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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I had not heard about the Seattle Public Schools fiasco until I read about it on Natalie Solent’s blog. If, like me, you have not been keeping up with statist nonsense out of the Pacific North-West of the United States, the Seattle Public Schools administration defined cultural racism thusly:
Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers…
Following much-merited riducule from bloggers and exposure in the media, the Seattle Public Schools district has beat a hasty retreat. However, we know that they will be back, with a similar sort of attempt to smear their political opponents.
Natalie Solent made the point:
The policy decision that “emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology” constituted racism came to my ear like a little echo of the draft European Constitution: an attempt to build in a left-wing position without going to the trouble of arguing for it. Under this definition pretty any student daring to defend Republican ideas could have been accused of racism. And that was the idea. It was all about power.
So anyone that subscribes to an individualist philosphy of any kind is clearly on notice; left-wing statists will continue to try to use intellectual gymnastics like this to try to silence Republicans, libertarians, Conservatives or anyone else opposed to their agenda. The racist smear is ideal for this.
Part of the point of Samizdata.net is to counteract nonsense like this. on the sidebar it says what we are about:
A blog for people with a critically rational individualist perspective. 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.
“developing the social individualist meta-context for the future” means, in part, creating an intellectual climate where nonsense like that peddled by the Seattle public schools board is treated with the laughable contempt that it deserves.
It is true that we have a long way to travel, but every day has its own task.
While reading about the Seattle Public Schools fiasco, I also spotted this op-ed by Andrew Coulson, who made a very good point about public education in general.
But this is still a free country. Thanks to our (ostensibly racist) regard for individual liberty, Seattle Public Schools board members and officials are free to adopt whatever definitions of racism they choose. It is inherently divisive, however, for an official government school system to promote one ideology over another.
Unfortunately, it is also unavoidable.
Whenever there is a single official school system for which everyone is compelled to pay, it results in endless battles over the content of that schooling. This pattern holds true across nations and across time. Think of our own recurrent battles over school prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, the teaching of human origins, the selection and banning of textbooks and library books, dress codes, history standards, sex education, etc. Similar battles are fought over wearing Islamic headscarves in French public schools and over the National Curriculum in England.
There is an alternative: cultural détente through school choice.
Historically, societies have suffered far less conflict when families have been able to get the sort of education they deemed best for their own children without having to foist their preferences on their neighbors.
Some people fear that unfettered school choice would Balkanize our nation. Their concern is commendable but precisely backward. The chief source of education-related tensions is not diversity; it is compulsion. Why is there no cultural warfare over the diverse teachings of non-government schools? Because no one is forced to attend or pay for an independent school that violates their convictions.
Read the whole thing.
The litany of failures for the immigration system in the United Kingdom continues to defy imagination. This New Labour government allows rapists, paedophiles and violent criminals from all corners of the globe to stay in Britain, live off the welfare state, escape from prison and commit crimes at the expense of the law abiding public. Now they are giving them passports.
THE Home Office was under more fire yesterday after it was revealed jailed foreigners are being given British passports after release.
Officials confirmed convicted criminals from overseas were granted British citizenship if they stay out of trouble for a period after prison.
The length of the “clear” period depends on their sentence.
Yet the Government has promised to deport overseas convicts in an immigration crackdown.
It is clear that Britain cannot be trusted to run its citizenship programmes in an efficient or secure manner. Therefore, the United States should remove Britain from its Visa Waiver program without further ado. That would concentrate minds at the Home Office.
Some inconvenient facts surfaced in yesterday’s Pennsylvania primaries. I will let the good folks from the Wall Street Journal’s Political Diary (available by subscription only) tell the tale.
Over a dozen Pennsylvania legislators lost party primaries yesterday in the biggest bloodbath in 40 years. Among the casualties were the top two GOP leaders in the state senate. “We have had a dramatic earthquake in Pennsylvania,” concluded Senate President Bob Jubilirer, who lost his bid for a ninth four-year term in a landslide. Because of the public mood, he says, his election “frankly just was not winnable.”
“The pay raise was the fuse that lit this whole explosion we are beginning to see,” former Lt. Gov. Mark Singel told reporters. Indeed, as an act of legislative chutzpah the pay raise had few equals. Last July, the GOP-controlled legislature, in cahoots with Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell, raised legislative salaries by between 16% and 54% without public debate, notice or review. They passed the raise in a 2 a.m. vote and evaded a constitutional ban on midterm pay raises by pocketing much of the increase immediately as “unvouchered expenses.”
