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.
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Having previously written a post on Alfred the Great (who I still think was the greatest Englishman who ever lived) and his family, I think it would be nice to present a pro-Viking post (or at least pro-Norse: not quite the same thing).
To go a Viking is to ‘raid’ in the language of old Norse and most Norse people were not raiders – they were farmers, craftsmen and traders (although someone might be any of these three things and still be a raider at some time in their life) like most non-Norse people in the period (from the late 8th to the early 12th centuries).
Raiding is not a libertarian activity (robbery, slave taking, rape and murder are violations of the non-aggression principle) and (as stated above) non-raiding occupations were much the same among Norse folk as among non Norse folk. So why do many libertarians (and non-libertarians) have a soft spot for the ‘Vikings’ (if we must call the Norse Vikings)?
Well a case can be made for the Norse as the freedom loving folk of pro-Viking popular legend.
It starts with Charlemagne (768-814). Charles the Great King of the Franks and later first Holy Roman Emperor. Charlemagne’s grandfather was the great general Charles Martel who defeated the Arab invasion of France, and his father was Pepin who deposed King Childeric and made himself King of the Franks (rather than just the “Vicar of the Palace” and real power behind the throne that Charles Martel had been). Charlemagne had some trouble imposing his rule (over other claimants to the throne) and had to beg the aid of Tassilo the ruler of Bavaria.
However, the internal politics of the Franks would not be a great concern if it were not for the policies of Charlemagne. Most rulers of this period raided (the later Vikings were not breaking totally new ground here) – loot was a good way of winning the loyalty of the hard men one need to be able to count on to preserve one’s rule. But Charlemagne raided more than any other ruler of his time.
Sometimes Charlemagne waged war with an ideological justification, for example the long wars against the Saxons in order to impose Christianity (more on this later). Other times it was to eliminate a potential rival (such as when Charlemagne betrayed Tassilo by the conquest of Christian Bavaria) and sometimes it was just in search of loot and ‘glory’ (such as the long distance raiding against the Avars). Charlemagne’s wars against the Saxons and his pressure on the Frisians (part of centuries of pressure on these folk of what is now the coast of north west Germany and north east Holland) and Denmark caused considerable interest in the Northern world.
Serfdom (the semi-slavery of the peasants – and idea that went back, in various forms, to the late Roman Empire) was never successfully imposed on the Frisians or the Saxons, but the spreading of religion by the sword was not Charlemagne’s only intent – the spreading of the Frankish social system (a military elite, loyal to a great warlord, living off the forced labour of others) was certainly part of the story. And in order to imposer this vast numbers of people were killed in Charlemagne’s campaign of terror.
It is hard to be sure (and it is contested) but some claim that there were great councils of the North – and that the ‘Viking Age’ (at least at first) was a response to the activities of Charlemagne. Certainly (even if we keep to the idea of the Vikings as independent raiders) the pressure on the Frisians meant that their sea power could no longer control the North Sea – leaving the area free for others.
Charlemagne also favoured the power of the Church – not just the worship of the Christian God. This meant the rise of what came to be called tithes and other forms of church taxes. But even after the Norse became Christians they tended to resist such taxes. For example in Iceland they were not imposed till the 1080’s and in Norway to the early 1100’s.
Serfdom as also strongly resisted by the Norse. In won out in Denmark – but never in Sweden or Norway (even after these areas became nation states). The case of Norway is interesting. As late as the early 1100’s there were still four different peasant assemblies that elected Kings (who did not have to be the same person) – such ideas were outside the mainstream of European thought (as expressed by Charlemagne and those who came after him). Slavery did exist in the Norse world – but it tended to decline. For example, in Iceland it died out completely in the 11th century. And (of course) Charlemagne was just a greater slave trader than the Vikings ever were.
Lastly there is the matter of price control. There were (broadly speaking) two views of the concept of the ‘just price’ in legal-theological thinking of the time. There was the view that the just price was a price that was freely decided between buyer and seller (this view is reflected in the laws of Bavaria in the 8th century) and there was the view that the ‘just price’ was the price established by custom or law.
