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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“Vetted for fifteen minutes”
So runs the subheading in the “Lexington” article about Sarah Palin in this week’s Economist magazine. A choice, the Economist says, which raises serious questions about John McCain’s judgement… and the rest of the normal left media establishment spin.
The line is a lie, as Governor Palin was closely vetted by the McCain campaign over an extended period of time.
No doubt some clever-clever person will come up with the excuse that if I read the small print of the article (or read it up side down and in a mirror) then… However, I am not interested in excuses, the intention of the article is plain. The intention is to use lies and distortions to undermine any challenge to the “liberal” left power elite.
As for the source of the “Vetted for fifteen minutes” lie. The New York Times of course (Joe Stalin’s best friend in the Western World). A cynic might question how close the New York Times is to the McCain campaign, but the Economist would denounce such evil right wing cynics.
Bob Bidinotto has an excellent appraisal of John McCain. It should serve as a corrective to some of the hopes that people may have about him after his – in my view – wise choice of Sarah Palin as his VP choice.
John McCain is a decent man of great character, with a wonderful sense of life and a courageous spirit. But he is no intellectual and certainly no philosopher; ideologically, he is very much a mixed bag. He is governed by his feelings, which are shaped in turn by his personal code — the code of national service, of “Country First.” Just as his notion of “selfishness” falsely packages legitimate self-interest with narcissistic self-indulgence, so too does his notion of “Country First” falsely package legitimate patriotism and “free enterprise” with the idea of individual sacrifice to the state.
In this incoherence, John McCain perfectly embodies the fundamental contradiction at the heart of American society: the clash between its conventional morality of self-sacrifice, and its political-economic system of individualism and profit-oriented capitalism. The fact that so many conservatives also try to square the circle of these logically incompatible premises means that McCain’s candidacy is dragging the Republican Party significantly to the left in its basic philosophy.
I can also recommend Matt Welch’s recent book about McCain. For all that the senator from Arizona might like to claim the mantle of a maverick, he is not quite that, and Welch points out that McCain is a different animal in certain respects from his Arizona predecessor, Barry Goldwater.
That is not to say that there is a not much to admire about McCain, especially his obvious courage under captivity. But like Bob I really worry about McCain’s version of “national greatness conservatism”. Any politician that takes Teddy Roosevelt as a political idol should be treated warily. Roosevelt inflicted the monstrosity of anti-trust on the US, for example.
Bob comes to this conclusion:
On individualist philosophical grounds, then, we are left with the choice of supporting either a profoundly flawed representative of America’s founding premises, or of supporting a candidate whose philosophy and every policy proposal are profoundly at odds with those premises. For me, that is no choice at all. (I leave aside the Libertarian candidacy of Bob Barr, who has zero chance of being elected; the only meaningful choice is between McCain and Obama.)
The Republicans and their alter-ego Democrats have for decades used their control over the system to give Libertarians no end of grief on our ballot access campaigns. I remember one Libertarian pundit in the eighties commenting ‘it is easier to get on the ballot in Nicaragua than it is in the United States’.
Their mis-use of power has become more and more egregious these last few years. I still keep tabs on Pennsylvania because that is where my absentee ballot goes. The last time I voted I had to return large parts of it blank because the LP was not on it. On top of that, Democrat Murta’s people pulled some real low-life shenanigans to prevent our candidate in his district from running against him. I got the that story via private communications with the Pittsburgh LP of which I was a long ago member.
This year it is the Republicans taking the low road in Pennsylvania. I suspect we will defeat them in court there, but I and most LP supporters are not of the victim mentality. Simply responding to their efforts is just not satisfying enough.
Fortunately we have an opportunity to turn the tables on them in Texas. It seems both parties failed to deliver their papers to the appropriate authorities in Texas by the time of the legal deadline. This is Texas law. Had it been our party, we would have been shut out, no questions asked. move along now boy. We would have had no hope of getting on the ballot.