Voters furious with the “Harrisburg Hogs” forced the legislature to repeal the raise with only a single dissenting vote. In the resulting turmoil, 61 challengers filed to run against incumbents in their party primaries — the highest number in a quarter century.
The incumbents fought back. Mr. Jubilirer and his allies raised nearly $1.5 million to defend his seat, versus the $200,000 that challenger John Eichelberger was able to collect. Similarly, Senate Majority Leader David Brightbill outspent his challenger, Mike Folmer, by some ten to one. It didn’t help. Both leaders wound up winning only 36% of the vote, a crushing defeat.
So for whom are these facts inconvenient? Proponents of campaign finance reform, that’s who. State controls on campaign finance are premised (or at least sold) on the idea that money distorts elections, that without state controls elections will be bought by the candidate with the most money, that the gentle hand of the state is needed to ensure a level playing field and a fair outcome.
Yet here we see well-connected machine politicians, who raised between 8 and 10 times as much as their opponents, turned out. Not the outcome one would expect from the campaign finance reformers, is it?
Damn bottom-up facts. So inconvenient to grand top-down theories.
The Smithsonian’s entrepreneurial impulse to exploit new media for profit is a healthy one, at root. The Smithsonian is already a quasi-private entity, where most staff is on the public payroll, while most executives are paid with privately solicited donations. It could conceivably, like the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and the federal student loan agency Sallie Mae, aspire to becoming a self-supporting entity within the government. So of course, the institution is taking a lot of flack for its deal to produce on-demand, for-pay documentaries in conjunction with Showtime. Congress has even joined in, cutting the institution’s funding while citing the high executive pay as an excuse.
The deal is bad, but not for the reasons being stated in editorials. It is bad because of an anti-competitive clause that gives Showtime first-refusal over the ‘right’ to fund documentary projects seeking to use Smithsonian archival material. Far from privatizing the Smithsonian, this makes Showtime a de facto government agency. Forcing documentarians to seek funding from a single source in order to pursue a creative project based on national archival material is an awfully pink concept, and the kind of move that gives privatization a bad name.
I would love to know if this is the result of some nefarious power play or just some good old fashioned ‘hand-in-the-cookie-jar’ naughtiness that got discovered.
Even at the CIA I tend to assume venal cock-ups explain most things rather than dark conspiracies… but I will follow this with interest.
The novellist William Gibson was interviewed on open source radio talking about the NSA wiretap scandal. The wonderful folks at BoingBoing transcribed part of it, and one part of it struck me as particularly interesting.
I’ve been watching with keen interest since the first NSA scandal: I’ve noticed on the Internet that there aren’t many people really shocked by this. Our popular culture, our dirt-ball street culture teaches us from childhood that the CIA is listening to *all* of our telephone calls and reading *all* of our email anyway.
I keep seeing that in the lower discourse of the Internet, people saying, “Oh, they’re doing it anyway.” In some way our culture believes that, and it’s a real problem, because evidently they haven’t been doing it anyway, and now that they’ve started, we really need to pay attention and muster some kind of viable political response.
It’s very hard to get some people on-board because they think it’s a fait accompli…
I think it’s [the X-Files, Nixon wiretapping, science fiction]. I think it’s predicated in our delirious sense of what’s been happening to us as a species for the past 100 years. During the Cold War it was almost comforting to believe that the CIA was reading everything…
In the very long view, this will turn out to be about how we deal with the technological situation we find ourselves in now. We’ve gotten somewhere we’ve never been before. It’s very interesting. In the short term, I’ve taken the position that it’s very, very illegal and I hope something is done about it.
I was particularly taken with the idea that popular culture has a role to play here. Did Hollywood create the paranoid ‘they are all listening in to us’ culture, or was it merely responding to popular demand. Who creates the zeitgeist that can often have a very big impact on the way the public perceives political and economic and social events? No one controls it, no one can control it, and no one person is in charge of it. And I think that makes it all the more an interesting phenomena to observe.
of Lew Rothman and JR Cigars. Don’t ask me how I found this, but what’s not to like about the following?
Tobacco Crusader Waxman `Outed’ As Closet Smoker
SELMA, NC (AP): Lew Rothman, flamboyant president of the popular J.R. Cigar mail order tobacco house, today announced that Congressman Henry Waxman (D,CA) has been a steady customer for years.
“He usually buys a box of cigars about once a month,” Rothman said in a telephone interview yesterday. “But he’s a real cheapskate. Always buys the ten-dollar-a-box factory seconds, the real stinkeroos. And he never pays on time.”
