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]
|
It is of course too much to expect much rationality in the debate about immigration occurring on both sides of the Atlantic at the moment. I keep getting completely deranged e-mails from an outfit calling itself Conservative News NYC from across the puddle who are claiming that the USA and Mexico are in a de facto state of war due to the ‘invasion’ of the USA by illegal aliens. They also take the view that anyone who takes a more measured opinion on this is clearly a vile traitor. This is the same outfit who thinks any American who supports Israel is also a traitor, a word they rather like it seems, although of course they preface this with “but we’re not anti-Semitic”. No, of course not, perish the thought.
Now just because I think the fine fellows of Conservative News NYC are barking moonbats that does not mean all is well when it comes to immigration. There are indeed two groups in the USA (and one in the UK) who really are a problem. On both sides of the Atlantic we have an increasingly radicalised and non-integrating community of Muslims amongst whom support is very widespread for values completely antithetical to post-Enlightenment western civilisation.
Add to this in the United States the quite similar, at least in outlook if not action, ethnic fascists of La Raza, the one form of overt in-your-face racist fascism that seems to be quite acceptable for members of the American left to praise and with whom they are quite happy to share a stage (I guess being racist to white people is not really racism, eh Hilary?). At least one good thing about La Raza is that they are a lunatic fringe amongst Hispanics in the USA (much as Conservative News NYC are a radical lunatic fringe amongst US Conservatives). Of course the same could probably be said of Samizdata in many ways as we are hardly mainstream in many of the views we take, so it is not like I am against lunatic fringes per se.
Sadly the same cannot be said for much of the Muslim community who do indeed appear to share a wide range of views with the people we quite incorrectly call ‘extremists’… I say incorrect because it appears they actually reflect increasingly mainstream Muslim opinion, particularly in the UK. They are not extremists, they are merely practising Muslims who actually believe what their religious texts tell them to believe. The problem is not extremism, it is Islam itself and anyone who actually takes it seriously.
One thing both of these groups have in common is that they must be relentlessly confronted and cannot be compromised with or appeased in any way whatsoever. It really is ‘them or us’.
However… → Continue reading: Immigration successes… and disasters
London’s New Year parade, watched by a crowd of more than 500,000, was the unlikely setting for a small victory of normal civic virtue over the craven risk averse culture so beloved by the post-modern political classes of the western world.
An American marching band and cheerleaders from Fort Myers High School in Florida flew to London and participated in the parade in spite of being initially banned from doing so by school officials nervous about terrorism in London. A revolt by the parents of the students reversed this bizarre ban. It might not seem like much but any time someone makes a common sense refusal to allow the minuscule risk posed by Islamic terrorism to alter one’s behaviour, it is an event worthy of praise, just as the reverse is worthy of scorn.
The more I read about the flood of money coming into the City of London from the United States, the more I am convinced that in the spirit of Christmas and fraternal Anglosphere conviviality, the people of London should say a heartily thank you to Maryland Democrat Paul Sarbanes and Ohio Republican Michael Oxley.
In fact, in the new year I plan to launch a subscription appeal to put up a pair of gold plated statues somewhere in the square mile, depicting these two fine politicians throwing handfuls of dollar bills to a multitude of grateful City of London bankers, fund managers, stock brokers and other sundry worthy capitalists, as great numbers of companies decamp from New York and list in London instead.
And so Paul and Michael, on behalf of all those fine folks here in Merry old England whose Christmas bonus packages have gone through the roof, thank you. We could not have done it without you. God bless globalisation.
An unsavoury developement of Le Web 3 in Paris, a conference about and for bloggers organised for the third time by Loic Le Meur of Six Apart. I have always considered Loic as one of the clued up people in this area and I will give him the benefit of the doubt as to what really happened. Politicians are a toxic breed. Dealings with them tend to backfire and so I’ll wait to hear his side of the story. Jackie has more on this. Following a link from her post, I came across a comment that captures one of the fundamental differences between the Anglosphere and ze Europe.
The very notion that liberty can be restricted by rules and STILL be called liberty is very difficult for English or American people. Actually, I don’t really know about the notion of liberty in the UK, but I do know that the Americans tend to define it as the absence of constraint (especially from the State… constraint from the dominant Opinion is still quite strong and widely accepted).
Now for the French side: liberty is defined as the ability to do what you want INSIDE of a collectively defined set of rules. See Rousseau on that matter.
I’m not pretending that any of these view is better than the other. But I think it helps why a Frenchman can say that liberty should be bound without (French) people gazing at him like he was a madman.
There are some similarities in the USA and UK with the convergence of practical politics into a ‘radical centre’ of regulatory big government statists, whose ‘left’ and ‘right’ labels are rather like those of Coke and Pepsi… sure there are differences, but in the end they are still selling sweet brown fizzy drinks… or selling a vision of state in which the mainstream ‘right’, be it Dave Cameron or George W. Bush, are not talking about shrinking the state (even a bit) and freeing the individual (or even the community) but rather just increasing the pace of regulation a bit slower and in different places than the ‘left’.
