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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Scott Cattanach writes in regarding the remark by European Commission Romano Prodi that membership in the Eurozone is a “definitive marriage” and “You cannot leave the Eurozone once you’re in”.
Funny thing is, marriages today aren’t forever and irreversible, and most of the politicians who think super-state agreements are irreversible probably wouldn’t want to ban no-fault divorce. You can dump your husband or wife, but not the State, government is important, you see
Quite so, that does seem to be what they think.
Just when we were about to celebrate finally pulling the plug on Noam Chomsky the world seems to conspire to throw him a lifeline. I am talking about the apparent collapse of the US energy corporation Enron who, like just about every other major US corporation I should imagine, sought political influence by contributing to the Republican Party election campaign. Nothing new about this of course and it would come as a considerable surprise if the Enron suits didn’t shovel a fistful of dollars at a few Democrats just to hedge their bets
But you can already hear the rush of adrenalin in leftist veins at the prospect of tarring George Bush with the brush of financial scandal. The Brussels Broadcasting Corporation can barely conceal its glee as they report that Bush is in big trouble! Real big trouble! He’s deeply implicated. He’s trying to distance himself but the questions won’t go away. This is worse than Whitewater. Much worse! Will Bush survive??!!
But that’s nothing. The best is yet to come as the demented Chomskyites and disgruntled Democrats (or do I repeat myself?) start building their coalition for a major offensive. Expect lots of this kind of thing all over cyberspace:
Oh yeah, Bush and dirty big oil millionaire pals robbed a whole bunch of American seniors and kids and minorities so they could rig the election result and get their boy in the Whitehouse instead of Gore who was going to be the best President in the history of the whole world and then Bush and Ashcroft and his pals in the CIA got together with Mossad and the oil execs and the Contras to arrange the whole attack on the WTC so they could destroy all the financial records and try to make people forget that they stole the election and conned the American people and then they started this whole phoney racist war so they could distract attention from all the money that the CIA and Mossad were plundering to give to the Russian mafia so they could give a pipeline to General Noriega so he could lay it all over the bodies of dead Afghans to pump oil from Finland into Mexico to earn kickbacks for the FBI so they could run a dirty tricks campaign against Ralph Nader to stop him winning the next election and its all about dirty money and dirty Republicans and dirty oil and…..
Yawn
I agree with ‘Johnny Student’ that one reason for the elite to want to present the world as complex is to keep them in jobs as the only people able to understand it. Another reason for wanting the same thing is as an explanation for the failure of their preferred solutions. They look around after decades of welfare/gun control/affirmative action and still see poverty/gun crime/blacks at the bottom of the heap. It is much pleasanter to bemoan the complexity and “stubborness” of poverty/crime/racism than admit that their solutions were just plain wrong. It also gets you a bigger budget.
Obviously in many ways the world is complex. But rather as physics can reduce multifarious phenomena to simple equations, I think you can dig down to some fairly simple ethical principles. The complexity comes in seeing what applies where.
I am certainly not an Objectivist, though it would be fair to say I have been influenced by Ayn Rand’s works. For me, the conjectural objective epistemology of Karl Popper makes more sense, but I am also of the view that Rand is not without her merits.
Thus when I saw Tech pundit Andrew Orlowski writing in an article in The Register that Ayn Rand was a crypto-fascist, that was not something I could leave unchallenged. I must confess I have never been a great fan of Andrew Orlowski, as he also writes for New Statesman, a publication that the excellent Will Quick of DailyPundit described exquisitely as “a haven of fluorescent idiocy”.
I e-mailed Orlowski as follows:
Sir,
I would have assumed that, given your well known statist beliefs, you would have known what the word ‘fascist’ actually means. It would seem not. But let me guess… you take the Chomsky line on language and my attempt to impose coherent meaning on a word is just evidence of my desire to oppress you. Yeah, that must be it.
Had you indicated Rand’s ideas were not entirely rational, then certainly you would have made a valid point. Her non-conjectural objective epistemology does have its weaknesses, but fascist? Ludicrous. Fascism is a form of nationalist collectivism, a socialist offshoot, and which part of Rand’s ideology have you identified as collectivist? Or have you identified some form of fascism I was previously unaware of that is not in fact collectivist? Some sort of ‘individualist fascism’? That would certainly be a fascinating concept: mass rallies of one at Nuremburg perhaps?
Fascist economics involve national control (but not necessarily nominal ownership) of the means of production in the service of (ethnic) national objectives… can you point me at the remarks in Rand’s works where she advocates that?
