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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I am not quite old enough to have been a full-blooded Cold War Warrior but I can imagine what it must have been like poring over the speeches and statements that emanated from the Kremlin, searching out all those coded mendacities and gussied-up ideological postures.
The closest we come to that kind of excitement these days is by listening to someone like the Director General of the BBC, Greg Dyke:
BBC director general Greg Dyke has warned of the risks of crossing the line between patriotism and objective journalism.
Not remotely a risk for the BBC where there is not even a hint of either patriotism or objective journalism.
In a speech to a journalism conference in London, Mr Dyke denounced the “gung-ho patriotism” of one US network covering the Iraq war and said it should not be allowed to happen in the BBC.
Oh that vulgar word again! Such a rank obscenity for a member of the defeatist, vacuous, ethically crippled ruling elite.
“This is happening in the United States and if it continues will undermine the credibility of the US electronic news media.”
Credibility in whose eyes?
“And we must never allow political influences to colour our reporting or cloud our judgement.”
This, from the head of a broadcasting organisation whose chief recruitment ground is the jobs page of the Guardian.
“Commercial pressures may tempt others to follow the Fox News formula of gung-ho patriotism but for the BBC this would be a terrible mistake.”
For those of you unfamiliar with British public-sector-speak, allow me to interpret: “We must oppose a free market in information and ideas as this would severely threaten our role as paternalistic gatekeepers of public opinion”.
“If, over time, we lost the trust of our audiences, there is no point to the BBC.”
I think you ought to have a word with the crew of the Ark Royal, Mr.Dyke.
The BBC has yet to undergo ‘perestroika’.
I was an occasional reader of American business-technology magazine Red Herring, which has just closed down. They often carried very interesting articles, such as the excellent round up of the state of nanotechnology (by several authors), and a piece on The Company and Society by John Micklethwait (who is indeed a relative of Samizdata.net’s very own Brian Micklethwait) in the final March 2003 print version (hence no links).
However I was only an occasional reader of Red Herring because although its coverage of technology was rather good, I found its neo-conservative acceptance of statist axioms in so many articles tedious, and to be honest I am not all that interested in the details of how corporate America finesses OSHA and tax regulations in order to function, or how they get their snouts in the public trough for R&D money.
Likewise I found my eyes rolling back when I read remarks from Editor-in-Chief Tony Perkins like…
We wish the Bush administration luck in trying to change the spending culture in Washington, D.C.. State governments must also learn how to do more with less.
…because there, oh so succinctly, is why I regard neo-conservatism as something which completely misses the point. The principle problem with government is not that it takes lots of other people’s money… no… that is just a consequence of what is wrong. The root problem is that government does things it has no business legitimately doing at any cost to taxpayers.
We do not need the state to do more with less, we need it to do less with less.
Most people have heard of concepts such as ‘the rule of law’, ‘respect for the law’, perhaps even ‘a government of laws, not of men’. The idea being that ‘the law’ is a noble thing, worthy of respect, the safeguard of civilization. Even non-libertarians (who reject the idea that ‘the law’ should be the law of nonaggression) hold that the law is something stable, something that helps defend the basic institutions of society over the centuries.
How is it possible to reconcile the above with the ever changing and ever increasing statutes and regulations churned out by politicians and administrators? Far from being majestic and worthy of respect, the actual law is normally a sordid mass of commands worthy of contempt.
By what right does the state tell people to do a certain thing or not do another thing? Whether it be to not cut meat on a wood surface, or to only make cheese in a certain way, or whatever?
The normal reply (which can be traced back to John Locke and others) is that government gets its authority from ‘the people’, but even if one believes (which I do not) that the majority have the right to tell everyone how they should live their lives down to every last detail of civil interaction, it is hard to see how this fits in with the world as it is.
Even in nations with democratic governments ‘the people’ do not tend to vote on the laws. Even the elected politicians who form the ‘legislature’ in such nations do not debate or even vote on most of the laws. The vast, ever changing and ever growing web of rules and regulations that control people’s lives are mostly created by administrators elected by no one. → Continue reading: The Law
Some years ago I read some interesting ideas about the standards of the Victorian gentleman. Superficially they were very strict. There were things gentlemen just ‘did not do’, but the superficial inflexibility hid a deep pragmatism. Sometimes one has to break standards in order to keep them. One must have ‘rough men’ on the borders and in the dangerous lands. One must sometimes compromise oneself or commit a crime against ones deepest beliefs and suffer a lifetime of remorse so that others may blissfully exist ‘within the code’.