Similarly the mainstream ‘left’ like Tony Blair or Al Gore are not selling wholesale paleo-socialist nationalisation of businesses as they did in the past, because they, like the mainstream ‘right’, now follow a more (technically) fascist economic model in which property can be ‘private’ but control of it is contingent upon being in accord with national political objectives and permission from some local political authority.
The ‘left’ and ‘right’ use different metaphors, different cultural references, different symbolism, but in truth they are selling much the same product. They put huge effort into fetishising their product differentiation precisely because there is so little difference in their core beliefs. In the USA, even the issue of self-defence and opposition to victim disarmament is less than solid with the Republicans than it once was as Bush made is clear he was ‘flexible’ regarding anti-gun legislation and needed hard lobbying to not renew the so-called ‘assault rifle’ ban (i.e. semi-automatic rifles which look ‘scary’). Put simply, all mainstream political parties (at the moment) are statist centrists, neither in favour of overt nationalisation nor of individual autonomy, regardless of their sales schpiel.
Why this is true is not hard to glean. Professional politicians are people who have the psychological disposition to both meddle in other people’s lives and to use force to have their views imposed. They are people who value having power over others above all else and the more aspects of society that are subject to political direction, the more important politicians become regardless of their hue.
So the natural order of things, if you are a person who makes their living out of being a politician, is to work to extend the state into more and more areas of life because the state is what you have influence over, thereby making yourself more important to ever more people. → Continue reading: The folly of always voting for the lesser evil
For some weeks Mr. Cameron’s friends in the media (such as the Telegraph group writer and editor of the Specator, Matthew d’Anconia) have been pointing to an upcoming speech that David Cameron was to make. This speech was intended to show what sort of politician Mr Cameron is, to define him – just as the first major foreign policy speech Mrs Thatcher made defined her (earning her the name the ‘Iron Lady’ from the Soviets – what was intended as an insult became a honoured name).
The speech was finally made on September 11th – on the day that the Iron Lady herself stood shoulder to shoulder with the Vice President in the United States (old, betrayed, hit by several strokes, the Lady still stood and walked ramrod straight – held up by courage alone).
Mr Cameron duly denounced anti-Americanism – it was “cowardice”, but then he said Britain must not be “slavish” in any alliance with the United States, and the American leadership was guilty of”‘sound bites”, lacked “humility” and that the American division of things into good and evil was “unrealistic and simplistic” (and so on and so on).
Leaving aside the point that when someone says that they are beyond good and evil, light and dark, (they are more sophisticated than old fashioned ideas of “right” and “wrong”) it tends to mean that they are evil, it was irritating to hear of Mr Cameron first denouncing anti-Americanism and then indulging in exactly that.
Mr Cameron is free to hold any opinion he wishes, even though I might suspect that his Yank bashing was less a matter of principle than an effort to get a favourable editorial in the Daily Mail (on the correct calculation that this newspaper hates the United States even more than it hates him, although some Daily Mail people such as Richard Littlejohn clearly despise what Mr Cameron said yesterday).
However, it is still unclear what Mr Cameron’s opinion actually is – for whilst he attacked the United States he did not say “the Iraq war is wrong”. David Cameron tried to have his cake and eat it as well, and thus playing to both pro and anti war people in his party.
Now being undecided about the Iraq war is not a crime and opposing the Iraq war is not a crime – I myself wrote against the idea of war, although I believed (and still believe) that once the war had started it must be carried on to victory.
I am not attacking Mr Cameron’s right to have an opinion, or his lack of clarity about what his opinion is – it is not even the general patronising tone of his abuse of the leadership of the United States that I object to. It is the date of his speech that is astonishing.
The anniversary of 9/11 is not the time to make this type of speech (far less to bill the speech as some equivalent of the ‘Iron Lady’ speech). If Mr Cameron really does not understand this it shows that just being born into a wealthy family and going to Eton and Oxford do not make a man a gentleman.
Great article in American magazine Reason here about the arrest of David Carruthers, CEO of the BetOnSports online gambling business. Following hard on the heels of the arrest of the three Natwest bankers on charges connected with the collapse of Enron, it seems the British state is steadily losing the ability to protect its citizens from being grabbed by U.S. authorities for arrest for offences which are not offences in this country and where the domiciles of a person’s businesses are outside the United States.
Carruthers was on his way from London, where his company is headquartered, to Costa Rica, where its online betting operations are based. The business is perfectly legal in both of those places, but not in the United States. And since most of its customers are Americans, Carruthers is guilty of about 20 different felonies.
Or so the FBI and the Justice Department say, and they are the ones with the guns and handcuffs. Catherine Hanaway, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, accuses Carruthers and 10 other people associated with BetOnSports, including company founder Gary Kaplan, of violating the 1961 Wire Act, which prohibits using “a wire communication facility” to accept bets on “any sporting event or contest.”
Despite the talk of fraud, BetOnSports is not accused of ripping off its customers. This case has nothing to do with consumer protection, except in the sense of protecting consumers from their own desire to bet on sports.