Waxman, as chair of the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, had conducted a highly publicized campaign against the tobacco industry last year, which included televised grilling of industry executives. Thomas Bliley (R,PA), a pipe smoker, replaced Waxman as chairman of the committee in the current Congress.
Rothman says that he made the announcement now because “I’ve had it with that dried-out little creep. He owes me six hundred dollars in unpaid bills, and wants me to write it off. Called me at my home about it. At eleven at night. Woke up LaVonda [Rothman’s wife] and the kids.”
Rothman stated that Waxman “…said to make [the unpaid balance] a campaign contribution. Like I’d give a nickel to see that humorless little goniff re-elected. I’ll send a bushel of Avo pyramids to whoever beats him.”
Rothman continued, “I tried to be nice to that little hypocrite, because he is a customer and a Congressman. I even sat still while he put on that monkey trial in Washington. But this is too much. The nerve of the guy!”
Reliable sources at other mail-order cigar retailers confirmed that Waxman had been “a regular buyer, if not a particularly desirable one.”
Congressman Bliley declined to make a statement for the record, but was overheard to say, “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”
Congressman Waxman could not be reached for comment.
From the Trenton Courier-Ledger, April 1, 1995, p. 5 col. 1
Flicking through the Reason blog, Hit & Run, I came across the link to the recent appearance by Reason’s editor, Nick Gillespie, on the O’Reilly Factor. Gillespie argues that it is silly to pass a law stating that folk should sing the national anthem of the United States in English. I agree (it is not exactly a Top Government Priority), although I would have thought that immigrants, if their intentions are to make a long-term home in their adopted country, should value it enough to try and speak the local language. Language is a part of assimilation. If I went to live in France, I would expect to learn the language, even if I spoke in an atrocious accent. But passing laws to force language is silly.
That said, I do not think Gillespie helped his case by what I thought was a singularly boorish performance on the show. Not a great advert for libertarianism. Virginia Postrel would have never acted like that, and she is much better looking.
There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.
– Jane Jacobs.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, is immune from state interference. Not even in the Land of the Free. Not even the past.
The original story here seems to be the tip of a bureaucratic iceberg. Last weeks further comment from the New York Times (which I can not find online, sorry):
[A]t the [US] National Archives, documents have been disappearing since 1999 because intelligence officials have wanted them to. And under the terms of two disturbing agreements – with the C.I.A. and the Air Force – the National Archives has been allowing officials to reclassify declassified documents, which means removing them from the public eye. So far 55,000 pages, some of them from the 1950’s [sic], have vanished. […]
What makes all this seem preposterous is that the agreements themselves prohibit the National Archives from revealing why the documents were removed. They are aparently secret enough that no-one can be told why they are secret – so secret, in fact, that the arrangement to reclassify them is also secret. According to the agreement with the C.I.A., employees are also prohibited from telling anyone that the C.I.A. was responsible for removing reclassified documents.
Next time you hear that saw about the price of freedom being eternal vigilance, remember eternity is outside time. You do not just have to keep watch on this moment.
There are few topics in the world that get people heated up more then immigration, and in both Australia and the United States, societies that have been built by mass immigration, the topic is in the news.
In the United States, the question is based more on what to do about the millions of illegal immigrants that have consistently been keen to seek opportunity in that great country, and have taken the dubious path of avoiding the proper legal channels to do so. In ordinary times this would not have been such an issue. However, since 2001 the United States has become naturally very sensitive about who enters its borders. I am actually surprised that it has taken this long to surface.
The United States immigration question is particularly interesting. You might think that a society that has built itself on mass immigration would be in favour of more immigration, but this is not the case, and generally never has been the case. In general immigration is tolerated, rather then actively embraced by the general populace, but when times get tough, the political mood can turn quite quickly on newcomers. This was as true in the recession of 1819 as it is today.
This is because the costs of immigration are felt and paid for by individuals, but the benefits of immigration are diffuse and spread right across society. It is a shame that many defenders of the right of the free movement of people refuse to admit that there are costs to immigration. The worker who finds his wages undercut or loses his job entirely, or the victim of violence or the householder who finds his property values eroded is naturally going to feel distressed and angry at what he or she sees as the ‘cause’ of his or her loss. People find themselves surrounded by people of different appearance, religion, and cultural conditions, and worry about how the newcomers will assimilate. → Continue reading: Three cheers for immigrants!
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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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