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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An old friend of mine, Andrew Ian Dodge, has joined the senatorial race in Maine to get on the Republican ticket, running up against Olympia J. Snowe. She is very much a RINO Republican, as you can see from this legislative record on her official website. Andrew Dodge has been a key figure in the Maine Tea Party movement, and has caused a stir by making it clear that the TP must be about tax, spending and the deficit, and is not interested in any social conservative agenda. For instance, he wants to cut the drinking age from its current age of 21 and is relaxed on issues such as gay marriage, etc. He may be seen as too much of a “wild card”, but he’ll freshen up the primaries, that is for sure.
Of course, having spent a fair amount of his life abroad, including the UK – his late father used to be a senior oil executive and Andrew lived all over as a result – he has seen what socialism has done in the UK, and does not want the same to take root ‘Stateside. That is an argument he can throw at any locals who wonder, absurdly, if he is “American” enough.
I wish him luck. At least the campaign will feature loads of good heavy rock music!
The commentary soundbite of the night so far, from the BBC’s coverage of Super Bowl XLV, from Tiki Barber:
Do not go to bed. Work is not as important as this game.
It’s Pittsburgh 25 Green Bay 28, in the fourth quarter, after Pittsburgh managed what I believe is called a “safety” “two-point conversion” (see comments), Pittsburgh having earlier in the game been down by 18 points. Nobody’s ever won a Super Bowl having been that far behind, but this looks to be anyone’s.
Mike Carlson, Britain’s ubiquitous American Football expert, commentates for whichever channel has the games, be it Channel 4, Channel 5, or, as now, BBC 1, and so he’s with the BBC tonight, as he has been throughout the play-offs. I seem to recall complaining here about the snide little political digs that Carlson has in the past indulged in, when commentating for Channels 4 or 5. The BBC seem to have told him to cut it out. Usually, whenever any player is called Bush (I seem to recall there being a Reggie Bush) Carlson calls him “the Bush you can support”. (Yes, I mention this in the comments here, in connection with something Carlson said during last year’s Superbowl.) George W. Bush himself is actually watching this game, as is Condoleeza Rice, or that’s who it looked like to me. They showed a whole row of such people. Whatever Carlson may have wanted to say about that he kept to himself.
Green Bay win the Vince Lombardi trophy, 31-25. The grandstand finish that Tiki Barber had been saying might, if earlier games were anything to go by, be contrived by Pittsburgh’s hobbling miracle worker of a quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, never happened, and it ended rather tamely, as American football games sometimes do, with guys kneeling down, and then … it was … over.
Now they’re saying that a play called Lombardi, about the great Green Bay coach of yesteryear that they now name the Super Bowl trophy after, just opened on Broadway. Blog and learn.
The Green Bay Packers are the “world champions”. Yeah. But now they are making a good point, which is that the Super Bowl has no exact parallel in British soccer. That has the FA Cup Final, but also the Premier League, and also a couple of European titles to shoot for. Every other year there’s either a European national tournament, or the World Cup. Only in the American version of football does the winner of the one big game win absolutely everything.
I’ve heard about this many times, and laughed at what I imagined it to consist of, again and again. But I’ve never actually seen it, until, a few days back, Instapundit linked to it.
“A few days” is a decade in Instatime, so forgive me if I don’t trawl back for half an hour through half a dozen pages of Instapunditry until I spot his posting on the subject, and merely supply anyone besides me who is interested with the link to the thing itself, which I did make a note of.
Here.
… that ‘tax pros’ are worried that tax evasion will be greatly increased by new regulations in the USA
Tax pros now fear that tax evasion could go viral if the health-reform bill’s new 1099 requirement takes effect next year. They say more small businesses will likely opt to do all-cash transactions under the table to avoid the 1099 reporting requirement, and all of its onerous provisions, which are worse than small businesses may realize.