The Republicans and Democrats are different. They are the ruling class. Laws are made for us, not for them. So the Texas authorities have attempted to waffle around the problem. I am sure the Texas legislature will do whatever needs to be done to assure the McBama twins are on the ballot if they can get away with it.
Normally this would just be done behind the scenes in a ‘gentlemanly arrangement’. But not this time. We are going to rock their boat and with some luck teach them the bitter taste of their own anti-democracy medicine.
I remember several years ago when I commented on ‘having my right to vote stolen’ in Pennsylvania, some one commented my vote was not stolen because I could always do a write in. So if by chance we block Obama and McCain from the ballot in Texas this year all you Republicans and Democrats should not be at all fussed about it.
After all… you can just write in your candidate.
The US economist and cheerleader for the Democrats, Paul Krugman, reckons that George W. Bush is a “libertarian”. To which I would respond: “If only”.
US blogger David Bernstein is equally unimpressed:
Bush and McCain are Extreme Libertarians: So says Paul Krugman: “What we really need is a government that works, because it’s run by people who understand that sometimes government is the solution, after all. And that seems to be something undreamed of in either Mr. Bush’s or Mr. McCain’s philosophy.”
After eight years of “no child left behind,” Medicare expansion, aid to Africa for AIDS, drug warring, abstinence education, nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so forth and so on, and more of the same promised by McCain, the better question is, is there any problem that Bush and McCain DON’T think government should solve?
I take those who think that the modern Republican Party is an outpost of radical libertarianism about as seriously as those who think that the Democracts are getting ready to shoot the kulaks.
Well quite.
So there are many women voters who do indeed want to vote for a women. Just as there are many black voters who want to vote for a black person. After all Senator Obama does not get 90%+ of the black vote because most of these people say to themselves “I really like Barack’s interpretation of Karl Marx via Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers, it is much better than the interpretation of …”
I doubt that one voter in a hundred even knows that Senator Obama is a Marxist – certainly the mainstream media have not informed of this.
– Paul Marks
I do not bother to write articles attacking leftist stuff from openly leftist publications or broadcasters.
For example, it may irritate me that the BBC sneer at Sarah Palin as “close to the oil industry” when, in fact, the lady exposed corrupt links between oil and Alaska politics. And it may be annoying that the BBC sneers that Governor Palin made her speech with “her husband and children in tow”, when it did not say that Senator Obama had “his wife and children in tow” when he made his speech. But the BBC is the BBC… it is a leftist broadcaster and its job is to present a leftist view of the world – although it is irritating that people are forced to pay for the BBC.
However, the Economist is different, it claims to be a free market magazine (sorry “newspaper”) dedicated to rolling back the state – and it simply is not.
The latest example is the front cover story “Bring back the real McCain“. When one turns to the article it turns out to be yet another Economist attack on the “irresponsible” policy of John McCain – the policy of trying to keep tax rates from being increased, and even reducing some of the absurdly high tax rates presently in place. The general tone of the article was both that tax cuts for “the rich” are immoral and that, on top of this, they must be “paid for”.
Contrary to what the Economist seems to believe, it was not the reduction of top rates of tax that was the problem under President Bush – on the contrary the revenue from the top rates of tax increased. It was the wild increase in government spending that has been the problem under President Bush.
Not just the mis-management of the Iraq war, although whatever one thinks of the judgement to go into Iraq in the first place the lack of planning for an insurgency meant a lot more blood and treasure being spent in the long run than would have been spent if more troops had been sent in the first place. There has also been all the subsidies, new entitlement programs and other wild spending and, again contrary to what the Economist thinks, the “earmarks” have been very important – for often Congressmen and Senators only vote for a spending bill because of the little earmark for some special interest buried on page…
And who in the Senate has been the most important voice of opposition to all this wild spending over the last few years – for all his faults, it has been John McCain. So for the Economist to claim he is not tough enough on spending to “pay for” his desire to make taxation less heavy is absurd, anti-earmark McCain is but it does not stop there – and, as stated above, the earmarks grease the wheels for the rest of the spending.