Clearly you do not know what you are talking about and thus I am disinclined to believe anything else you write.
By your own words you are revealed, sir.
Perry de Havilland …-
Andrew Dodge is not well pleased by some people’s views of ‘Lord of the Rings’
I feel I must wade into the sordid debate about Tolkien and Lord of the Rings. I am afraid there are some prevailing factors which will mean that the great man will never get the kudos due to him by fellow writers and the critics. The man has absolute no writer “cred”. He was not an ardent left, a pederast, pedophile, drug addict, raging queer, womaniser, sado-masochist or suicide prone loon. The man was an Oxford don who liked nothing more than smoking his pipe with a glass of something while he and others (C.S. Lewis) read their latest work. The man enjoyed the company of his fellow writers, his own creations and books instead of little boys, hookers or criminals. How can this man have sold so many books? His critics can only muster one insult to the good man’s name: he wrote for children. His books contained no rape, mass murder, transvestites or drug addicts. His books were quite simply a story of a battle between good and evil in a fantasy world. (Of course he is loathed by the snooty writer/critic for spawning the fantasy genre as well. In fact this may be his greatest crime against the written word.)
Of course the poor man gets it from those who should be on his side for the same reason as above. The happy-clappy’s who should like him for his “Christian” themes (and some do), instead loath him for his fantasy books. His books contain magic therefore must be evil. Not only that but they blame Tolkien for the genre, they blame him for Dungeons & Dragons and all other Role Play Games, computer games other than chess, heavy metal music, Columbine (& all other acts of teenage violence) and all other activities enjoyed by the young (mostly males). I am not sure if they have managed to blame Tolkien for sex yet, but that is only a matter of time.
Ironically Harry Potter maybe saving Tolkien from the happy-clappy wrath. I did a quick search on Google and found several sites praising the Lord of the Rings for its Christian elements. These sites were attacking Harry Potter as actually evil and satanic, and letting Tolkien off. The articles posted were recent, since the Harry Potter movie was released and at the time of LOTR.
Below I have included the letter I wrote to the Telegraph in response to an act of butchery in their opinion page. The author managed to include the arguments against Tolkien from both the left and the right.
_____________________
Sir,
I was appalled at the overwhelmingly inaccurate portrayal of Tolkien aficionados in the article (9th Dec Telegraph Opinion page). The piece was written with all the intelligence and accuracy of a tabloid article. It was boorish and nasty, coming across as a knuckle-dragging rugby player’s description of anyone who is at all bookish. In addition to maligning those of us who read and admire Tolkien the article goes on to insult AD&D and other role play game players, computer game players and heavy metal/hard rock music fans. As part of these insults there is a not so subtle jab at the young male Tolkien fan’s sexual preferences then bemoaning the lack of promiscuity, illegal drug use and anti-social behaviour in their lives.
If the article had stuck to the valid point it was making about the author’s designs for his book, it would have been much more effective.
Surely of all the possible outlets, the Telegraph is that last place you would expect to find this kind of sensationalist stereotype-filled diatribe.
Andrew Ian Dodge
Westminster
As I seem to have gotten some dander up on a previous post (for which I am utterly unrepentant), this may be a good time for me to discuss a more general topic: why Libertarians are no closer to the Right than to the Left. I’m not going to do this by writing a philosophical treatise but by describing a personal journey.
I have been a Libertarian-writ-capitalized for almost as long as there has been a Libertarian Party. I missed the beginning by a few years and much regretted that lost chance to have voted for someone other than Jimmy Carter. I certainly would not have voted for a Republican (other than Goldwater but I was far too young then) under any circumstances, then or now, and most certainly not for one tainted by association with that most evil and dishonest of all 20th Century Presidents, Richard Milhouse Nixon.
I was a libertarian from the time I was a young teenager, but there was no Party to associate myself with or to tell me that I was not the only one with beliefs about individual liberty. I admired Barry Goldwater greatly and respected his opinion that the Vietnam war should either be fought or not fought. This earned him an undeserved warmonger label and succeeded in electing the man whose name I was chanting in marches around the Pittsburgh Federal Building a few years later when I was one of the organizers of a Guerilla Theatre troop of the Yippy variety:
Hey, Hey LBJ, How many kids did you kill today!
Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win!