“Tax evasion could go viral”… what a pleasing concept. Well all I can say to these unnamed ‘tax pros’ laboring away tirelessly to make people ‘compliant’ is “from your lips to God’s ear”.
Few things would help the growth of the culture needed for a fight back of liberty to succeed than something that not only induced contempt for the state but actively motivates self-interested resistance to the supra-constitutional tax gathering arm of the US government… and perhaps the single best form of resistance to an over-mighty state is keeping as much money as possible out of its hands.
Encouraging tax evasion: far from being an ‘ugly side effect’ it is the unforeseen silver lining that may tip millions of apolitical business folk into unwitting de facto alliance with liberty’s anti-statist friends.
John Hawkins: Now, in recent years we started to hear more people calling to get rid of the Federal Reserve. Good idea, bad idea? What are your thoughts?
Thomas Sowell: Good idea.
John Hawkins: Good idea? What do you think we should replace it with? What do you think we should do?
Thomas Sowell: Well it’s like when you remove a cancer what do you replace it with?
There is a nice piece by Don Surber (H/T, Instapundit) seeking to explain the hatred that is felt among some folk for Sarah Palin. He obviously focuses on the attitudes of Americans, but I’d wager that some of that applies also to non-Americans who hate or despise her in much the same way that such people also got riled by Ronald Reagan’s folksy speaking manner and ignored the wisdom and intelligence of that man. It is a good piece.
It got me thinking about why certain politicians, even if they espouse views which are not necessarily all that outrageous or objectionable, provoke feelings of such hatred in some quarters. In the UK, for example, the last person I think who was really hated in the Palinesque sort of way was our own Margaret Thatcher. There are certain things in common – although not ones I would stretch too far – such as that they came from unfashionable parts of their countries (Lincolnshire/Alaska); made a point about religion in their lives (they are obviously nutters then); happy marriages (which provokes a strange kind of resentment among some folk); a certain middle-brow, cultivated lack of pretension; the pitch and tone of their voices (Maggie sounded very arch early on), and so on.
Add in the fact that they are women in a male-dominated arena of politics, and the reason for hatred grows. And I also think that for a lot of so-called feminists, a woman who espouses “family values”, supports capitalism, etc, is seen as letting the side down. This rather ignores what we Samizdata writers would say, that free markets, when freed of state interference, are usually very good news for women, since bigotry against women, like any other group, is a cost.
There is also something quite useful about Sarah Palin in this regard. Although I do not agree with all her views, at least as far as I know what they are, I usually find that the sort of people who say they hate or despise her are nobs of the first rank. So it is a sort of useful marker: if I find myself talking to someone and her name comes up and the reaction is as described, I can usually pigeonhole that person as someone to be avoided.
And Palin has great legs. The sources of hate must run very deep indeed.
This posting is about politics in the USA. Please realise that it is a simplification, what mathematicians call a first approximation, more true than false, and sufficiently true to be worth saying so that it may perhaps then be modified and qualified towards the actual truth.
I ought also to admit that I have never set foot in the USA, and that I got the notions that follow from the Internet, and before that from watching (as I still now watch) USA television shows (mostly comedy and cop shows). We here in Britain get lots of those. I freely admit that distance, instead of lending clarity to my eye, could merely have lent and be lending bullshit to it. In fact, I do admit it. But the bullshit it has lent includes the kind of bullshit that wins and loses USA elections. First approximation truth about what is being perceived, about what big bullshit picture is being believed in, is often sufficient to win or lose an election. For as we all know, a big part of reality in politics is perception. Voters in the USA get a lot of their ideas about politics in the USA from the Internet and from television shows, or so it says on the Internet and on television.
So here goes.
In political USA now, there are now four important groups of people. There are Democrats, Old School Republicans, Tea Partiers, and Voters. Political outcomes were determined by what the Voters decided about the first two. They are now determined by what the Voters decide about the other three.