Charlemagne favoured the latter view – and his officials (and those of later Kings) tried to impose detailed price controls (and other regulations). The Church was never united behind Charlemagne and his officials – but Charlemagne had saved the Pope from the power of the Lombards and the Pope did declare him Holy Roman Emperor, so the view of the dream of extensive state power (itself a dream of re-establishing the controls of the late Roman Empire) was a respectable one within the Church – and cast a long shadow over the Middle Ages and beyond.
The Norse however rejected the very notion of Imperial power in such matter (indeed in all matters). So perhaps people are not totally foolish to remember some aspects of the ‘Vikings’ with certain warmth.
In the years following the First Opium War and the (forced) Treaty of Nanking in 1842, and the consequent establishment of Shanghai as a treaty port, areas of Shanghai were conceded to the Britain, the United States, and France between 1846 and 1849. Extraterritoriality applied, and foreigners were not subject to Chinese law. The French Concession (which never contained all that many French people – there were actually more Russians) was ruled essentially as a French colony – officials were appointed in Paris to adminster it. On the other hand, the British and American concessions were merged in 1863 to form something called the “International Settlement”, which elected the “Shanghai Municipal Council” to govern the city. On this basis, Shanghai was close to being an independent city state (albeit with some use of the Brtish and American legal systems and military) until the second world war.
This peculiar status still remained somewhat intact even after it was controlled by the Japanese from 1937 (who had started trading in Shanghai along with the Europeans in the first half of the twentieth century, and had gradually taken control of the city and other parts of China by force), and as a consequence Shanghai was the only port in the world unconditionally open to Jewish refugees from Europe. By 1941 over twenty thousand mostly German and Austrian but also Polish and Lithuanian Jews had arrived in Shanghai, creating a new Jewish area in the Hongkou area of Shanghai, which had once been the American concession but in the 1920s and 1930s was a predominantly Chinese area of the International Settlement. As I wrote last month, I went for a wander around this area when I was in Shanghai last month.
The Japanese had nothing against Jews (Japanese brutality being largely reserved for the Chinese), and the Jews in this area built what of a community they could, including the Ohel Moishe Synagogue, schools, theatre and newspapers, and they received some aid from the existing (very weallthy) Jewish community in Shanghai and from (largely American) Jewish philanthropic organisations. If you look very carefully, you can still see one or two handwritten signs which date from that era.
After 1941, partly under pressure from their new German allies, the Japanese confined the “stateless refugees” in Shanghai to one relatively small area of Hongkow. Conditions in this “Shanghai Ghetto” were not good, and the area was somewhat disease ridden. In 1945, thirty odd Jews were killed by an American bombing that was attempting to destroy a Japanese radio station.
But the vast majority of the Jews in Shanghai were still alive when the Americans liberated the city shortly afterwards. Joy at the arrival of the Americans was followed by news of the Holocaust and that virtually all Jewish friends and relatives back in Europe had been murdered, so it must have been a strange liberations. Over the next few years the Jews in Shanghai were dispersed to Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, the United States and Palestine, and relatively few were there when the communists took over in 1949.
Still, visiting the former Shanghai ghetto is a far less depressing thing than visiting almost anywhere described as a former ghetto in Europe. In Warsaw a couple of months ago I reflected that half a million Jews had once been confined to a small area there, and that basically all of them were subsequently murdered, something just too depressing for words. The ghetto in Shanghai is a place where at least twenty thousand were saved, and the memorials commemorate that. The Ohel Moishe Synagogue is a museum to the events of the time, and if you go there a nice Chinese gentleman welcomes you, shows you a film about the events, and shows you around the exhibits of photographs and documents of the time. (He also gave me a parish bulletin from a local (modern) Jewish community, inviting me to join them for shul and other events, but I am alas not Jewish so it didn’t really apply).
Other memorials nearby suggest much the same thing. There is a certain amount of pride in the fact that this is a place where people were saved.
Patrick Porter, a recent reinforcment for Oxblog, noted the other day that writing history is not as easy as it looks. He was referring to the recent practices of US historians, writing about US social practices of the past that have political implications for today.
Cynics have long known that ‘history is written by the winners’, but the 20th century showed that history could be used and abused to fight political battles that are in dispute. Unlike more traditional readers, I myself have no objection to writers of history using their works to advance an agenda, so long as they are upfront about what that agenda is. Much value can be gained by looking at an old question with the different view that a blatently political or social agenda can provide, regardless of whether or not I agree with that agenda. As a blogger writing for Samizdata.net, it should be obvious that I do have an agenda of my own- the advancement of liberty and against statist values. Given the nature of this blog, that hardly requries disclosure on every post.