This was partly youthful nose-thumbing at holier than thou right wing bigots and partly a major dislike of the concept of draft slavery. I might add that our troop broke up because most of it was involved in a court house riot after their targetted arrest at a demonstration in front of Draft Board member Julius Steinsaper’s house. I was away for Easter and missed the fun. I use the word advisedly as quite a few of my friends went to the hospital with patches of hair ripped out, broken bones, you name it… and I think one policeman pulled a muscle in his back while beating someone and another whacked his own hand with a billy club. That part of our troop became “The Pittsburgh n”, where n equals some number I have long forgotten.
In an earlier action we set up a baby doll in Mellon Square Park and offered passerby’s imaginary shots for a quarter. We were soon surrounded by about 20 or more police and police dogs; the street was blocked due to the number of police vehicles parked there while Pittsburgh’s finest debated whether we were violating a City or a State ordinance by carrying a toy Tommy Gun in public. Their boss finally came by, probably to find out why the rest of the city was denuded of police… he looked at the 6 of us with one toy tommy gun… he looked at the 20 some of well armed police surrounding us… he looked at us again… he looked at them, shook his head in disbelief and waved at us to just simply go away. I could not help the strains of “Alice’s Restaurant” going through my head.
One cannot say I came away from the incidents above with a great deal of respect for the police and the State. That is not even to mention the busts of friends for grass, the busts of others with planted drugs, the newspaper reports about friends busts that listed items that turned out to be birth control pills and the like…
Above all else, the 1960’s and early 70’s were a battle against an extremist right wing society that had no compunctions about the use of violence to suppress people. If you did not conform (and god help you if you were so nonconformist as to be black!) you were a Commie and the Enemy. This attitude in the government culminated in the Kent State murders of 1970.
On the day it happened I was at an antiwar demonstration at which my girlfriend was tossed in the back of a Tactical Police van. You know the sort, the cops they keep in a cage and feed raw meat to. So I was not in the best of moods towards the evil state when I saw the news about the murders a few hours later. I and thousands of other students were ready to go out and bring down the government that night, and if anyone had truly had a clue there would have been a nationwide attempt at something foolish. Even as it was, the reaction was so large and so angry and so sustained that it was the turning point. The kids who died at Kent State very directly helped end the draft, the war and everything the Right wing stood for.
Much of the New Left (ie the kids) in those days were profoundly non-statist. The by-word was “do your own thing”. Live and let live. Don’t enslave me to go fight your war for your reasons.
But there was another element. The left may have been the flag around which we rallied, but the flagholders had their own agenda, and towards the end that agenda started to be foisted on us. I could probably do a bit of research and give you the precise day on which I parted company from them. A Senator from Ohio was speaking in Skibo ballroom (the CMU student union) and instead of asking about the war or some other “correct” issue, I asked about support for the Mars program. For those who don’t know, this was the post-Apollo time when Mars programs were still being discussed… just before the long knives came down and the remaining Saturn V’s became horizontal bird houses.
After the talk, I was caught near one of the ballroom doors by one of my co-radicals, and a co-founder of CMU’s “Effete Snobs for Peace” (ESP). The exchange went something like this:
John: That was a really pig question Dale.
Dale: <3 beat pause> Go fuck yourself, John.
At which point I dropped all connection to campus radical organizations. John had done me the favour of explicating that the Left was as profoundly anti-liberty and anti-individualist as the Right.
This left me politically homeless for some years. I worked hard, did theatre, played music, partook of the musicians holy rites of SD&RR and in general lived the life of a free man (one that would curl the hairs of a Right-Winger) and utterly ignored politics other than to wish as much ill as possible on Tricky Dicky during the Watergate hearings.
Finally, in 1978 I ran across the Libertarian Party. I have voted straight party ever since. Or at least when I can get my absentee ballot sent over here, something which seems to be beyond the organizational capabilities of Allegheny County.
So if I seem a bit harsh on Right Wingers… it is because I am and I simply don’t much care. I do not see them as any more of a fellow traveller than I do those on the left, and the left has much better parties and is a lot more fun to hang out with.