Voters used to think that Democrats were good people with bad ideas, clever, but mostly only at excusing their bad ideas. Democrats sincerely believed in bloating the government, taxing, regulating and generally screwing things up. But they applied these bad ideas to all, without fear or favour. Personally, they had blue collars and were honest hardworking folks. They did not lie or cheat. They looked you in the eye and treated you right.
Voters used to think that Old School Republicans were bad people with good ideas. Republicans believed in business success, low taxes, less regulation, and generally getting the US economy motoring along. Trouble is that they were also rich and nasty snobs, and corrupt. They used their grasp of economics mostly to get rich themselves. Politically, they applied their ideas only in ways that suited them. If a tax or a regulation happened to suit them or their huge country club network of rich and nasty and snobbish friends, then they would, on the quiet, be for it. For them, business-friendly government meant a government friendly to their own businesses. If, on the other hand, your collar was blue, they’d deregulate and tax-cut the hell out of you, for the good of all, and for the good of themselves especially.
Hard to choose, wasn’t it? No wonder it was a dead heat, decade after decade. Good but stupid idiots versus clever but sneaky bastards.
It still is a dead heat, between Democrats and Old School Republicans, but this is because things are now moving towards Voters thinking that Democrats are bad people with bad ideas, and that Old School Republicans are bad people with bad ideas. Democrats now look like (or are being revealed as always having been) greedy and malevolent bastards with the same old bad ideas as ever. Old School Republicans are the same rich and greedy snobbish bastards they always were, but are now seen to be infected by (or revealed as always having believed in) bad ideas much like those of their opponents.
Enter the Tea Party.
The Tea Partiers started out as people whom the Voters regarded as dubious people with dubious ideas, and are moving towards being people whom the Voters believe to be …
I need some way to emphasise this next bit. Pay careful attention. I know, I’ll put the next five words into the title of this posting.
… good people with good ideas. The Tea Partiers have good ideas, which they sincerely want to apply to all without fear or favour. They are good people who work or worked for their living, will look you in the eye and treat you right, no matter what colour your collar, or anything else about you.
The Tea Partiers thus threaten to destroy both the Democrats and the Old School Republicans. They threaten to destroy the Democrats by destroying them, and to destroy the Old School Republicans by replacing them with different Republicans, Tea Party Republicans.
The Democrats say that the Tea Partiers are “extreme” Republicans, Republicans who are even nastier. They wish. The Tea Partiers are indeed creating a new sort of Republican, but not an even nastier Republican. They are creating nice Republicans. Electorally, the Tea Partiers are cleansing the selfish richness and snobbishness and nastiness out of the Republican brand, leaving the ideas that the Republicans appeared once to believe in untouched, and renewed in strength and quality. If the Republican brand resists too much, the Tea Partiers will destroy it and make another.
The recent financial melt-down is, of course, crucial to all of the above. In a crisis, ideas matter. And the Internet, the new idea spreader, is also crucial. USA citizens need no longer submit to being told what they think about bad times, by the bad people with bad ideas who are to blame for these bad times. Democrats are being revealed as nasty, by the melt-down and the Internet. Old School Republicans are being revealed as stupid, by the melt-down and the Internet. The Tea Partiers are being revealed as being good people with good ideas, by the melt-down and the Internet. No melt-down and no Internet, and you are back to the old dead heat between nice idiot Democrats and sneaky bastard Old School Republicans. And the Tea Party? Without the melt-down and the Internet, there is no Tea Party. (According to television, there is, still, no Tea Party, only criminals.)
No wonder the Democrats and the Old School Republicans hate and fear the Tea Party and are trying anything and everything they can think of to make it seem like bad people with bad ideas. Trouble is, all that the critics of the Tea Party can now think of to say about the Tea Party just adds to the impression that such critics are nasty and stupid bastards.
