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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Glenn Reynolds recently interviewed Ray Kurzweil, the futurist thinker who has recently come out with a new book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. I first came into contact with Kurzweil’s ideas when I read his earlier book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. In this, he expounds his idea of the Law of Accelerating returns, which holds that technological progress grows at an exponential rate.
If you are not familiar with the idea of the Singularity, the Wikepedia page is a good place to start.
It must be emphasised that the ideas and predictions made by Singularity enthusiasts should be examined with caution. I myself am hugely optimistic about the possibilities, however, I should point out that futurists have a patchy record. This is not because they are bad; it is rather a reflection that our technological society is now so complex that understanding the various trends of our society is becoming too much for a single individual. Singularity enthusiasts concede this, and part of the reason why the term ‘singularity’ is used is that beyond the ‘singularity’ we can not really comprehend what will happen. (Just as an event horizon clouds everything within a black hole.)
However there are some features that most futurists agree will occur as progress nears the Singularity, and my purpose is to ask some questions about how they will affect issues dear to the heart of this blog. → Continue reading: Ruminations on the Singularity
James Waterton of the Daily Constitutional sees the need for more hardcore activists to spread the word for classical liberal values… and he also sees the need for more people to read his excellent articles. We agree with him on both counts
I was having a chat today with two friends about the nature of a market society. Both guys are intelligent, open minded and lacking ideological zeal. After talking about this and that, the discussion turned into me defending the free market of commerce and culture. Neither of them are heavily interested in politics, however they both articulated their positions with cognisance and we had a good discussion.
Because of the above discussion and the assumptions my friends held of the free market, I came to realise that – as enthusiasts of the free market – we do very little to actively promote the cause and its benefits. We hope our continually improving lives do the talking for us. Trouble is, these benefits can be twisted by people who do not agree with us. We are getting rich, says Green Left, at the expense of those in the third world and/or in our underclass. This is rubbish, of course, but it is an easily grasped concept, no matter how misguided. A group like Resistance goes out to a lot of schools to talk to students about the beauty of socialism. It is rich pickings for them there, because the simplistic truths of socialism appeal to minds that are neither sullied with the realities of human nature nor self-supporting adults. It is not hard to make a teenager feel bad about our society. Ask them if they lead a comfortable life. Show them a few pictures of starving African children. Let them join the dots. Child’s play. → Continue reading: We need a classical liberal ‘Resistance’ movement
‘Just let us put in place our hierarchy of rights. The right to live. The right to go to work on the underground. The right to have an ID card. The right not to have data abused.’
– Charles Clarke to MEPs before the second bombing, talking up data retention.
Freedom has no natural place in a “hierarchy of rights”. Freedom used to be what was left over when other people’s rights to their choices were taken into account. But the priesthood seems keen to ensure that there are “rights” everywhere, with no space for anything else, and that “rights” are not options, they are compulsions. Lenin would be proud.
A commenter in an earlier article here responded to someone arguing that Muslim immigrants should never have been treated as ‘immigrants’ in Britain but as ‘guest workers’ the way the Germany treat Turks in their country, making them much easier to deport when the powers-that-be decide it is time for them to go. His reply was:
…but removal of those guest workers is one hell of a job isn’t it?
Quite so. Moreover it seems obvious to me that a significant number of Muslims in Britain have successfully integrated into British society just fine and I see no reason to pretend otherwise. Yet clearly we do have a major problem with an equally significant number of Muslims who have not assimilated, show no sign of doing so and are manifestly a source of recruits for Al Qaeda.
Endlessly blathering on about how “Islam is a religion of peace” or alternatively to call for expelling ‘Muslims’, simply because they are Muslims, is the sort of wilful blindness and one size fits all collectivism of a sort I would rather leave to socialists of both left and right. Anyone who values western liberal civilisation needs to think a little harder than that, avoiding both atavistic collectivism and a head-in-the-sand refusal to see we have a serious problem that will not go away on its own.
If what we are trying to defend is a pluralistic tolerant society, then we have to make sure that the message is not just “throw the wogs out!” but rather “You are welcome here if you are willing to assimilate to a sufficient degree.”
But how does one define what that ‘degree’ is exactly? I am not talking a Norman Tebbit style “cricket test” but rather a willingness to tolerate ‘otherness’. We do not need Muslims to approve of alcohol or women in short skirts or figurative art or bells or pork or pornography or homosexuality or (particularly) apostasy. We have no right to demand that at all and obviously not all Anglicans approve of some of those things, so why require that Muslims must? No, what we do have the right to demand (and that is not too strong a word) is that they tolerate those things, which is to say they will not countenance the use of force to oppose those things even though they disapprove of them. In fact it is not just Muslims from whom we must demand such tolerance.