Of all the many consequences of the 9/11 atrocities, I have noticed one that has hitherto gone unheralded and probably unnoticed. Amidst the long periods I have spent reading and scrutinizing the many voices of America that are broadcast over the internet, I have noticed with mounting bemusement a highly prevalent use of the term ‘Britney’
At first, I must confess that I was at a loss to grasp the meaning or significance of this term but, upon examining the context in which it is most frequently used its true meaning soon made istelf abundantly clear; the term ‘Britney’ is, of course, one of affection and endearment for us, the British
How could it be anything but, when used with such visceral relish by so many of our American cousins when they say things like:
Oh man, I really wanna rock with Britney
Or
Me and Britney gonna paaarteeeeee
Or
Wow, I dreamt about Britney last night and woke up with, like, a major woody
Hot salty tears of pride and gratitude roll down my cheeks as realise that our ‘special relationship’ has not only been undiminshed by time and circumstance but rather has deepened and solidified. How my heart swells with pride when I think of all those Americans in bars from Boston to Philadelphia and Chicago raising a glass of Pabst Blue Riband to toast the memory of Winston Churchill, a truly great Britney
This is nothing short of an inestimable gift, for, while the French are Frogs, the Germans are Krauts, the Canadians are Kanuks and the Russians are still Commies, we British are ‘Britneys’; the donees of a idiomatic expression that carries within its pithy cadence all those qualities that Americans have come to expect from us; steadfast and redoubtable, yet chirpy and easy-going
I exhort all my fellow countrymen and women to embrace and celebrate this term and make it our own and I urge our American allies to go forward and conquer their enemies for us ‘Britneys’ are with you
I am slowly catching up with articles posted in my absence, and I really have to add my 2p about Kevin Holtsberry’s opinions on that lad in Australia. In two short words: They Suck. Any man who would deny a 15 year old his last chance to experience the joys of sex before his premature demise is simply sick minded. If people like this were in a position to have actually prevented it, I would go further and simply call them Evil, on a par with the Communists with whom Natalja also compares them.
Personally, I found this one of the more touching stories of a year that had all too much evil in it. I am very glad that in at least one case love and humanity prevailed. This is at the heart of why we want a libertarian society. Without State power men of evil intent will not have the power to prevent acts of compassion and kindness.
And in any case… there is always Las Vegas. 😉
Ooooo, I do love Switzerland. The place reeks with old money, refinement and smooth, rich chocolate: an oasis of sanity, an island of serene, efficient and discrete capitalism amidst the swirling adhesive gunk of Euro-scleroses.
In all of Switzerland I have always liked Zürich the best. Across the river things are quite decadent and tinged with counter-culture, in that not very threatening Swiss sort of way. Lurking amidst the sex shows and ‘clubs’ there are several quite fun bars and student filled coffee houses when one is in the mood for that sort of place. Around where I am staying, on Kirchgasse, it is all great shops, nice hotels, comfortable cafés and fairly good restaurants. Storchengasse is my favourite part of all and that is where I arranged to meet my business acquaintance for dinner tonight after he offered to take me out. Other than the fact I nearly froze to death looking in the shop windows on the way to see him, everything here is wonderful.
We talk business mostly, speaking in English, discussing how business must be conducted in Italy and how this must be done with that lawyer because of EU law and that must be done with this lawyer because of Italian law and then there must be a permit to do that and then we must register this and set up an account there and then we must wait for that to be approved…so on and so on and so on… and then I ask what must we do when we meet in his office on Monday for this business here in Switzerland?
“Oh, that”, he says… “when you told me you were coming, I had everything drawn up, agreements, plans, everything. I will just drop them off at your hotel tomorrow. If everything is okay, sign the agreements and give them back over lunch on Monday.” Clean direct Swiss-German accented efficiency and simplicity.
Oh Switzerland. I do love Switzerland. Why can’t everywhere be Switzerland?
Now that Will Wilkinson is back from his Teutonic debauching, The Fly Bottle is overflowing with typically excellent offerings.
Goldberg pretends to loathe grab-bag culture, but he and his ilk do it just the same when they pick Christianity over Celtic paganism and individual rights over collectivist subjugation. However, conservatives attempt to camouflage that their preferences are just preferences by constructing a highly selective narrative about “Western Civilization” that gives their preferences the illusion of intrinsic worth as necessary keystones of their fictitious cultural edifice. I’m not being postmodern here. I’m being descriptive.
Of the essentials of Western Civilization, Goldberg writes:
… some of the ingredients for Western civilization I have in mind are such categories as Christianity and religion in general, sexual norms, individualism, patriotism, the Canon, community standards of conduct, democracy, the rule of law, fairness, modesty, self-denial, and the patriarchy.
Why not Stoic mysticism, collectivism, military nationalism, absolute monarchy, slavery and the Napoleonic Code? Why don’t these go in Jonah’s grab bag?
Top notch stuff.