This is why we need the Anti-war Libertarians. They are there to remind us that war is in general a bad thing; it is something which often expands state power. They provide us with an unbending code against which we must judge our actions.
Libertarians are thinking beings, not robotic ideologues. There are times when we must knowingly do things we find distasteful simply because it is the world we live in or because an action protects something we hold dear. The existence of a code, is important. Without one each new action defines a new central position which is no position at all.
We Samizdatistas are the rough men and women at the borders of Libertopia, ready and willing to sacrifice our souls that others may sleep peacefully with their more strict adherence to gentlemanly libertarian behavior.
The estimable Stephen Pollard writes that the sheer shamelessness of parts of the anti-war crowd means they are unlikely to learn a good lesson from the fall of Saddam’s regime. Hence we (by which I assume he means pro-war types) should be prepared to get nasty against our opponents, launching personal attacks, emplying savage ridicule, and the like.
This is mighty tempting, but it causes me problems. Yes, taking the p**s out of thugs like Michael Moore, Ted Rall or the latest Hollywood lame-brain is good fun and occasionally worth the effort, but I am not sure that simply using the very same tactics used by our opponents (such as character assassination, etc) is really going to work. Others may disagree (please comment below) but I think that part of the reason why our libertarian meme is spreading is because of clear-cut events like the collapse of the Berlin Wall, globalisation, etc, as well as decades of hard intellectual slog by folk with weird surnames like von Mises or Rand. I also think that being decent human beings actually helps, although by “decent” I certainly don’t mean we should be meek or not jump to anger in the face of obvious idiocy.
I must admit – and I share the frustration of Perry de Havilland, Stephen Pollard and others – to being annoyed by the moral and intellectual bankruptcy and sheer brass neck of those who even now decry what the Americans and British forces have achieved in Iraq. But I am keeping my cool (well most of the time!). We are better than our opponents, and I suspect, deep down, they know it.
And I also think it worth pointing out that although many of those who opposed the military campaign in Iraq are motivated by hatred of the West and its freedoms, many inside the libertarian parish had doubts or opposed it outright for good and honorable reasons (fears about civil liberties, public spending, deaths of innocent civilians, etc). Let’s not forget that.
The following entry was put in our comment section by G. Cooper in response to Natalie Solent’s post The Floodgates of Anarchy. I thought it was sufficiently interesting to warrant a post of its own (as it saves me from writing one myself as I was thinking much the same thing):
Watching the scenes of jubilation this morning and the way the liberating troops are being greeted, I find myself experiencing strangely mixed emotions. I am deeply, unashamedly, proud of the coalition’s forces and the restrained and civilised way they have behaved in all this and I am also delighted for the Iraqis. But still there’s a troubling sensation nagging away at the back of my mind. It’s that the greater fight has yet to come. Not with bin Laden, Iran or Syria – the one against a far deadlier enemy, our own corrosive, mendacious Left and its fellow travellers: the Lib-Dems, anti-globalisation clowns, pacifists, religious ‘leaders’, self-styled ecologists and the rest.
Yesterday, even as the British were securing Basra and the Americans preparing to liberate Baghdad, I heard a radio phone-in during which an Iraqi in exile was pouring scorn on the liberation, saying that the people would never welcome our forces. He was, of course, wrong but will he would admit that today? He will not. Nor will the intellectually bankrupt army of Left-liberal academics, ‘experts’, ‘analysts’, broadcasters, politicians and journalists which has done nothing but undermine our efforts to rid Iraq and the world of Saddam’s wickedness.
Nothing will make these people admit they were wrong about almost every single aspect of this war. They will simply move on to criticise something else, not even pausing to reflect on their streams of negativity, lies and hopelessly inaccurate predictions (“millions of dead” “armageddon unleashed in the Middle East”, “ecological catastrophe” “it’s all about oil”).
It wasn’t easy to defeat Saddam. How much more difficult will it be to rout those working from within to tear down the very systems which allowed us to defeat this evil?
Stop Press: Even as I write, a BBC reporter in Baghdad is “sounding a note of caution” as he opens the next phase of the war, predicting a tide of anti-US feeling from Iraqis, weeks more fighting, more civilian casualties. This relentless spew continues, even as Uday’s palace burns and the reporter’s voice-over is broadcast to pictures of Iraqis rejoicing, celebrating and proving him a fool.