If we can get them to agree to tolerate those things, then it does not matter if Muslim women wear burquas because as long as they are not subject to force, a woman may elect to say “Sod this for a game of soldiers!” and cast off that symbol of misogynistic repression… and if she does not do so, well that is her choice then… but she must have a choice. They do not have to look like us (I do not hear calls for Chinatown to be razed to the ground), they do not have to share our religion(s), or lack thereof, but they do have to tolerate our varied ways and if by their actions or words they show they do not, we have every right to regard them as our enemies and take action to defend ourselves.
For decades the supporters of multiculturalism have used tax money and government regulations to actively discourage assimilation of immigrants into the broader society, preferring to see communities develop which favour ‘identity politics’ better suited and more amenable to their own collectivist world views. And now we are paying the price for that. We will not be able to defend ourselves physically or preserve our liberal society unless we stop tolerating intolerance, and that includes not just fundamentalist Islam but also the anti-western bigotry of the multiculturalists.
Surprise surprise. Today, the headline above this story, on the front page of the Guardian caused me to actually buy the thing. But I learned little I did not already know.
The profit margins for major traffickers of heroin into Britain are so high they outstrip luxury goods companies such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci, according to a study that Downing Street is refusing to publish under freedom of information legislation.
Only the first half of the strategy unit study led by the former director general of the BBC, Lord Birt, was released last Friday. The other half was withheld but has been leaked to the Guardian.
It says that the traffickers enjoy such high profits that seizure rates of 60-80% are needed to have any serious impact on the flow of drugs into Britain but nothing greater than 20% has been achieved.
The study concludes that the estimated UK annual supply of heroin and cocaine could be transported into the country in five standard-sized shipping containers but has a value which at a conservative estimate tops £4bn.
Or, as I remember a visiting American policeman saying, in some argument about drugs that I took part in about a quarter of a century ago: These guys don’t count their money, they weigh it.
The trouble is that our political class has persuaded itself that it simply cannot legalise this trade. People might kill themselves by taking too many drugs. (The perfect punishment, I would say.) The politicians already ban lots of other things because they are unsafe. (Stop. Let people take their own risks and their own chances.) “Middle England” would not stand for it. (Middle England stands for lots of other things it dislikes.) But, but, but, we just can’t. (Why not?)
Well, why not indeed? What is going on here? Maybe the root cause, if there is such a thing, of the utter refusal of the present generation of politicians to legalise drugs is that they have got it into their heads, as have an appalling proportion of their voters, that it is the job of politicians to look after the voters, in the manner of parents looking after their children. To legalise drugs would be to send out a message that the politicians simply cannot bear to send out, namely: We don’t care about you! Look after yourselves! If all you can think of to do with your lives is take drugs, you will get no money from us to pay for them. And if you wreck your lives with them, and find yourselves ill and starving, tough. The only way you will get our attention is if you commit crimes under the influence of drugs, or because you can think of no other way to make a living, in which case we catch you and punish you some more.
Meanwhile, the rest of us can help by discriminating against people who damage themselves with drugs, by denying them employment, friendship, romantic attachments, respectability. That way drug abusers, if abusers they be, will have the necessary incentive to pull themselves together.
Drugs are dangerous, although it is clear that lots of people manage to use drugs regularly while nevertheless keeping these dangers at arm’s length. As this report makes clear, the stuff is pouring in, yet our civilisation trundles on, and when it comes to civilisational collapse, alcohol surely now does far more damage than (the other) drugs. Nevertheless, there are dangers attached to these drugs, and I for one have never doubted it, which is why I have refrained from ever using them, timid soul that I am. Even cannabis – much talked up as harmless by some of the people I went to university with – actually seems to have quite severe mental health risks if you use it too much. To put it bluntly, it is now quite widely believed by scientists and doctors that it can drive you mad – which is just what my recollections of the characters of some of the people recommending cannabis to me all those years ago have long caused me to suspect.
But, however harmful – or harmless – all these drugs may be, there is no sensible future in the government treating their sale and use on a par with the kind of genuine crime where someone else is immediately hurt or attacked or has their property harmed or stolen, and is accordingly immediately ready to help the authorities with any inquiries they might be inclined to make. How is the government supposed to learn about the drug trade? Who is going to tell them about it? (Even when compiling reports about the drug trade, with no thought of arresting anyone, all they can do is “estimate” what is really going on.)
But alas, such commonsensical questions are mere pinpricks when they come up against the entrenched mental positions of virtually all our current rulers. What is needed is more than a policy upheaval. A mental upheaval is required, and those are an order of magnitude harder to contrive. Meanwhile, it does not matter to our rulers – not enough to make any difference in how they behave – how much absurdity and expense they inflict on us in order to sustain their paternal illusions, and to sustain the corresponding illusions of all those of their voters who share them.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
– 5th Amendment: US Constitution
Today is the 4th of July, when Americans celebrate their independence and much talk of freedom and constitutions occurs. This day is in many ways an orgy of self-congratulation, much of which is entirely justified (I make no secret of my pro-Americanism Atlanticism).