As for the idea that higher rates of tax at the top end will mean more revenue, the basis of the Economist claim that not ending the Bush tax rate reductions will cost X vast amount of revenue, this claim does not just ignore the reality of higher revenue from the reductions in the top rates of certain taxes under Bush, it ignores what happened under both Reagan and Thatcher, and under President Kennedy, and under every government that has reduced high top rates of tax since at least the Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany in the 18th century. Perhaps Grand Duke Leopold is too recent for the Economist writers, but to the horror of collectivists, “tax cuts for the rich” really do “pay for themselves”.
However, there is also another factor. On the very day the Economist hit the shelves, its sister publication the Financial Times reported that yet more companies were leaving the United Kingdom because of our very high rate of Corporation Tax.
Yes, you guessed it, the American combined State and Federal Corporation Tax burden is actually worse than that of the United Kingdom. “But lots of American corporations do not pay Corporation Tax” – the ones that make losses do not pay for they have no profits to pay tax out of (hint – this is not a good thing for the corporations concerned), other companies do not pay because they are not “corporations” at all – they are privately owned companies whose owners pay income tax on their profits.
Sadly ignorant of all of the above, the Economist specifically targeted John McCain’s proposal to reduced the rate of Corporation Tax as one of his “irresponsible” policies.
John McCain is no economic genius, but has shown the ability to learn. The Economist writers show no such ability, all they can do is to trot out the moronic collectivism they were taught at school and university. I know I have said this before, but it needs saying whilst the Economist still pretends to be a “free market” publication.
Probably it is the whole world I do not understand, but I am going to stick to not grasping it a bit at a time. It seems less daunting.
How does this work? Some commentators are saying that Senator McCain picked Governor Palin as his running-mate in order to attract supporters of Senator Clinton who are cross with Senator Obama for not giving up when he was winning the Democratic nomination.
Just who is crazy here? The Clintonites who think Obama is such a middle-of-the-road disaster for failing to appeal to the activist base that they might consider voting for a party that is over the other side of the road? And having done so, I look forward to their saying is the racism of the American public not Democratic-party petulance that has kept him out of the Whitehouse. Or the super-Clintonites who say they are mad at Obama for not being a woman? Republican strategists (if they exist) who care about what the tiny number of leftist Democratic activists think, but nevertheless think Palin will attract them, despite her being of the religious right persuasion and ideologically about as far from a leftist Democratic activist as possible? Or the commentators who assert such a strategy would make sense?
Or are there really large numbers of Americans who will vote for McCain solely because Palin is female and for no other reason of policy, personality or competence dividing the candidates and their platforms? That would be crazy. Wouldn’t it?
Comrades! – and revisionist Hillary supporting scum. Only a little joke, Hillary comrades – your support is really most welcome.
I stand before you today to tell you that Now is Our Time. The pathetic remnants of Western Civilization are ripe for destruction, and we will be the generation of revolutionaries that will finally achieve the goal of creating the new society. Outmoded institutions like private property will be swept away, and a new progressive order created.
And this will be achieved without once mentioning such words as “socialism” or “Marxism” in public. Indeed it is our very care to avoid scaring those mislead by capitalism, the ignorant who still cling to their guns and religion, that will help us achieve total victory. Ultimate power is within our grasp.
No longer we will have to pretend to be “proud of our country”, for as the Intellectual Vanguard of the Revolution our country is the whole planet.
We have the children and young people already. It is true that most children are still given such outmoded and old fashioned things as birthday and even “Christmas” presents. Few children are given the intense political education that these two children receive [at this point Comrade Speaker is to wave the two girl props], or that the Great One himself received – the three hours of political education per day that our Beloved Leader was given by his mother, the untypical white person, from his most early years.
