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]

Zout Alours!!

No link I regret to say but the BBC is reporting that exit polls in France indicate that fire-brand nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen has edged out the socialist Prime-Minister Lionel Jospin into second place in the presidential elections behind front-runner Jacques Chirac. At the moment it appears as if Chirac and Le Pen will be contesting the presidency in a head-to-head fight. This could get very….well, interesting.

Au Revoir, Tristesse

The first round of the French Presential Elections are underway. Here is a list of the candidates:

Lionel Jospin

Current Prime Minister. Socialist.

Jacques Chirac

Incumbent. Markets himself as a ‘Conservative’ but his policies are virtually indistinguishable from those of Jospin.

Jean-Pierre Chevenement

Former Interior Minister. Marxist nationalist.

Jean-Marie Le Pen

Veteran National Socialist.

Bruno Megret

Another National Socialist.

Noel Mamere

Green Party.

Arlette Laguiller

Trotskyite Worker’s Struggle Party.

Robert Hue

Communist Party.

Francois Bayrou

Former Minister of Education. Centrist.

Jean Saint Josse

Hunting, Fishing, Shooting, Nature and Traditions Party.

Daniel Gluckstein

Party of Workers. Another Communist.

Christiane Taubira

Left Radical Party.

Olivier Besancenot

Revolutionary Communist League.

Corinne Lepage

Nationalist Enviromentalist.

Christine Boutin

Socialist.

Alain Madelin

Liberal Democracy Party. Advocates Anglo-Saxon style free market reforms. Very unpopular. Doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of even getting past the first round.

The two candidates polling the most votes go through to a run-off for the Presidency. It is widely expected that these will be Jospin and Chirac although Arlette Lagullier has been putting in a strong show and could pip either one of them.

Another Samizdata blogger sends reports from afar

Many years ago I visited Bergen, in Norway, and the locals told me that the weather for my stay was by far the best it had ever been. Well, now I’m in the south of France, in a town called le Boulou (they call it a ‘village’ here), just south of Perpignan. The weather is the worst it’s ever been. On Wednesday night there was a, by South of England standards, regulation noisy thunderstorm, with lots of rain, as you’d expect from a thunderstorm, and there was further heavy rain the next day. This turned the pathetic little smear of dampness they call their river into a real river! A raging torrent the width of a football field in fact. Le Boulouans couldn’t sleep for the din! The weather is now improving, and by the time I leave it will have recovered its normal warmth and sunniness.

Meanwhile France is … France. The food shops are far better than in England, but finding a job is far harder than in England – two facts which may be related. Employing other people is a nightmare of expense and bureaucratic awfulness. If you aren’t something like an enarque or a multinational or some such, the only way to get ahead economically is to run a Mom and Pop store of some sort and do your own labouring. Thus France abounds with these, and they’re run like crosses between ordinary businesses and art galleries, being expressions both of love and “greed, for want of a better word” (see my previous posting about Wall Street). France has the same inane cartoons on TV as England. It also, more famously, has the same currency as nearby Spain, which I have to admit is a convenience if you live twenty minutes by car from Spain, as my hosts do. The internet seems to work.

Le Boulou seems to be a real ‘community’. People know each other, perhaps because they still shop in the same local Mom and Pop stores that the English have abandoned for supermarkets. Tomorrow I am attending a rugby match, which will presumably abound with local spirit, rugby being at its strongest in this part of France (France having just beaten England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Italy, i.e. everybody, in the recently concluded Six Nations Rugby Championship). I’m looking forward to this game greatly.

I’ve not been able to meet any local libertarian intellectuals so far. It would seem that they’re all on holiday, elsewhere.

The French State as ‘Big Mother’

Having made a dig at our Gallic cousins on Thursday it is only fair to point to a welcome burst of common sense from the land which has of course yielded such wise people as Alexis de Toqueville and Frederic Bastiat, both genuine liberals (i.e. not socialists).

In the Financial Times’ editorial pages today, psychoanalyst and author Michel Schneider writes that in France, the state has become so big as to represent a mother-figure to many of its citizens, who increasingly regard themselves as children. Schneider is the author of Big Mother: the psychopathology of political life, and the whole article is worth a read. So as Dr Glenn Reynolds would say, go read it.

Frustrated in France

Great news item via Reuters in Paris (no link yet, sorry):”a Paris bank employee who works for 37 hours a week, has 37 days holiday a year and sometimes wonders what to do with all her free time.

“When I go down to visit my family in Brittany for a long weekend they ask whether I actually have a job at all,” she says of the new leisure granted to her and millions of other French by a four-year-old law that has shortened working hours.

As certain columnists like to say, you couldn’t make it up.

Anti-globalizer in the slammer

Justice is sometimes achieved. Jean Bove, a key figure in the anti-globalisation movement who trashed a McDonald’s restaurant in France, has been jailed for three months for his offence, committed in 1999.

A report by Reuters on today states he claims he was protesting about US tariffs on cheese and other French foodstuffs, but I do not recall this French twerp as a principled advocate of free trade for American products in Europe. Frédéric Bastiat he most definitely is not!

A message from all technological asylum seekers to the enemies of free speech in France and everywhere else…

An article in Wired reports a victory against the ‘forces of darkness’ with a US court refusing to allow the French state to impose Internet restrictions across the world. Does this mean I think wacko groups like the KKK or Nazi historical fantasists are ok? No I don’t. However I do not want my judgement and prejudices to have force of law, unlike the lawyer for the forces of statist authoritarianism, Stephane Lilti.

“If this ruling, which we will appeal against in the United States, is upheld, it will give total impunity to all those who seek technological asylum in the United States,” Stephane Lilti told Reuters. “This would make America a haven for all types of people on the extreme right and racists … for us French it will be extremely difficult to ensure our justice system’s decisions are respected because we will be dealing with someone who can take refuge in a U.S. computer.”

Excellent. Every time we can make a repressive law in France or anywhere else unworkable, the light of liberty shines a little brighter across the entire world. Why should anyone respect the French justice system’s decisions to repress free speech? Notice Lilti does not seem to worry about ‘the extreme left’. I guess this means a post to the Internet in support of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot is just fine by him.

What force advocating statist lawyers like Lilti do not choose to realise is that the best way to destroy irrational buffons like the KKK is not by forcing them underground but by actually shining the light of day on them. Let them out into the open where everyone can see what preposterous little people they are by reading their own words… sort of like the way Stephane Lilti is exposed by his words as a noxious enemy of liberty who rails in fury against the rest of the world’s refusal to be a party to the repression of French internet users.

As Sinead O’Connor put it in a song:

Though their own words.
they will be exposed,
they’ve got a severe case
of the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’

So I would like to raise my glass to all you technological asylum seekers, yearning to speak free…the brave ones, the oppressed ones, the articulate ones and yes, even you stupid hateful ignorant ones.

And to those who would gag us, censor us and unplug us… fuck you