But perhaps, just perhaps, the ‘shot heard around the country’ that was delivered by the Supreme Court of the United States with the Kelo verdict will snap a great number of Americans out of their understandable but entirely misplaced complacency regarding the benevolence of their own nation-state.
Not only does Eminent Domain now pose a threat to anyone whose property happens to catch the eye of a well connected property developer, the USA also has outrageous ‘asset forfeiture’ laws that allow suspects to have their property taken by the state, reversing the burden of proof and making the accused (but un-convicted and usually un-tried) person prove their property is not the proceeds of some crime in order to have the property returned (they cannot prevent it from being taken in the first place). So much for ‘due process’.
Americans would do well to remember that it was the use of British sedition laws to seize private property from political activists was a major cause of disaffection in the colonies in the lead up to the Revolution in 1776. Moreover those sedition laws were far less capricious and more respectful of due process than modern ‘asset forfeiture’ laws (colonial era sedition laws at least required you to actually be convicted).
The fight against Al Qaeda and any who ally with them must go on but the greatest threat to liberty (and in the long run that inevitably means life) facing the people in the United States comes not from without but from within. Until the entire scope of what government can do is radically cut back, Kelo is pointing the way to a grim future. I hope that the Supreme Court’s destruction of the 5th Amendment by allowing the state to take private property for the private use of property developers, will be reversed long before it requires the active use of the 2nd Amendment to make private property secure against those who would rather use political power rather than markets to enrich themselves.
Happy birthday America.
At Hyde Park, Dido just introduced as the “African Ambassador for Music from Senegal”, Youssou N’Dour*, who she was “in awe” of, “not just because he has a wonderful voice, but because of his wonderful beliefs”. He came on stage to say:
“The debt cancellation is OK. The aid is OK. But, please, open your markets.”
There will be an awful lot of well-intentioned nonsense given unquestioning, reverential coverage today, with ignorance and platitudes dressed up as profundity. Maybe, however, for perhaps the first time at an event of this type and on this scale, a kernel of truth will wriggle its way onto TV.
I consider this a small but notable victory for the notion that, if you permit free speech and are prepared to tolerate every misguided and moronic idea, eventually the truth will out.
* [edit]: add correct spelling and link.
Samizdatista Paul Marks lets rip in the comment section of the new Tory leadership blog at Conservative Home on the topic of that Orwellian doublespeak term ‘social justice’. Check it out.
Only a wilful fool would dispute that racism moved from being the unremarkable default mainstream view in the western world to being a prejudice which scarcely dare speak its name. I would argue that this did not come about just because a few anti-discrimination laws got passed. A great many things are illegal and yet doing them does not put you ‘beyond the pale’ in polite society. In most circles lighting up a spliff or speeding or paying your builder/nanny/housekeeper in cash are matters of little or no account and few people would think less of you if they discovered you were doing so. Overt racism on the other hand has precisely that effect because regarding that there has been a cultural shift. To be a racist is not just wrong, it makes you a jackass in the eyes of others. Most racists are now more prone to keep their views to themselves, not because someone will call the cops and have them hauled off to a re-education camp, but because they can no longer safely assume others will share their meta-context.
And so with that in mind, it may seem trivial to rail against people who display or wear images of Che Guevara but what is at stake is far more than a battle for mere tee-shirt space. The fact that a person wearing a Himmler or Hitler tee-shirt would attract scorn is quite appropriate, and so it is really quite intolerable that fans of the mass murderers of the left get to think images of their favoured mass murdering thug makes them look cool. Why just let that slide?
Groups like the ‘animal rights’ activists PETA provide a fairly good example of ‘going to the culture’ with some success at portraying people who wear fur coats as wicked and getting that meme into the zeitgeist fairly effectively at least in the USA and UK (though rather less successfully elsewhere). So do not shrug off efforts to portray people who wear images of communist mass murderers as jackasses rather than ‘cool’ as wasted effort over something something of no account. Little things like this add up and if you believe, as I do, that the single biggest factor determining the triumph or defeat of liberty is a cultural expectation of liberty, then fighting for the cultural issues really does matter. And if the lumpen wearing the Che Guevara tee-shirt does not even know who he was, as will often be the case, then tell him in no uncertain terms so that next time he looks at his pile of shirts, perhaps he will think twice before putting it on and maybe, just maybe, look at other people wearing those vile tee-shirts a bit differently.