The benefits of this are obvious- the reader knows exactly what the intellectual meta-context I am operating from, and can read into what I write to take from my writing what they will. I think that is far more honest then pretending an objectivity that I can not in all honesty claim.
I was moved to remark on this subject not by any historical event, but by a series of historical novels, Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series. For those that are not familiar with these six novels, Colleen McCullogh has novellised the fall of the Republic of Rome and the rise of Julius Caesar, based on the best historical information that she possesses, and uses her writer’s talent to ‘fill in the gaps’. While not to everyone’s taste, I have enjoyed the series and they have sparked in me a great deal of curiousity about classical history. However, I must raise the objection that McCullogh seems far too partisan towards Julius Caesar then seems to be reasonable. At times in the later novels, one is left wondering if this is not hagiography. What is the agenda here? Or is it just that with my libertarian meta-context, I have too much objection to someone who was ‘Dictator’?
Mark Holland is on a blogging roll just now, and one of the more interesting things to be found on his blog earlier in the week was a link to and a big chunk of a speech made by Winston Churchill, on June 4th 1945, which I assume Mark to have found here. (Mark himself offers no link.)
Quote:
But, you will say, look at what has been done in the war. Have not many of those evils which you have depicted been the constant companions of our daily life? It is quite true that the horrors of war do not end with the fighting-line. They spread far away to the base and the homeland, and everywhere people give up their rights and liberties for the common cause. But this is because the life of their country is in mortal peril, or for the sake of the cause of freedom in some other land. They give them freely as a sacrifice. It is quite true that the conditions of Socialism play a great part in war-time. We all submit to being ordered about to save our country. But when the war is over and the imminent danger to our existence is removed, we cast off these shackles and burdens which we imposed upon ourselves in times of dire and mortal peril, and quit the gloomy caverns of war and march out into the breezy fields, where the sun is shining and where all may walk joyfully in its warm and golden rays.
Now I am not trying to say or even to suggest that what governs Britain now is what was meant in 1945 by “Socialism”. That hard-line root-and-branch government control of everyone and everything is a horror story has by now been well understood by all but a tiny few lunatics, if only because the promised economic benefits of such a system have all turned to dust and rust, in Britain and everywhere else where such Socialism has been attempted. Churchill’s team won that argument, even if this took rather longer than Churchill had hoped in 1945. But the book which prompted Churchill to say these things, Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom, paints a more complicated picture than just simple tyranny. Hayek also foresaw chaos, and an ever more desperate governmental effort to correct chaos, with even more chaos. And at the moment, governmentally induced chaos probably looms larger in our lives than governmental tyranny. But the means of inflicting a more self-conscious and deliberate tyranny at some future date are now pretty much all in place.
And, once again, the traitor in our midst is war. In 1945, it was the recently concluded war against Nazi Germany, and the warm glow of team spiritedness which that war gave off, for those who had good wars like formerly poor soldiers who had lived through victories (rather than those who had died during defeats), and like behind the lines enthusiasts for central planning. Now, it is the so-called War on Terror, which creates an atmosphere in which the Government does not demand or expect to know everything, but does insist upon its absolute right to know anything in particular that strikes it as important. And, now as in 1945, the British people, on the whole, do not object. Rather do they expect this, and complain only when the Government fails to keep an eye on things enthusiastically enough.
Today is the anniversary of the execution of French monarch Louis XVI. If my reading of history is correct, the matter did not end terribly well for France. Not that most Frenchmen would want the Bourbons back, however.
Of course there is a huge body of historical literature on the rights and wrongs of the French Revolution, which in many ways created the model for totalitarianism in Soviet Russia, China and elsewhere. That the Bourbon monarchy was a corrupt institution and that the ordinary folk of France suffered under an oppressive system is not in much doubt, mind. I cannot help but think, however, that the violent overthrow of the monarchy and what followed was, in net terms, a disaster for Europe and sowed the seeds of much eventual trouble.
I recommend this book by Simon Schama and this item, which pinpoints the violent events in France as an example of “totalitarian democracy” and the dangers of folk who claim to have an unique insight into some fictitious entity called the General Will.
