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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The thing I find most unsatisfactory about the debate over gay marriage is the widespread misunderstanding about the law as it is presently configured.
Of course, I cannot speak about the law in other countries but here in Britain same-sex marriage is not illegal it is void. There is a world of difference in those two positions.
Allow me to explain. If two men (or two women) in the UK decide that they wish to wed then they are perfectly free to engage in any type of marriage ceremony they desire accompanied by confetti, bridesmaids and any number of drunken, embarrassing relatives reeling around the dancefloor while the band plays ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree’.
Nobody is going to a lift a finger to stop them nor will they ever be subjected to any form of official censure or arrest or prosecution. However, the state will not issue a licence for that marriage and, as far as the law is concerned, there was no marriage. It never happened, it does not exist and the participants remain as two single people. → Continue reading: Markets are a many splendid (and unsplendid) thing
There has been some laughs about Linda Ronstadt getting kicked out of a casino for her anti-Bush tirade. This happened because of confusion about the right to free speech and the right of private property to be enjoyed as the owner sees fit.
Casino owner Bill Timmans explained that:
We hired Ms. Ronstadt as an entertainer, not as a political activist. She went up in front of the stage and just let it out. This was not the correct forum for that.
This is all quite proper in my view. I have nothing against anti-Bush tirades, and I might make one myself soon (although I’m unlikely to dedicate it to Mike Moore), but there is a place for everything, and I would suggest that if you are paid as an entertainer, when you go to work, you entertain.
And the casino owners were right to evict her. It is like having a blogroach in Samizdata comments. A casino is private property, and the owners can admit whoever they like, and set guidelines for how guests should behave.
My last posting has provoked a storm of comment, which I hope relfects the controversy of the issue and not any inflammatory tone on my part. I tend to let the commentators discuss the issue, because frankly they do a very good job!
However, adam raises a very interesting point:
Isn’t this kind of argument fallacious, as you’re assuming the phrase “assumed consent” has the same moral status in all circumstances?
Compare with other phrases, eg “killed”. “I killed him cause he got in my way” – moral status = bad. But, “I killed the rabid dog because otherwise it would have eaten those poor babies” – moral status = good.
Now this could invalidate my argument if I had used euthanasia as an example of ‘presumed consent’, because then the motive for killing becomes central.
However, I was pointing out that someone having sexual intercourse with a minor or a person with diminished mental faculties would want to defend himself of herself of the charge of ‘rape’ by claiming ‘presumed consent’.
The point is that sexual intercourse is not a criminal offence, despite the attempts of puritans of both Left and Right to make it so. Therefore it is the question of consent that is central, and whether a person’s inability to give consent allows other people to take decisions for them. Because minors and persons with diminished mental faculties are generally unable to give their consent, we have a presumption that consent is not given in such cases, hence the notion of ‘statutory rape’.
The main moral issue about statutory rape is that an age of consent will not protect some immature adults whilst unreasonably assuming a lack of moral faculties for fast-devlopers.
To blur the distinction between a crime based on the lack of consent (rape) and an abhorrence of sex to create the concept of (sex crime) is something straight out of Orwell’s nineteen eighty four.
I find it fascinating that a commentator should jump from sex to murder. One is a crime. The other is not.
They are not artefacts, they are not animals, they are not a tourist attraction, they are people. They do not belong where animals do, they belong in settlements, villages, towns and cities like you and me.
– Sydney Tshepiso Pilane
This is an account of my wildly fluctuating sympathies as I gradually found out more about a legal case launched by the Bushmen of Botswana.
I first saw the story on Ceefax. It’s disappeared from there, so I can not quote, but I got the impression that the Bushmen had been evicted from the Kalahari game reserve and that the (possibly dishonest) reason the Bostwana government had given for evicting them was that it could not afford to provide services. Riiight. I powered up for Welfare Rant #2 on the way that welfare systems start by offering their clients services and end by making the ‘services’ compulsory and demanding that people live their lives in such a way as to allow the government to fulfil its side of the forced exchange with minimum inconvenience.
Then I thought, not so fast, Natalie. → Continue reading: Kalahari Bushmen, New Age Travellers and the paradoxes of state welfare.
I always knew there was something fishy about the Spectator. My suspicions were confirmed by the article which surfaced for air last week (but which I have only just got around to reading).
The author is very troubled by the apparently catastrophic collapse in fish stocks:
In a single human lifetime we have inflicted a crisis on the oceans, comparable to what Stone Age man did to the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, what 19th-century Americans did to the bison and the passenger pigeon, what 20th-century British and Norwegians did to the great whales, and what people in this century are doing to rainforests and bushmeat. This crisis is caused by overfishing.