Get into a discussion with any self-described anarcho-capitalist and it is only a matter of time before you are directed to David Friedman for an answer to the conundrum posed. I have generally considered such appeals to authority as tacit admissions of defeat – if an argument is any good, it ought to be easy to summarise and explain. Conversely, it is often the least defensible arguments which require complex exposition (and by a third party to boot!). I was recently referred to Friedman by Scott Scheule during a discussion at my own blog and promised that Friedman would deal with the thorny question of what differentiates the “Free market protection agencies” predicted by anarcho-capitalists under anarchy from the real world “protection agencies” we observe in conditions approximating anarchy such as mafias and warlords. Friedman sketched out this scenario: → Continue reading: Free market protection agencies and the tragedy of the commons
There is an interesting article in The American Conservative by Robert Locke called Marxism of the Right, by which he is referring to libertarianism. The ‘money quote’ being:
If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function.
Like most right-statist (conservative) criticisms of libertarianism, this one fails on several levels. In this article’s mitigation, libertarianism (like conservatism) means different things to different people and so no doubt some self-described or de facto libertarians believe that ‘pure’ selfishness and individualism are all a society needs to function (that said, I reject the implied semantics suggesting that selfishness and altruism are mutually exclusive as I do not accept the Randian definition of altruism that Locke rather amusingly seems to use). Yet most well considered libertarians do not really take such a simple view of things as Locke suggests.
He asks libertarians many questions:
What if a free society needed to draft its citizens in order to remain free?
Then is it in fact a ‘free society’ to start with? Or is it just ‘less un-free’ that some alternative? More correctly however ‘society’ does not draft its ‘citizens’ (and I prefer the more honest term ‘subjects’), only states do that… and the two are not the same thing at all.
What if it needed to limit oil imports to protect the economic freedom of its citizens from unfriendly foreigners?
But whose ‘economic freedom’ is really being talked about here? I find it bizarre that in 2005 this argument is still being made about a fungible globally traded commodity.
What if it needed to force its citizens to become sufficiently educated to sustain a free society?
I would be curious to know if Locke feels that society in the United States was hugely less free before the introduction of educational conscription. I also wonder if he feels that the low quality state education imposed on children in the blearier parts of many large US cities has made those people more free and if so, why?
What if it needed to deprive landowners of the freedom to refuse to sell their property as a precondition for giving everyone freedom of movement on highways?
And yet Japan, a nation of extraordinarily high land prices, manages to create a rail system vastly superior to that in the USA without legal powers of compulsory purchase. There are always alternatives.
What if it needed to deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap foreign labor in order to keep out poor foreigners who would vote for socialistic wealth redistribution?
But surely here the problem is not the origin of voters but rather unconstrained democracy. This is not an argument for controlling immigration but rather for sensible constitutional constraints which set the acceptable limits of politics. → Continue reading: Marxism of the Right?
Here are a couple of recent stories, both recently linked to by Instapundit, that I think deserve to be put next to each other.
First, here is a quote I found while rootling about in the McCain/Feingold story, which Dale Amon has already posted about here. Here is the bit that interested me:
These laws are decidedly NOT aimed at online press, commentary or blogs, and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 was carefully drafted to exclude them. The FEC has now been asked to initiate a rulemaking to work out how to deal with different kinds of Internet political expenditures, and there will be plenty of opportunity for public commentary.
This denial is, of course, the result of the exact opposite having been alleged. I read it because one Winfield Myers of the Democracy Project quotes it, and notes that the quotee, a hot shot lawyer, makes very little of his past legal relationship with McCain. Bloggers prefer it when they know where people are coming from.
And the second quote, is from a review of a book called Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything.
McNab was a seafood importer who shipped undersized lobsters and lobster tails in opaque plastic bags instead of paper bags. These were trivial violations of a Honduran regulation – equivalent to a civil infraction, or at most, a misdemeanor. However, using creative lawyering, a government prosecutor used this misdemeanor offense as the basis for the violation of the Lacey Act, which is a felony. The prosecutor then used the Lacey Act charge as a basis to stack on smuggling and money laundering counts. You got that?
McNab was guilty of smuggling since he shipped lobster tails in bags that you can see through, instead of shipping them through bags that would frustrate visual inspection. He was guilty of money laundering since he paid a crew on his ship to “smuggle the tails.” Although it turned out that the Honduran regulation was improperly enacted and thus unenforceable, the government did not relent. A honest businessman lost his property and his freedom: McNab is serving 8-years in prison.
Okay, so what do the tribulations of a seafood importer have to do with the right of bloggers to blog what they damn well please? Well, what interests me is the political process involved in both matters. How the hell do the laws and the processes that got poor Mr McNab nabbed get put in place in the first place? The phrase “not aimed at” is the point of this posting. → Continue reading: “Not aimed at who?”: how distributed governmental stupidity McNabs the innocent
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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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