One of my favourite actors, Michael Caine, achieved one of his early breakthroughs in the film, The Ipcress File, based on the Len Deighton Cold War thriller of the same name. (I love the fact that Deighton, a fine historian of the air campaigns in the Second World War, used to write a cookery column for the Observer. Very hip). Anyhow, without spoiling the plot of either the book or the film, it hinges around the use of “brainwashing” techniques to make people do one’s bidding or erase the memory of certain information.
How much of this could ever be based on fact or indeed, did either side in the Cold War use such techniques? There is a long entry in the now-indispensable Wikipedia site on this topic, pointing to the origin of the word “brainwash” in the early stages of the Cold War during the Korean campaign. The entries raise some doubts about how widely used such techniques were, or whether the term simply refers to a particularly fierce form of propoganda. I have come across the term in various films of the period, such as the first version of the Manchurian Candidate (forget the remake, which is a pale imitation of the original). But to what extent were such techniques really all that effective in moulding minds? Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”, which I have just finished reading and enjoyed immensely, queries the idea of an infinitely malleable mind, arguing that there are limits to how the brain can be influenced by certain techniques.
If this is true then it is encouraging that there are limits to how far the mind can be moulded in any way that those in authority, whether benign or malign, wish.
Anyway, I can strongly recommend readers rent out the Caine movies based on the Deighton books. Highly entertaining.
To say that the ancient Greeks have had a profound influence on Western civilisation is a truism so obvious to many who regularly read this site that it might seem silly to spell it out. The state of education in Britain, however, means that it is important and necessary to spell that achievement out and draw out the key elements of what the ancient Greeks ‘did for us’ as well as point to some of the shortcomings.
Charles Freeman’s The Greek Achievement is a splendid tour of ancient Greece, starting in the Bronze Age and finishing with the advent of the Middle Ages. It covers military campaigns, notably the long-running Peloponnese war; the changing fortunes of the dozens of city states; the development of democracy and city government and the eventual rise of Rome. Interwoven with this is a masterful survey of developments in philosophy, maths, science, astronomy, law and language. Freeman also is excellent at explaining the role of myth and ceremony in Greek culture, and does not fight shy of showing the lousy treatment of women and the huge use of slavery. → Continue reading: What the Greeks did for us
Perhaps this category should be referred to as prehistorical views. Usually, when we hear that palaeontologists and archaeologists have extended the prehistory of the human species, we think of the Leakeys, Africa, Lucy and the Olduvai Gorge.
For once, such an announcement comes from closer to home. The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project has discovered a site near Lowestoft dating human habitation in Britain to seven hundred thousand years ago. This date is based upon the vole teeth discovered on the site, compared with later discoveries at Boxgrove and Westbury sub Mendip in Somerset.
The dates involved are much too early for carbon dating – effective only to about 40,OOOBC – but scientists have been able to calculate good approximate ages from the known ages of animal fossils found at the sites.
In particular, the research centres on teeth belonging to a genus of prehistoric watervole, known as mimomys. About 700,000 years ago these voles had rooted molars, similar to those of human beings, which grow once then get worn down through adult life. But by 500,000 years ago, the animals had evolved rootless molars that continue to grow – an advantage to creatures that eat tough vegetation.
The voles found at Boxgrove are from the later era, but the East Anglian ones have primitive molars, dating the site definitively to at least 700,000 years ago. Those at Westbury are of an intermediate form. “The dating still involves some guesswork, but the best estimate is about 600,000 years ago,” Professor Stringer said. Simon Parfitt, a fossil mammal specialist at the museum and at University College, London, who analysed the vole fossils, said; “We can put everything in a relative order, and Westbury could be 100,000 years earlier than Boxgrove. The Best Anglian finds go as far back as 700,000 years.”
Early Man’s reach extended further and earlier than we have anticipated. Who knows what else prehistory will throw at us.
Finally someone has explained to me why such as fuss is made, and not just by idiot Frenchmen, about the military genius of Napoleon.
All I have seen for the last forty years or so is a very self-important general who liked presiding over slaughters, sometimes of the other fellow’s army, sometimes of his own, and frequently both. I have seen a land-locked leader who was comprehensively defeated by Nelson several times. And I have seen a hubristic fool who invaded Russia, with catastrophic consequences. Okay he also won several battles, and wrote out lots of laws. But why the adulation?