A great film and nice biscuits but…
Ginger Stampley spectacularly misunderstands not so much our views on the dynamics of insurrection, but the entire nature of the conversation that was taking place. Whilst I also think she gravely under estimates the polarisation going on in American society, I do not think that is really the issue. She says our views are based on dystopian fantasy. Well, yes… that is the whole point. Neither Walter nor I think the United States is ripe for armed groups to rise up against state tyranny… things would have to get far worse than they are for that to even be within the realm of possibilities as things stand.
I actually look to civil society in the United States, for all its many and variegated flaws, as the Anglosphere’s beacon of hope and regard it as almost certain to overcome the contrary tides of repressive statist stasis (well, almost certain). For there to be an armed insurgency in the US beyond that of fringe groups like the KKK, I would have to be quite wrong in my essentially optimistic long term view of US society. Yet if it turns out I am, and that Waco was just the first and most spectacular of many, then the dystopian fantasy would indeed be turning into dystopian fact, and the required ‘popular support’ for armed resistance Ginger talks about would indeed start to develop.
The reason I am so keen to prevent the attempted disarming of American society is that this is a wonderful litmus test of civil society’s health… and hence why I am increasingly pessimistic about already disarmed British civil society, which grows more like Stanley Kubrick’s vision of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ year by year as our common law rights are rachetted away by Brussels with the assistance of people like Tony Blair and Jack Straw and David Blunkett and Michael Hesaltine and Christopher Patten, all profoundly hostile to the essential underpinnings of non-state centred British civil society.
Thanks to Gary Larreategui for a small correction
Samizdata has seen a debate of recent on the procurement of a harlot for a dying underage boy. This has been a great source of consternation for those who call themselves Conservatives and/or Christian. There have been hysterical letters to the Telegraph pondering the fate of the boy’s soul. In my not so humble opinion I think it was a stellar idea to give the kid his dying wish. Surely getting laid is a hell of a lot more healthy than be taken to a park owned by the arch-evil, Disney or meeting some knuckle-dragging sports hero barely capable of joined up words? At least one is natural.
The debate over the fate of this poor boy does ape the debate over cannabis, both medical and otherwise. For some, mostly the same people listed above, the fact that cannabis has a medicinal effect for me and many others is irrelevant. It is an “evil” drug that leads to other evils, full stop.
I digress, this row has reminded me of a stink that has raised the hackles of many in the US, and more specifically Maine. A Republican Representative in the Maine State Legislature proposed a law to make adultery a crime. She proposed jailing adulterers as if they were murderers, fraud-sters or child molesters. The Representative wished to enshrine her religious beliefs in law and then use it to pummel “fornicators.” Above I have listed the discussions surrounding the bill and its merits. It should be noted that neither she nor her supporters had done much contemplation about how the bill was to be enforced.
This is yet another case of the Conservative right in both the US and the UK being as statist as their socialist opponents. Both sides wish to use the state to enforce their particular form of morality.
What bothers me more is that this Representative is making a complete arse out of her party and those of us on the right. (In Maine right of centre whether it be libertarian or authoritarian, are tarred with the same brush). Worse yet, this idiot is providing a staging area for every religious loon going to come out of the wood-work they were confined to in order that Bush might get elected. They seem to be keen to tear up the uneasy truce that saw those of us of my ilk siding with those of an authoritarian nature to rid the US of the vile Clinton/Gore axis. Many of these types are rather perturbed that Mr Bush is not as hard-right as he was portrayed by the left-wing media.
I would like to point out to some of you on this list that a few years ago this hysterical happy-clappy element in Maine “outed” me as a Satanist and follower of “dark path” as a result of a satirical site (about me) which I linked to for a laugh. Puritanism is alive and well in the New England and the South of the US even in the 21st century.
It does pain me to see this sort of hysterical superstitious idiocy still existing in a so-called civilised country in the beginning of the 21st century. Do anyone believe that the US will ever outgrow this lunacy or is it a permanent feature of the country ready to rear itself given the slightest opportunity to do so?
Can US libertarians take the right-of-centre ground away from these people? WIll the actual founding beliefs of the country ever actually have a chance to take hold or will the US continue to piss away it’s founding beliefs and freedom? At the rate its going I doubt the US will make its next b-day and it certainly won’t make 400 years old. I should not be too shocked, after all the US has an Attorney General who thinks dancing is a mortal sin.
Andrew Ian Dodge
[Editor’s note: Andrew is the author is the excellent book Statism Sucks!, which is about, well, take a wild guess]
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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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