– Posted by G Cooper at April 9, 2003 10:27 AM
Well Mr. G. Cooper, I suspect very few of the people who found themselves on the wrong side of history, or to be more accurate, on the wrong side of objective reality, will acknowledge that they were wrong not just publicly but even to themselves.
Some who opposed the war on grounds which had nothing to do with Iraq (but rather domestic issues of cost, encroachment on civil liberties at home, etc.) will be unmoved in their views by the success of the war, and that is entirely logical. That ‘the good guys won’ is frankly an irrelevance if the basis of their opposition was an antipathy to the growth of the state at home (a concern which I share in spite of my support for this war of liberation).
However those whose opposition was based on the ‘welfare of the Iraqi people’ or the ‘doomsayers’ (“impregable defences of Baghdad” anyone?)… these people are the willful blind and deaf, walled off from seeing anything which does not fit their distorted subjective world views.
So it falls to you, and us, and everyone else who values the truth, to keep blowing on the trumpets until the walls come crashing down… and then keep blowing a little longer anyway just to be sure!
On Saturday I spent the morning helping out with canvassing for the town council elections (not seeking votes for me this time – I was in another ward seeking votes for another couple of candidate of my party).
Instead of going straight home (after the morning canvass) I visited first the town museum and then the town library. I have visited both places many times over the years, but I still sometimes go (perhaps my senile brain means that each time I visit I find things that have long been there, but which I do not have a clear memory of).
In the museum, amongst other things, I looked at a stuffed red fox and was impressed by the size of the beast. In life it would have clear threat to the nice cats I had met in the morning – how can anyone oppose fox hunting? I know I was supposed to be talking to voters in the morning, rather than to talking to cats, but….. Also I know that cats are very cruel to birds and other such – but I do not much care (I like cats).
In the town library I looked through the main encyclopaedia (the one that is not going to publish any more editions in paper form). The section on Sweden told me that compulsory education was imposed there in the 1844 a few years before the guilds were abolished and the trade monopoly taken away from the special towns that had long held the monopoly. The encyclopaedia article also told me that in the mid 19th century it was decided that the Swedish state was to control all main line railways. Over the centuries it did seem that the state owned vast areas of the country and could steal private land at will – and there were all these detailed facts and figures on everything (in this country the first census we had in recent centuries was in 1801 and the Birth Marriages and Deaths registration act came in 1836 – other than that there was nothing much).
I thought about how this compared to what I had seen in my local town museum. In Kettering there was no town council till the the late 19th century. There was a church Vestry, but the local people had rejected a town council. In 1872 a local government board was imposed and in the 1890’s a Kettering Borough Council was created. Within a year or so the new K.B.C. was out doing wicked things (such as taking over the town water and gas supply). → Continue reading: What we have lost
Forgive this interruption to your scheduled programme of dark forebodings, war worries, terrorist threats, police state and impending civilisational collapse but I am taking a short break in order to bring you some good news.
It would appear that the political landscape of Britain is not quite as barren as I had hitherto imagined it to be. Indeed, little oases of life-giving sanity are starting to spring up amidst the arid desert of top-down, tax-and-spend socialism.
Case in point being Reform Britain, a campaign group consisting of loads of big-brained luminaries who describe themselves thus:
Reform is an independent campaign to promote new directions for public policy based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, and individual liberty.
As I reflect upon the lowly and squalid state of public debate in this country over the last few years, the above words wash over me with all the fragrant and orgasmic tingle of a cool spring zephyr.
And, as if that was not enough, these wonderful people have launched a related website called ‘Down the Drain’, a perfectly appropriate domain name for a site which is devoted to disclosing just how much money HMG syphons off of its productive citizens every day and, more pointedly, where it all ends up.
Broadcast your seeds with gusto, you Great Sowers of Hope, and may those seeds be nurtured, fed, watered, grow and cover all the land with a golden harvest.
Your normal service of doom, gloom, despair, gnashing of teeth, wailing and general despondency will now be resumed. Thank you.
[My thanks to Stephen Pollard for the links.]
Nigel Meek is a British libertarian, a Samizdata reader and an executive officer with both the Libertarian Alliance and the Society for Individual Freedom.