The emotionally overdone analogies (integral to any discussion concerning wildlife or the environment it seems) could well tempt me into dismissing his entire thesis. But that would prevent me from making what I regard as a more important point so, for now at least, I am willing to play along with the proposition that fish stocks are, indeed, under some degree of threat. In any event, I have no evidence to the contrary.
But at this point the author of the article and I part company, as the former goes on to lay the blame for impending eco-disaster on the proliferation of celebrity chefs with their apparently insatible appetites for exotic fish dishes. A conclusion so absurd as to be almost worthy of satire.
In common with every other ‘opinion former’, the author draws on what he regards as an unarguably correct and obvious equation: if some species of fish are dying out it can only be because we greedy, selfish humans are eating too many of them. Not once does it seem to occur to the author that if that equation were true then we surely would have chomped cattle, pigs, sheep and chickens into extinction long ago.
The dwindling numbers of marine animals is a ‘tragedy of the commons’ arising from the fact that the high seas are insufficiently owned. Apart from some nationalised coastal waters, fishermen are pretty much at liberty to trawl for as much fish as they can lay their hands on anywhere they please, anyhow they please and as often as they like. There is simply nothing to stop them.
In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that they fail to husband or manage the species they live off. There is no incentive for them to do so. However, if stretches of sea were owned in the same way as land is owned then not only would the owners be able to bar trespassers but (as with land farmers) they would have an commercial incentive to find ways to breed as much edible marine life as possible for human consumption and resultant profit. Hence the countless millions of farm animals in the world despite the prodigious rate at which we humans kill and eat them.
Until such times as the oceans are parcelled up into ‘watersteads’, stocks of marine animals will continue to decline. If you want to save the seas from becoming a watery grave, privatise them now.
As the sort-of unofficial Samizdata consiglieri, I have occasionally had to advise the editors about the laws that govern them things we can and cannot say. Fortunately, we have managed, thus far, to steer clear of unwelcome attention from the authorities.
However, that task (and my sort-of job) could be about to become a degree of magnitude more difficult:
Inciting religious hatred is to be made a criminal offence under plans unveiled by Home Secretary David Blunkett.
The government failed to get laws introducing the offence passed by Parliament in the wake of the US terror attacks in 2001.
In a speech in London, Mr Blunkett revived the proposals.
He said he was returning to the plans as there was a need to stop people being abused or targeted just because they held a particular religious faith.
As mentioned in the linked article, this proposal was first hastily put forward by David Blunkett as a knee-jerk response to the WTC attacks in 2001 and justified as necessary measure to counter the whirlwind of anti-Islamic hatred he believed was about to blow (but which never actually did).
At the time, an outcry made him back down but once these ideas get into gear it is next to impossible to prevent them trundling forward. They are like cancer; you think you may be in remission only until such time as it comes creeping back.
I have yet to see the draft legislation so I consider this to be an interim condemnation. However, if recent history is anything to go by, then the laws that finally get embossed onto the statute books will be badly drawn, inchoate and so indefinite in scope as to be open to alarmingly wide interpretation by a now thoroughly politicised police force and judiciary.
Nor can we expect enforcement to be anything like fair (insofar as I am able to use that word at all in this context). Again, precedent indicates that it will range from selective to chaotic with the really nasty creatures going unscathed while the unlucky and politically easy targets have the book the thrown at them.
As much as anyone, I love to lampoon the ‘PC’ culture but I don’t much feel like laughing anymore. Current public discourse is already sufficiently timid and amaemic without further legal mechanisms designed to lock up our minds and sterilise our conversations. I do worry that the effect of all this will be that people eventually turn inwards to small groups of family and trusted friends, eschewing any sort of public life or discussion altogether for fear that it is just too risky.
I realise that some may find these concerns a little overwrought but just as it takes time to construct the machinery of public control, so it takes time for the effects of that control to manifest themselves and a nation where people have to speak in whispers or codes is a despotic and unpleasant one regardless of how bouyant the economy may be.
This is not what the future should be.
Meanwhile, in Gotham City:
People who kill bats or destroy their roosts are to be targeted in a nationwide police campaign.
Officers are to be trained in how to investigate damage to roosts as part of Operation Bat, which is officially launched on Wednesday.
Police will also be warning builders, roofers and pest control workers that it is a crime to destroy bat roosts.
Ker-pow! Take that, you builders. Spla-tt! Not so fast, roofer-man. Ka-boom! It’s the Gotham City jail for you, pest control worker.
Conservationists hope the crackdown will help protect dwindling native numbers of the nocturnal mammal.
