by state officials on a given day. The posting by Brian on some local bureaucratic monster in the U.S. state of Illinois is a case in point.
Most Europeans would be unable to pick out the state of Illinois on a map (so much for the vaunted European superiority at geography). Yet thanks to Brian’s posting, any English-speaking European looking for examples of state oppression could discover that – somewhere in Illinois – there is an instance of heavy-handedness happening now.
Consider what our knowledge in Europe would be of the Waco massacre if it had taken place before outside television broadcasts. Instead of assuming that everything’s worse because our databases are overflowing with complaints, we should note that we have the tools to expose state oppression almost anywhere on this planet. Think of Rodney King. Did police officers never beat black men before hand-held video cameras existed?
That sounds like the name of some old British movie… but what I am referring to is the Libertarian Alliance meeting held every last Friday of the month at Brian Micklethwait’s place in Pimlico, London.
The speaker was samizdata.net contributor David Carr, delivering his views on the Middle East, specifically the Israel-Palestine troubles. It was possibly the most heavily attended Last Friday at Brian’s I have ever seen, literally standing room only… which made the final standing ovations for David’s outstanding talk all the easier 
Standing room only for David’s talk!
Paul Coulam and Adriana Cronin: the intellectual hardcore
Judith Hatton and Amoy Ing: libertarian thought across the generations
Is Britain revolting? According to this report in the Straits Times the British are as MAD as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore.
“This week, anonymous letters were sent to national newspapers by an organisation calling itself Motorists Against Detection (Mad), claiming responsibility for the acts of vandalism against the cameras.
The growing number of attacks on cameras in recent weeks signalled the start of a British-wide assault on the devices, Mad warned.
Although thousands of cameras have been damaged, police have not received a single message from any passing driver reporting a vandalism. As a result, no one so far has been caught damaging a camera.
Strangely, though, not so much as a word about this in the British press. So what’s the score? Was it simply a slow-news day in Singapore, so time for a bit of journalistic licence? Or is it being kept quiet here for fear that publicity will only fuel further civil disobediance?
 
Two rather different looks for Sarah! If you want to know who and what Sarah Lawrence is – and if you want to know about one of the smartest and most effective libertarian propagandists alive then you do want to know who and what Sarah Lawrence is – then read “The Burqa Incident”, subtitled “How I was expelled from the Libertarian Party convention and (allegedly) narrowly escaped spending the night in jail being interrogated by the FBI”. (This girl is clearly a graduate of the Brian Micklethwait School for Putting Unwieldy But Accurate Titles On All Articles (Or Subtitles If That Is Preferred) So That They Always Know What It’s About And Don’t Have To Guess.)
Sarah was due to speak at the Libertarian Party National Convention, held in Indianapolis in July of this year, which she eventually did, on a subject that included “burqa” in its title. So, she thought she’d stir up a little interest for it by walking around beforehand in a burqa. This is an impressive costume (see below).
The joke at the centre of this characteristically Sarahesque episode is that when our Sarah, dressed in her burqa, tried to enter the premises being used by the Convention, she completely freaked out the security people, who had been scaring themselves about a possible terrorist attack on just such a place as this (lots of people assembled in one place) for the previous several days. However, this was what they said to her:
“If it is not part of your religion to wear that, take it off or leave.”
As Sarah herself points out, the guy had it the wrong way around. What he was saying was, in effect: if you’re a genuine terrorist then walk right in ma’am and do your worst, but if it is just a stunt and therefore no threat and no problem, go away.
It seems that not even someone genuinely suspected because of her costume of perhaps being about to let off a bomb may meanwhile be subjected to insulting and religiously demeaning costume restrictions.
I suppose all wars take a bit of getting used to. It must have been rather like this here in England at the end of 1939, when we were still getting used to fighting that war. Let’s hope this war never gets as deadly and as deadly serious as that war did, and remains stuck at the (mostly) farcical stage for the duration.
Sarah’s article has also just been published in The Laissez Faire Electronic Times, under an even more accurate title.
I would like to say “Well Done” to all the libertarian comrades who attended the Liberty conference at the week-end. I’m sure it was rather tedious, frustrating and confirmed all the usual complaints we have against the leftist so-called defenders of liberty. However the first virtue of attending such events is that it clears up in their minds whether we’re in only favour of the right of our corporate sponsors to screw the poor, or in favour of freedom for white people, or whether we’re serious about liberty.
No doubt there are some leftists who come away from an encounter with the Libertarian Alliance with the private realization that actually, they hate freedom if freedom means other people being allowed to choose capitalism as their mode of dealing with the universe. As someone who values truth above delusion I suppose the Libertarian Alliance performs a valuable educational function when it allows fascists to discover their inner selves and come out of the closet.
The value of such an exercise is that it makes the claim that libertarians are closet nazis unsustainable. Being accused of being naive utopians is rather an improvement on being falsely associated with every horror of the 20th century.
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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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