However, such intense political education is only needed for the leaders, for the Community Organisers – for the Intellectual Vanguard of the Revolution. For the masses the level of conditioning provided by the progressive media and by the public collective schools and even some of the “private” schools, is enough. With minds clear of experience or information, the young can be taught that all problems are due to the greed of big businessmen (we need not even use word “capitalists” ) and can be solved by enlightened collective power.
It is true that we have made compromises and sacrifices, but look at things have turned out:
For example, only forty years ago our Comrade Revolutionaries were fighting on the streets with the corrupt Chicago Machine. We decided not to fight that Machine – but to cooperate with it, using our family ties to the Machine when we had them. And look at the results.
Now the machine is ours. It is our instrument – the instrument of the Revolution!
Today many of the largest corporations fund our organizations – just as Saul Alinksy predicted they one day would. But it is more than fear – the infiltration and, more importantly, the permeation of ideas (as Gramsci taught) means that many of the largest corporations are managed by people who are in whole or part in sympathy with us. The transition will be easy -for the managers of such corporations as General Electric hate the whole concept of share OWNERS already.
This is what pragmatism has given us – power, ultimate power. And soon this whole stinking Imperialist country will fall to us. And when this place falls, so will the whole world!
This is the secret of our success – our flexibility. If the “liberals” with their bourgeois humanitarianism are against the death penalty then we are against the death penalty – whilst they are useful to us.
But as soon as it is more useful to be in favour of the death penalty then we are in favour of it – indeed more in favour of it than anyone else. Indeed we truly are in favour of the death penalty, although not for the offenses the deluded reactionaries are – pause for laughter and shouts of “kill them all”.
Comrades, Comrades – we must remember Comrade Lenin’s teachings.
If it is for the good of the Revolution we should kill off nine tenths of the population of the whole Earth, but if it is for the good of the Revolution to resist our urges and kill no one at all – then that is the policy we should follow.
The only morality is the Revolution – the new society. There must be no more self indulgence in killing than in anything else.
Just as living children may be used as props to attract the votes of sentimental idiots – the kind of people who give “Christmas” presents [pause for more laughter], so they may be killed out of hand after they are born, or used for experiments [pause for laughter]- experiments the capitalists and their dupes are so weak as to be forced to fund with their taxes – pause for wild laughter.
There is no contradiction – for the only truth is the Revolution and its needs. For this end we may even set up Churches to take over the “God” nonsense.
Of course this is more than “we may” – for we already have, this is what Liberation Theology is about.
For whilst religion is the opium of capitalism – it can also be the energy of the Revolution!
When the new society is achieved, and it will be soon comrades, we will get rid of this “God” concept for the only true God is the Collective – not some mythical individual. Just as we will get rid of other things we pretend to hold in high regard, such as the “family” [wave prop children again – to wild laughter] – but till then these absurdities are of use. We will even use the idea of the pathetic Bush of capitalist taxes to subsidize religous groups – our religious groups. Indeed we have so ordered things that we get most of this money already!
Wild laughter – and shouts of “the capitalists fund the rope with which we will hang them”, other shouts of such things as “Warren Buffet and …… do this without being forced to” more laughter.
Comrades, Comrades we must not indulge ourselves even by too much talk – there is still much to do in the campaign.
So I will conclude by telling you that I think that our traditional private chant of “Death-to-America” is too narrow – too much in the spirit of narrow bourgeois nationalism and counter nationalism. Indeed it is has even been taken up by Islamic radicals, although of the more anti imperialist and useful kind, and they are even stupid enough to chant it in public.
So I propose a new chant. I was inspired by some of our more weak minded, but useful, comrades at Stamford University – with their “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho – Western Civilization has got to go”. But I propose something that is shorter and less flippant.
[At this point the speaker leads the crowd in the new private chant].