With the added benefit of thwarting the fiendish plans of The Joker, The Riddler and The Penguin.
Surely you do not have to be Superhero to appreciate that the very essence of private property is exclusivity. That means the owner is entitled to eject all manner of other living things regardless of the number of legs and wings they possess. Otherwise, what is the point of private property? If we are obliged to maintain our homes as wildlife sanctuaries then we may as well revert to living in forests under the shelter of banana leaves.
Never mind the ‘dwindling native numbers of nocturnal mammals’, what about the dwindling native numbers of property rights?
I just hope that these apparently well-connected ‘conservationists’ do not take it into their heads to add wasps, rats or cockroaches to their little list.
Wealthy property tycoon, Will Hutton, is having himself a right old grumble today.
He is angry because other people are not paying enough tax and it is all the fault of those wretched Americans:
Equally, would our readiness to stand by progressive taxation have been so weakened without the view from the US that high rates of income tax on the rich are morally and economically wrong?
We had Mrs Thatcher, but arguably her dominance in British politics would have been less secure had it not been for the succour she took from American policies and conservative ideas. Britain is not a slave to American influences, but it cannot ignore the international common sense which the US more than any other nation shapes.
But, and lest anyone think that Mr Hutton is mindlessly anti-American, salvation is at hand. If US Conservatives have crippled the British left then American socialists can help them to cast away their crutches and enable them to walk tall again:
But opinion is moving. My bet remains that it will carry John Kerry to the White House – just. Of equal importance is the fact that neo-conservatism is on the defensive and that American liberalism has its best chance to regain ground for the first time in a generation.
It is not just American politics that could be transformed by Iraq, but our own. To believe in universal rights and fair societies might become respectable again.
Ergo, Mr Hutton believes these things are not respectable now.
For the most part, this is standard, nay boilerplate, Sunday fare for Guardianistas. Something to be to scanned in approvingly over a nut roast washed down with a steaming pot of fair-trade, dolphin-friendly, non-judgmental eco-coffee.
But if his regulars are unable to appreciate the sumptuous irony here then I can because Mr. Hutton is a member of that peculiar class of British metropolitan scribblers who are forever bewailing what they see as American dominance of our economy and culture and demanding that we look to Europe for inspiration. Yet Mr. Hutton feels himself unable to make the case for socialism without the bulwark of a Democrat President in the Whitehouse and notwithstanding the fact that Europe is a social democrat lock-in.
I think the truth is that Mr Hutton has lost the capacity to make the case for ‘universal rights and fair societies’ under any circumstances. But if he insists on blaming Ronald Reagan and George Bush for this descent into rhetorical impotence, then that is just fine by me.
Harry Browne overstates the case against Ronald Reagan and makes himself look small.
There are plenty of libertarian criticisms of Ronald Reagan, from his refusal to veto tax increases, for failing to cut spending, or his support for the ‘War on Drugs’. Where Harry Browne goes well overboard is when he dismissed the effect of Ronald Reagan’s spending cuts rhetoric and on the Cold War.
Browne actually admits that Reagan made the dialogue of spending cuts possible and the mainstream debate. He accuses Reagan of not acting on his words. But what about Harry Browne himself?
In his excellent 1973 book: How I found freedom in an unfree world, Harry Browne claims:
You waste precious time, effort and money when you attempt to achieve freedom through the efforts of a group… I came to see how foolish it was to waste my precious life trying to make the world into what I thought it should be.
Yet by 1996, Browne was writing:
I don’t want to be a politician. I just want our country back.
He then sought the nomination twice as the Libertarian Party candidate for the US federal presidency. Now unless Browne had a grotesquely over-estimated sense of his on importance, he must have realised that the LP candidate was not likely to win. If not to win, why stand for office? → Continue reading: If Browne is right about Reagan, he is wrong about himself
This past weekend, I took a friend’s baby daughter for a long walk (or, more accurately, a long push – she can’t yet walk, so was in a buggy/stroller). The ducks that reside at a nearby lake are usually a safe bet when one wants to keep this particular child entertained, so that’s where we headed.
As the baby clapped and giggled at the animals – They’re not that funny, I sniffed. She kept laughing anyway. Kids, eh? A man arrived on the shore carrying a cage that contained a baby duck. He had rescued the animal the week before, he told me, after a member of the public had called the Folly Wildlife Rescue to report that the duck was caught in some fishing line. Initially, it was believed that the duck would have to have its leg amputated, but fortunately the vets were able to save the animal’s life and its leg.
I asked the man about Folly Wildlife Rescue, and he told me that it is an exclusively volunteer effort, with absolutely no form of government subsidy or other state support. It relies entirely on donations from the public and its own fund-raising activities. He himself is not paid a penny for the time and effort he puts in to this endeavour, and neither is anyone else involved.