These cases present a number of difficulties. I think American authorities are entitled to crack down on crimes of theft, fraud and violence even if those crimes have not occured on U.S. soil but involve injury to a U.S. citizen. That is fair. But the BetOnSports case suggests that, in this internet, globalised age, the writ of the U.S. legislature seems to run across the whole planet (well, most of the planet. I do not think extradition will work any time soon in North Korea).
Besides the legal niceties, there is also hypocrisy of nanny-state legislators at work here. America boasts the ultimate gambling city on the planet: Las Vegas, not to mention hosts of other places in Reno, Atlantic City and various Indian reservations. Not to mention the various state lotteries from which the U.S. tax-eaters gain a hefty income. And that is what this arrest and closure of on-line gambling is about. The faux moral scolds who decry gambling are not concerned about people pouring their hard-earned cash down the drain. No, they are worried that a nice source of tax revenue is passing them by.
Our own political masters in Britain are scarcely better in their approaches to the various ‘sinful’ activities that need to be regulated to protect a benighted populace. Drinking hours are liberalised and super-casinos are encouraged and yet smoking in a private member’s club is banned and cultivation of cannabis plants in your back yard for medical use will get you sent to jail or hit with a hefty fine. What a great world we live in.
There is a fine article in the Telegraph rebutting anti-Americanism and another which features a splendid quote from an unnamed US embassy spokesman who responded to claims that a poll has found many British people are opposed to the US decision to overthrow Saddam Hussain and suggesting many had a low opinion of US civil society:
“We question the judgment of anyone who asserts the world would be a better place with Saddam still terrorizing his own nation and threatening people well beyond Iraq’s borders. With respect to the poll’s assertions about American society, we bear some of the blame for not successfully communicating America’s extraordinary dynamism. But frankly, so do you [the British press].”
Quite. Never apologise to your enemies.
Attending a Bruges group bash at the IEA yesterday, I had the opportunity to listen to the cogent James Bennett elucidating further on the concept of the Anglosphere. As always, the talk was clear and precise, dodging the pitfalls of contemporary topics that can blind many to long-term opportunities through a strong pessimism about Britain’s current predicaments.
Bennett’s arguments on the pervasive individualism that biases the English speaking countries towards liberty proved a welcome long-term antidote to the current gloom. Indeed, his accounts of the spread of English through India, and its transformation from a language of the elite to the masses, was described in terms of a social revolution.
Whilst we are trapped in the short-term carcrash that is the EU, the positive trends of globalisation and the adoption of English throughout India, China, Asia and Africa will prove far more beneficial in the long-term. We will know that the world is becoming far saner and far brighter when we see the outsourcing industry open its first call centres in Kabul or Waziristan. Their turn will come…
We seem to have become practically as theocentric at the higher levels of the administration as these people we’re waging war against. It makes me kind of uncomfortable.
– Christopher Buckley, interviewed in the Sunday Times Magazine
He’s talking about the US; but there are some discomfortingly morally aggressive Christians in charge on this side of the pond, too.
The alleged atrocity carried out by a fire-team of US Marines in Iraq is ghastly news and whilst I hope, like so many other allegations against Allied soldiers in the Middle East, it turns there is much less to this than meets the eye, the reports do seem to be indicating that this time there really was a monstrous massacre of innocents.
However the fact this horrendous incident has not been swept under the table shows that the US military does have structures that work as intended. Whilst it is appalling such a thing could have happened, it would be even worse if it had happened and the people responsible got away with it.
In that respect at least, one cannot but compare the accountability of the USMC with what happened when British police shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes, a innocent Brazilian man, and what we got was a stream of barefaced lies and complete fabrications and still no one has been brought to book (which should not just be the people responsible for the killing, but everyone involved with what has clearly been a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice).
It is when things go badly wrong that you discover how decadent an institution has become. The contrast between the US military and British Police is quite revealing.
There is another interesting article in the Washington Post about why it is a bad idea for conservatives to always support the Republican Party regardless of what it does. This closely echoes what I have been saying about conservatives in Britain supporting David Cameron’s Blairite Tory Party. The WaPo article does not take the pro-liberty stance on this I would (it is an article by a conservative for conservatives) but the underlying political calculus and logic behind it is hard to argue with: if your votes can always be taken for granted, do not be surprised if your views do not count for anything with the person you voted for.
The differences between the two main parties in both Britain and the United State has been largely an illusion for quite some time. In the US at least the Republicans and Democrats use very different cultural references and language to make themselves appear meaningfully different, but in Britain the utterances of David Cameron and Tony Blair are so similar that I would be willing to bet that if shown to a person out of context, most would be hard pressed to tell which of the men said what.
What makes the tribal loyalties of conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic so foolish is that time and again, year after year, those loyalties are not reciprocated. Tory policy towards the EU, where the parliamentary party has never reflected the views of the Tory rank and file, is perhaps the most extreme example but by no means the only one. Similarly it has long amazed me how conservatives who excoriated Clinton for trade protectionism and hugely costly ‘social’ programmes (a misnomer if ever there was) remained silent when G.W. Bush did the same in spades.
If conservatives are not willing to punish their leaders for fear of the Other Tribe getting elected, they have only themselves to blame if they get the same corrupting policies the Other Tribe’s leaders would have enacted anyway.
|
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.
|