Death-to-the-West! Death-to-the-West! Death-to-the-West! Death-to-the-West!……….
A few days ago, the venerable Glenn Reynolds linked to an article published in the Asia Times titled Americans Play Monopoly, Russians Chess. The article, written by pseudonymous columnist Spengler, is something of an interesting read, as it offers up a comprehensively explained and intriguing motive for the former superpower’s recent machinations in Georgia.
Many Western commentators ascribe the recent Russian belligerence to a newly acquired military ability able to act upon the yearning of its current leadership which is trying to recapture the glory days of Soviet power. A good dollop of credible force applied carefully should make Russia’s tiny neighbours wake up to the fact that they are kissing the wrong butt. Spengler contends that the truth is rather less vainglorious; Russia’s recent adventures represent moves in a long-term game in which the country’s very survival is at stake.
After all, it is – as any moderately informed individual knows – facing what present-day figures predict to be a near total demographic collapse in the coming years. Russia is, says Spengler, exercising a grand strategy to eventually absorb the Russians and other ethnic populations living in the nations in its so-called “near abroad”, declaring them all Russian and thus halting the country’s disastrous population decline. This will also ensure the minority status of the Muslim population in Russia (the only ones who are breeding) and, lo and behold, win the survival of the nation in the eyes of those pulling the levers in the Kremlin. It is an insightful alternative analysis of what is driving the crisis in Georgia – not groundbreakingly so, as I am certain a number of Samizdata contributors and commenters could have provided us with much the same explanation – but nevertheless well worth consideration. → Continue reading: An amoral solution to Russia’s existential crisis
Firstly the many people who signed up for the ‘special’ text message announcement of Senator Obama choice for “running mate” were treated with great disrespect. Democrats were out singing the praises of Senator Biden (for example on Fox News) on Friday morning. Then an aircraft was sent to pick up Senator Biden from Delaware and take him to Chicago (this was first spotted by a blogger I believe) – so that he could appear with Senator Obama in the Saturday event.
This was duly noted (by both American and international media) as confirmation that Senator Obama had picked Senator Biden.
Everyone paying even slight attention knew.
Everyone from evil ‘rightwing’ foes of all that is ‘socially just’ in Britain (people like me), to casual watchers of, for example, Indian English language television.
Everyone knew – accept those activists who had trusted the Obama campaign to send them a text message and were away from the broadcast media or the internet. The texts were not sent out till this morning.
As for Senator Biden himself: a totally pro-union (i.e. supportive of government special pro-union laws) politician. And someone who is ardently in favour of expanding the size and scope of American government health, education and welfare programs – a Welfare Statist.
Almost needless to say Senator Biden is also a ‘gun control’ man and so on.
However: Senator Biden’s son will be off to serve in Iraq this October – which will show patriotism. And Senator Biden himself is strongly anti Castro – and is clearly from the non-communist left. Perhaps this is what Senator Obama meant when he promised (on CBS) that he would pick someone with very different opinions from his own, who would “challenge my thinking”.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to match over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labours, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted in The Constitution of Liberty, by FA Hayek, page 251.
This paragraph remains a superb summary of the essential flaw in what we nowadays call the “nanny state”. Unlike a proper nanny caring for little children, the paternalist state has no interest in raising children into adulthood, but instead, infantilises the public, hence finding ever more justifications for treating the populace like five-year-olds.
At least the moral scolds of the early 19th Century as related in entertaining fashion in this book at least relied, in part, on moral exhortation rather than outright bans all the time, although there was plenty of that. But De Tocqueville and other great classical liberal writers spotted the authortarian dangers of do-gooderism from an early stage in modern, industrial countries. It seems a shame that the lessons have still not been fully learned.
On a related point, I see that California, which seems to be in the grip of puritan buffoons, is now referred to in some parts as “Nannyfornia”. In fact, if you Google up the term, it says, “Did you mean California?”. That’s gotta hurt.
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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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