Recently, however, I have been reading General Sir Rupert Smith’s new book, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World.
Reading the Introduction was sometimes a little like wading in lead boots through treacle. It contains sentences like: “Force is the basis of any military activity, whether in a theatre of operations or in a skirmish between two soldiers.” “Military force when employed has only two immediate effects: it kills people and destroys things.” And: “Military force is applied by armed forces of men, materiel and their logistic support.” Even a civilian like me knows these things, although to be fair to Smith these thudding revelations of the obvious immediately become the basis of distinctions and qualifications that were more subtle.
However, as soon as Chapter One got started, things livened up considerably. And Smith began his story proper with: Napoleon.
What made Napoleon different was that the French Revolution had created something quite new, in the form of a vast and almost infinitely replenishable army of conscripted citizen enthusiasts, rather than the human farm animals who were herded into battle by his contemporaries. Eighteenth century infantry tactics were as much about preventing desertion by one’s own soldiers as they were about defeating the other lot, which does much to explain why actual battles were generally avoided and manoeuvre and negotiation were often all that happened in pre-Napoleonic military confrontations.
Besides which, in the eighteenth century, armies were hard to replace. They did not flock to any banners. They had to be chased after and caught.
Napoleon did not invent the solution to this problem, but the Revolution presented him with it, and he seized upon it.
This is the bit of the story I never did properly understand, and I guess I still do not. What was the big difference between being a subject and being a citizen? Some non-aristocratic thug standing on a balcony bellowing at you that you were now a “citizen”? Big deal. But apparently, in those days, it was a big deal. In exchange for this title Napoleon’s citizen army became something quite new.
Napoleon realised that, provided that he looked after his men – fed them properly, clothed them properly, and so on – he could demand of them things that his rivals could only dream about. In exchange for such solicitousness, Napoleon was able to split his vast citizen army into independent corps, each able to fight on their own, and trust them to do as they were told and not to run away. While his opponents could manoeuvre only as one docile mass, his armies would split up and march this way and that (which also made them a lot easier to supply because this made foraging so much easier), like a Kung Fu master waving his hands hypnotically, and only converging on what Napoleon decided would make a good battlefield on the day of the battle itself.
Once there, Napoleon was not afraid to get stuck into a pitched battle, because unlike the opposition, he could whistle up another army in the event of defeat, or for that matter of costly victory. Apparently his fellow “citizens” did not mind this. Risking death, in exchange for “gloire” was, they reckoned, a good deal. Fighting for Napoleon was like playing football for Brazil, in an age of mud-bound cloggers. Dying was worth it, because until then, you lived! Was that it? I do not really know.
Even after the amazing Russian fiasco, Napoleon was still able to magic another army together out of nowhere, and have another crack at the coalition that confronted him from 1813-1815. As Smith himself points out, this was truly remarkable.
So I guess I still do not fully understand Napoleon’s achievement. But thanks to General Smith, I have, as it were, isolated the bit of the story that is still a mystery to me. And once I take that bit on trust, the rest of the story falls into place.
Maybe me not fully understanding the “citizen” bit is because, as Smith has already made very clear, the “paradigm” of industrial warfare that got started with Napoleon is now, in his opinion, in a state of advanced crisis, and is in fact pretty much history. It was this paradigm shift argument that got me interested in this book in the first place, and why I intend to press on until I have finished it, despite any further treacle I may encounter. General Smith is, I think, a man worth following, through a book anyway, and the price of following him is worth paying.
Smith apparently played a big part in the Balkans in the nineties. I wonder what he did there, and what he will say about it. And I wonder whether Perry de Havilland approves of this man or has in the Spawn of Satan box, in the company of people like Harold Pinter.
Yesterday I chanced upon a short interview on some children’s TV type show called T4, with the actor James Purefoy. ‘Purefoy’ is, I now finally know, pronounced ‘pure-foy’, rather than “pure-i-foy”, which I have often wondered about.
Anyway, James Pure-foy is playing Mark Anthony in the hit TV series, Rome, and one of the things he said struck me as really rather illuminating. He said that the difference between us and the Romans was that they regarded weakness as a vice and what we would call cruelty as a virtue.