This is a snapshot of now, not a prophecy about the next century. This is how USA politics is now and the direction that USA politics is moving in now. I don’t say that things will continue this way indefinitely. In particular, how will the Tea Partiers take to being part of the government, to having to grapple face-to-face with the melt-down? The continuing melt-down and the Internet might then turn round and reveal the Tea Partiers to be just another bunch of good idiots or nasty bastards, or just nasty idiots. But, the melt-down and the Internet are not doing that now. They are doing the exact opposite of that.
Predictably in the wake of the shooting of a US politician and her surrounding admirers by an incoherent leftist (but I repeat myself), the journalistic profession continues to show just how completely they do not understand the subject they write about.
It is too painful for a nation traumatised by Tucson to reflect how these virtues have been betrayed once again by the insidious gun culture of America; by the pathetic weakness of laws which allow criminals and madmen to get their hands on real weapons of mass destruction that can fire hundreds of bullets in a minute; by the gun lobby’s intimidation of politicians in vulnerable seats; by the greed of the gunmakers who nowadays prefer to manufacture weapons more suitable for mass murder than for individual defence.
Yet far from gunmakers (who are a trivial political force) driving this debate, never was there a more truly ‘grass roots’ movement in the USA than the one which supports the right to keep and bear arms. Moreover ‘individual defence’ is only one of the reasons the Second Amendment exists… the primary reason for this piece of constitutional artifice is to keep the population armed as a counterweight not to criminals, well private sector criminals that is, but to the state itself.
But to expect a mainstream journalist writing for a British newspaper declaiming about US affairs to understand that… well I suppose that is like expecting a rodent to suddenly start quoting Shakespeare. It just ain’t going to happen. People like journalist Harold Evans have hardly blinked as personal liberties have been remorselessly eroded across the western world and when they call for yet more state controls, their opinions should be judged accordingly.
Matt Welch, over at the Reason Hit & Run blog, comes across this piece of nuttery from the land that gave us Dan Ackroyd and John Candy. How sad and oppressive that nation appears. Of course, there is no reason for anyone else to gloat: in Britain, we have more than our fair share of censors and wannabe controllers of supposedly offensive messages.
Canada does seem to be prone to a lot of this sort of nonsense. Mark Steyn, a Canadian national now living in New Hamshire, has had his problems with self-appointed guardians of what is considered to be acceptable to say and write.
My old man, when in the RAF in the 50s, once nearly emigrated there to serve in the Canadian air force. You might now be reading me with a Toronto or Vancouver dateline. Oh well, Dad chose to move into farming instead.
Erratum: I previously said John Belushi was Canadian. He was not. Sorry for the error.
David Henderson, over at the EconLog blog, has astute observations to make about the statements made by a parent of the girl murdered by the Arizona shooter. I recommend you read it all. It is probably not the sort of article to appeal to Paul Krugman, who is now well on the way to achieving the status of what the swearblogger Obxnoxio the Clown calls “a weapon’s grade cock-end”.
Here is more on Krugman’s descent, over, at all places, the Economist.. Even that organ of high-minded opinion is starting to publish attacks on him. Or maybe its editors are starting to take note of our own Paul Marks.
“The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?…[the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed.”
The quote is from Thomas Szasz, psychiatrist and libertarian. The race to get your side’s definition in first perfectly describes the frenzy of the left wing media establishment to link the murders carried out by Jared Loughner to the right, the Tea Party, and Sarah Palin. I posted about the contrast between Guardian columnist Michael Tomasky’s haste to explain Loughner’s murders and his reluctance to explain Nidal Hassan’s murders here.
Over the last few days further evidence has emerged that Loughner was (a) simply a drug-addled madman, judging from his strange pseudo-logical screeds on YouTube and (b) had began to fix his mad rage on Gabrielle Giffords in 2007, after she gave what he regarded as an inadequate answer to his question, “What is government if words have no meaning?” At that time Palin was barely known outside Alaska.
