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 am in the US at the moment sharing today’s festivities with all manner of creatures…
Mike Hudack of blip.tv wishes all a happy Independence Day with a few thoughts worth noting:
The Fourth of July isn’t significant simply because it marks the beginning of independent American politics. It’s significant because it marked one of the first times that a group of people threw off the yolk of foreign leadership and chose self-government. It is significant because of the emphasis placed on individual empowerment and individual choice. It is significant, most of all, because of the ideal of America created on or around July 4, 1776 — an ideal that we have yet to realize, but that we continually strive for.
His personal hero of the American revolution is Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, whose arguments created conditions for writing the Declaration of Independence.
“[the] distinction of men into kings and subjects… [is something for which] no truly natural or religious reason can be found.”
and
“I challenge the warmest advocate for reconciliation to show a single advantage that this continent can reap by being connected with Great Britain.”
It is allowed to be idealistic today:
The moral here is a simple one. In 1775 and 1776 one man’s words ignited the firestorm that led to the Declaration of Independence. One man’s views on democracy, on republicanism, on individual rights and individual responsibility. One man’s views that almost didn’t get printed because no printer would dare put those words down in ink. Thomas Paine’s access to the printing press, thanks to Robert Bell, changed the world.
Such words are very encouraging, especially coming from someone who has set up and runs a videoblogging community. It means that this particular community and the company behind it is driven by an understanding of the profound impact that individual creativity and its distribution will have on the future. And, surely, that is a Good Thing.
A few days ago former Clinton Secretary of State Madelein Albright condemned the American Libraries Association (ALA) for its tepid response to the Cuban state’s repression of intellectual freedoms by its policies of banning certain books and imprisoning independent librarians who do not follow the party line.
However all I ever need to know about the ALA is revealed in this article with the line “But she won her loudest applause for oblique slaps at President Bush”. Hostility to Bush roused the emotions of more ALA librarians than defending oppressed librarians in Cuba. Of course that Americans are more concerned with American affairs is hardly surprising but when an organisation decries its government’s leadership at home on civil rights grounds and yet balks at heaping any significant opprobrium on an old style communist tyranny off the American coast, I think this is an organisation that can be safely consigned to the useful idiots category.
No doubt many in the ALA are impressed by the more than ten fold increase in the number of public libraries under Castro, ignoring the fact that these libraries can only stock books which are not deemed ideologically unacceptable by the regime. Somehow I rather doubt books by the oafish Michael Moore or Marx are in any shortage in the American libraries presided over by the ALA (and rightly so).
This story about a drugs bust at a drive-thru restaurant may get some folk chuckling but I am not getting the joke. One of thousands of examples, in fact, of how the war on drugs is a waste of time, energy and law-enforcement talent. At a time when we live with the threat of terrorism, one would like to think that priorities were a touch different on both sides of the Atlantic.
President Bush, a man I have never had much affection for and about whom I have very few good things to say, has just struck a blow for the good guys of the issue of eminent domain abuse (UK= compulsory purchase) by signing an executive order that the US federal government can only seize private property for public use and not in order to turn it over to private property developers.
Although the vast majority of property seized in the United State is does by state and local authorities, this is nevertheless a very welcome development indeed and a definite move in the right direction.
Daryl Hannah was arrested yesterday for sitting in a tree, defending the South Central Farm, a community garden in Los Angeles scheduled for development by the property’s owner, Ralph Horowitz. The City of LA, which has most recently owned the land, had been kind enough to allow locals to use the acreage to grow tomatoes and corn whilst it lay fallow. Then it sold the land to Horowitz, who evily has decided to develop the property…
The kicker? Horowitz is the property’s rightful owner from away back – the city having seized the land from him in the first place in 1986, citing immanent domain, when it wanted to build an incinerator on the site. He’s now being accused of being an ‘evil developer’, and member of the LA Jewish Mafia.
Then along came the D-list celebrity activists, including Hannah and folk singer Joan Baez, who took up the ill-conceived cause, found a tree on the property, and started sitting in it.
Far from being a bleeding-heart shoe-in, the farm is so stinky a lefty effort that the local alt-weekly newspaper, the LA Weekly, ran an investigative expose about thuggery on the part of pro-farm organizers and their intimidation tactics in pressuring the ‘farmers’ to support the ’cause’.
The only net effect, of course, will be to prevent any landowner, including the government, from allowing community gardens anywhere, ever, or any other benevolent use of property, for fear of squatter confiscation.
A brutally ‘fair’ outcome, satisfactory only to those who fail to recognize that unfairness is the basis of benevolence – it is what we call charity.
However this time it is nice to hear of Islamic extremists killing themselves in ways that do not involve blowing themselves up on a bus in London or in a pizzeria in Israel in order to murder a bunch of civilians. More of this and faster please.
I am in San Francisco right now with Adriana, who will be speaking on net neutrality at Vloggercon tomorrow with her Samizdata co-editor hat firmly affixed. Today, we will be attending Techdirt Greenhouse with fellow Samizdatista Hillary Johnson.
Upon arrival yesterday, Adriana and I went for a wander and took in the, er, sights. We passed by UN Plaza, where I snapped this nauseating image:
On the same pole, there is a sign warning vagrants not to peddle without a permit. Still, I would have loved to have taken a snap of the sign that Perry de Havilland and I spotted while driving around in San Francisco last year, which featured a beaming Asian-American woman with the following in bold letters:
Paying taxes really pays off!
Whenever I am in San Francisco, I cannot help but think of the great Ken Layne, who wrote in 1998:
San Francisco is truly the foulest place on earth. The nation’s most expensive city features $2,000 moldy little apartments, a filthy broken-down transit system, tens of thousands of bums on the dole, the nation’s worst newspapers, year-round crappy weather, and a local government that’s truly of and for the people. That’s because the people here are total idiots.
We are actually quite enjoying the weather, but the rest sounds about right to me.
Yet again we see on the issue of homosexuals marrying that conservatives and left-wingers are just arguing over whose prejudices the law will validate, rather than should the law validate anyone’s prejudices. Why oh why are people on both sides not calling for the obvious solution to this (non)-issue: get the state out of the marriage business.
We do not require the state to sign off on most contracts between two people, so why should marriage be any different? Sure, let the courts get involved if there are disputes or malfeasance just as it does with any contract (that is what civil courts are for), but by de-politicising the whole institution and treating it as just another civil contract, the whole tedious issue goes away. If religious conservatives choose not to recognise ‘gay marriage’, well fine, that should be their prerogative. If a homosexual couple want to declare to the world they are ‘married’, well how is that the business of anyone but the people involved?
A huge contingent of police and MI5 officers descended on a London house overnight and arrested its occupants who are suspected of developing a chemical bomb to use in a terrorist attack. One suspect was shot in the shoulder during the raid.
Meanwhile in Toronto, Canada, twelve men have been arrested in a raid where the suspects were thought to be assembling an ammonium nitrate bomb, having allegedly assembled three tonnes of the stuff.
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.
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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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