In addition to the entirely noble goal of trying to educate the public about how they can prevent accidental injury to animals and caring for those animals when they do get hurt, I approve wholeheartedly of people taking the initiative to launch and maintain this kind of volunteer effort. It is refreshing to see Folly Wildlife Rescue performing such an admirable service without relying on the state to write the cheques. And I am pleased that they get enough donations to treat thousands of animals and inform the public about the dangers posed to wildlife by seemingly innocuous activities.
For years, Folly Wildlife Rescue – including its intensive care unit and other medical facilities – has been run from the home of Annette and Dave Risley in the Kent and East Sussex borders area of South East England. Due to the huge volume of animals they are treating, this is an impractical set of circumstances, both presently and in the long term. Because the price of property in this area of England is so high, it is expected that Folly Wildlife will have to spend at least £400,000 (more than $730,000US at current exchange rates) in order to buy suitable premises for their operation.
If you are at all impressed with the dedication shown by the volunteers who run and raise funds for this rescue operation that is untainted by money taken from taxpayers, I would ask you to consider throwing a few ducats their way. If you are not able to do that, you could support them by using their Amazon affiliation link when you shop at that online store, or simply drop them an email (address here) to let them know you are behind them and wish them luck. After all, someone has got to give injections to sick badgers and put bandages on injured hedgehogs, and I am pretty glad it is not me.
More to the point, Folly Wildlife Rescue is the kind of thing any supporter of a smaller government should gaze upon with gratitude. Please consider doing what you can to communicate that gratitude to the people behind the effort.
During the last few days, the British media, all of them, have been making much of D-Day, and quite properly so. The survivors from among those who fought that day who still remain with us now will mostly be gone ten years hence, so now is the last big moment of public thanks and public acknowledgement for these gents. And today will surely not pass without further mentions here of the sacrifices made on June 6th 1944, and the great purposes for which those sacrifices were made.
But the bit of the story that I keep thinking about is … the weather. How pleasing that one of our great national obsessions should have proved so extremely pertinent, at that time of all times.
The story is well known. The weather during the first few days of June 1944 was vile, and Group Captain Stagg, the man whose job was to analyse and present the weather news to those in charge of Operation Overlord, was the bearer of these bad tidings. On June 4th, D-Day, ready to happen on June 5th, was postponed, because of the weather, by one day.
But it could not be postponed for much longer than that. Too many men were revved up to go. A serious postponement would do dreadful things to that most crucial of military variables, morale.
Then, the miracle. Stagg discerned a magical moment of calmness in the middle of the weather system that was causing all the headaches, and through the eye of this meteorological needle Supreme Commander Eisenhower was able to thread the Normandy Landings. And they were all the more of a success for the fact that the Germans knew for certain that they just could not be done when they actually were done. As it turned out, the weather for D-Day was perfect, and all the more perfect for having seemed to be so imperfect.
My main purpose here is not to salute those ageing D-Day survivors, although I do salute them in passing, of course I do. No, the point I want to make here is that weather forecasting is one nationalised industry that really does seem to work, and to have been working well for some time now. → Continue reading: Weather forecasts are up there with dentistry
Totalitarianism is any political system in which a citizen is totally subject to state authority in all aspects of day-to-day life.
– free-definition.com
Britain and the United States are not what could be reasonably called totalitarian states. The ‘modern’ understanding of what a totalitarian state is falls within frames of reference conjuring up the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany: national systems which believed that the state was an all encompassing thing that superseded society, in fact replacing civil society, in the manner advocated by Rousseau and others. To be a totalitarian means a total state in which quite simply no aspect of human life is beyond the remit of the political state.
Because both of these well known forms of totalitarianism enforced their political will via mass murder on a biblical scale, that disguises the fact that National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union differed quite significantly in many ways. Just being ‘total states’ does not mean they were the same kind of total state. Whereas the Soviets simply nationalised literally everything (i.e. took direct political control of all means of production) and maintained control via the supply of, well, everything, Nazi Germany retained large numbers of privately owned companies which were ‘free’ to trade and make several profits provided they did so in ways which complied with regulations and essential national strategic objectives: Willi Messerschmitt was free to run his company, provided he did not decide to stop making aircraft and instead become a refrigerator manufacturing company.
Reasonable commentators have often pointed out that in modern times, totalitarian states have always come about due to cataclysmic events… it was the slaughter, privations and aftermath of World War One which lead to both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union after all. However is this understanding of how a total state comes about the only way Totalitarianism one can come about? → Continue reading: Inching closer to a total state
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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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