A prescient remark from Thomas Szasz, then. Yet anyone who knows anything of his work and writings will have predicted that I am about to say that an apt quote is not his only relevance to this situation. Szasz is famous for opposing the many authoritarian crimes of the psychiatric profession: among them imprisonment without trial or appeal, assaults under the name of “treatment” (such as lobotomies, electric shocks, injections of drugs against the patient’s will), and collusion with the state to define dissent and eccentricity as mental ills. All very great dangers and he was right to oppose them, as he was right to oppose the prohibition of drugs.
And yet – there is Jared Loughner and the lengthening list of those like him. Lougher was is (Why do I keep saying was? He is alive and in custody!) a drug-addled madman who killed six people. “He should have been locked up before this” does not seem an unreasonable thing to think.
Clayton Cramer is a former libertarian. His article Mental illness and mass murder contains food for thought. This 2007 post by Brian Micklethwait is also relevant. I would welcome your opinions.
In today’s Guardian Michael Tomasky has written the following article about the murder of six people and attempted murder of many others, including Congresswoman Giffords: In the US, where hate rules at the ballot box, this tragedy has been coming for a long time. Some selected extracts:
… You don’t have to believe that alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, is a card-carrying Tea Party member (he evidently is not) to see some kind of connection between that violent rhetoric and what happened in Arizona on Saturday.
… So what particular type of nut is Loughner? We don’t have a full picture yet. But we have enough of one. His coherent ravings included the conviction that the constitution assured him that “you don’t have to accept the federalist laws”. He called a female classmate who had an abortion a “terrorist”.
In sum, he had political ideas, which not everyone does. Many of them (not all, but most) were right wing. He went to considerable expense and trouble to shoot a high-profile Democrat, at point-blank range right through the brain. What else does one need to know? For anyone to attempt to insist that the violent rhetoric so regularly heard in this country had no likely effect on this young man is to enshroud oneself in dishonesty and denial.
I would like to report to you that my nation is in shock, and that we will work together to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. Alas, neither of these things is close to true. Of course an event like this is hard to believe in the moment; but in the context of our times, it’s really not surprising at all. Last summer, a California man armed himself and set off for San Francisco with the express intent of killing liberals at a nonprofit foundation that had been pilloried by Glenn Beck and others. Only the lucky accident of his arrest en route for drunk driving prevented the mayhem then.
The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has documented more than two dozen killings by or arrests of rightwing extremists who intended to do serious political violence since 2008. One Tennessee man killed two worshippers at a liberal church, regretting only that he had not been able to ice the 100 liberals named by author Bernard Goldberg as those most responsible for destroying America. Giffords herself received threats after voting for the healthcare reform bill, and shots were fired through the window of her district office. An event like this has been coming for a long time.
In contrast, here is the article that Michael Tomasky wrote when Major Nidal Hasan murdered thirteen people and attempted to murder many others: American, for better or worse. Some selected extracts:
We have much more to learn about Hasan before we can jump to any conclusions. A New York Times profile of him from yesterday notes that this army psychiatrist, who’d presumably heard many blood-curdling war stories, obsessively feared being sent over to Iraq or Afghanistan. But it then says that the FBI has monitored some internet postings by a certain Nidal Hasan that spoke positively of suicide bombers, comparing them to soldiers who risk their lives for their comrades. The Times didn’t know if it was the same Nidal Hasan.
For all most Americans know about Palestinian culture, Nidal Hasan could be as common a name as Dave Johnson. The Palestinian is an unknown person in the US. Jews are a part of the country and have been for decades, but average Americans pretty much know Palestinians only as suicide bombers. Sadly, for some Americans this event will reinforce an image of a people who resort first to mindless violence.
…
We should assume until it’s proven otherwise that Hasan was an American and a loyal one, who just snapped, as Americans of all ethnicities and backgrounds and political persuasions do. And, as is so rarely the case in these situations, he’s alive, so we’ll have a chance to hear him express his views some day.
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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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