To many readers here this will seem a banal and obvious observation, but I have never heard it put quite like that, or if I ever have I was not paying attention. Perhaps the clarity of this observation can be attributed to the fact that although the actors in this series are British, the producers are Americans. Americans do love to nail down in a few words what a show is all about. (Until Purefoy went on to say this, I did not even know that Rome was an American production rather than British.)
This cruelty-is-a-virtue meme pulls together lots of different things about the Romans that have never previously made proper sense to me. Basically, why were they such total and utter bastards, and at the very same time so amazingly smug about how virtuous they were? Did they like torturing each other, and even being tortured? Answer: no. But they did believe in it. They were not indifferent to pain. They believed in pain. They believed in inflicting it, and believed that being able to endure it was one of the highest virtues. A lot falls into place once you (by which I mean I) get that.
Given the kind of world that the Romans inhabited, you can see how such beliefs would answer the Darwinian necessities of that time. But perhaps because the Roman political system had such a modern feel to it, the ancientness of their ethical beliefs seems somehow jarring. But yes, the Romans spent a lot of their time ? in particular a lot of their education ? actively trying to be more cruel than their natural inclinations inclined them to be. (See also: Sparta.) → Continue reading: Roman virtues and vices… and ours
All over the UK tonight, the sky will be lit up with fireworks and the evening will reverberate with a lot of loud bangs as folk mark Guy Fawke’s Night. Here is a nifty website explaining all about the event, what is commemorated and why. I’ll be off to Battersea Park later this evening to enjoy the fun. I hope people use their common sense and don’t get hurt.
Here is an informative book about the early 17th Century plot to blow up Parliament and the subsequent anti-Catholic crackdown. There is also even something called the Gunpowder Plot Society.
When I was a student living in Brighton, I once went to nearby Lewes, a town that stages a massive series of processions and bonfires every year. It is pretty non-PC in that a lot of people have muttered that such an event, especially one that involves burning effigies of a 17th Century Pope, stirs up ugly prejudices. I can sympathise up to a point with the grumblers. When I went along to the event there was the smell not just of gunpowder in the air but quite a lot of aggressive body language on display (although that may have been due to the potent local ales). I am glad to say that, all this time on, anti-Popery hysteria is mostly a thing of the past in Britain (apart from the odd bit of nuttiness at Glaswegian local football matches between Celtic and Rangers). Alas, it lingers on in Northern Ireland.
How do they do it? To be more exact and honest, how do we do it? Some of us, that is to say. I am referring to the mysterious tenacity of poshly educated people in British politics. Tony Blair went to a posh school. Now it looks odds on that the Conservatives will pick another posh, after a generation of not-so-poshes, starting with Edward Heath. Why? What is the magic that the canniest and most ruthless of us public school educated people which keeps the most prominent of our kind so prominent?
Part of it is that the education of the non-posh majority has, in Britain, been severely damaged, in the name of advancing the non-poshes. That is certainly part of the story.
But I think that another quality that people like David Cameron manage to exude � honestly or dishonestly, it really does not matter which � is: humility. Personally I tend to find this type insufferable, which may be because I got to know these people close up when they were still perfecting their personas, and in some cases before they were even trying and were just being pure bastards. The nastier the bastard, the thicker the veneer of humility that they later glue on, in my experience. But if you are not intimately acquainted with these nice, nice chaps, that humble act can fool you. Plus, in a few cases, the humility is genuine and was there from the start. Anyway, Cameron’s type radiates the notion that he only got where he is by being very lucky. The cards he was dealt made Cameron what he is, Cameron seems to say. Without these cards, the undoubted skill with which he played the cards he did get would have availed him nothing. One, you know, does one’s best, but one has been fortunate, extremely fortunate.
The trouble with the meritocrats whom the likes of Blair and Cameron come up against is that they seem to believe that they merit their cratness. They deserve it. Gordon Brown, for example, suggests to me a man who not only thinks that himself to be an excellent Chancellor of the Exchequer, but also a man who thinks that he deserves to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and for that matter deserves to be Prime Minister, instead of recognising with his every public word and gesture that he also needed a hell of a lot of luck to get anywhere near either job. → Continue reading: Posh politicians and not-so-posh politicians who actually do things
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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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