I work in a state-sector Further Education college in the London suburbs. Most of our students are 16 to 19 year old full-timers taking A-levels or vocational equivalents, but we also have a large number of part-time adult students, mostly doing evening classes of one sort or another. We have a fair number of overseas students, and indeed enough of them to warrant the College employing a part-time International Students’ Officer.
One of my jobs is as the first point of contact with people submitting general email enquiries to the College. Mostly these are requests for prospectuses or other straightforward matters that I can deal with myself. Sometimes I have to pass them on to others.
It took me some time to realise – or at least to hypothesise – how illustrative emails were about the differing cultures that people come from. Emails from youngsters wanting a full-time prospectus are nowadays often written in mobile phone text language and/or are simply semi-literate. Emails from adults wanting a part-time prospectus are often just old-fashioned letters – “Dear Sir/Madam, blah blah blah, Yours faithfully” – sent via a new medium. The point is that in either case they tend to be quite short and direct: This is who I am, where I live, and what I want.
Emails – and indeed still the occasional letter – from overseas are often very different. And by ‘overseas’ I mean a very limited number of countries that between them supply the majority of such enquiries to the College: Pakistan, Nigeria, and The Gambia. The most noticeable feature about them is the quite astonishingly flowery, sycophantic, and obsequious tone in which they are often written. “Esteemed Sir, I have heard about your outstanding institution from many sources… It will fulfil a dream for me to come there… I would be truly honoured if you would provide me with information… Your humble servant…” I make this up by way of example, but believe me, it does not begin to do justice to how some of them are written.
At first, I thought that this was merely a rather quaint, if excessive, courtesy. It took me some time to consider that there might be another interpretation, and one that if correct offers an insight into the nature of the societies from which the authors come – and therefore also about our own. → Continue reading: E-mail and culture
I think this is one of the best summaries I’ve encountered of the bias problems that media people are having with this war. It’s from an emailer to Natalie Solent:
When you’re told to talk about the war for hours every day and only a finite amount happens in a day, you tend to exhaust rational remarks and reasonable questions and, after doing all you can with repetition of the obvious, must ask unreasonable questions and explore less likely contingencies. In this mental state, prejudices are apt to come more to the surface as the commentator’s mind searches for something else to say.
That’s a better explanation of what is going on than to suppose that it’s all some great big conspiracy. It is quite a lot of little conspiracies, although maybe “networks” might be a better word. And it’s a great big zeitgeist, that is to say a conspiracy that is all out in the open. And that has the results described above.
But the main thing these people are biased in favour of is keeping their jobs. If you can help them do their jobs while you do what you’re trying to do, they won’t necessarily stop you. Zeitgeists can be changed.
Malcolm Hutty has some interesting perspectives on something more commonly associated with nasty dictatorships: Spontaneous Pro-Government Protests… only this time they are the real things!
BBC News 24 reports that there are protestors outside the French embassy in Washington D.C. decrying French obstructionism on the U.N. Security council. Footage showed that the equivalents of usual street protests were present: placards screaming “Remember Normandy”, and bottles of wine ceremonially poured into the gutter.
This strikes me as a rather unusual story in two respects. Firstly, when half a million people on the streets of London protesting UK government policy on hunting and the countryside barely trouble the BBC for a mention, why do a few Americans merit coverage for a viewpoint equally antithetical to the BBC party line? Is this just an example of News 24 desperately needing footage to fill its airtime? Or has the imminence of war persuaded their editors to recognise that Bush-n-Blair aren’t the only supporters of ousting Saddam?
Secondly, stripped of all the ephemera, this was essentially a pro-government political protest. Such things may be common on the streets of Baghdad and P’yongyang, but are not generally the done thing in western democracies.
I wonder whether the protestors saw what they were doing as “supporting America” or instead as attacking a powerful foreign regime that was interfering with their own disposition, as realised through their domestic political leaders. Curiously, seeing people with whom I identify strongly adopt the tactics of really alien cultures prompts in me a new sympathy for misguided Leftist foreigners.
Next thing you know, the BBC will be filming an Israeli pizza parlour nearly bankrupted by the fear of terrorism, and I will suddenly (and unwillingly) decide that the Palestinians should own the freehold there anyway. Who knows? If the BBC dared to drop its own bias briefly, nations might speak a little more peace unto other nations.
Malcolm Hutty
It is taken as read by certain commentators on what is loosely known as the ‘left’ (sorry to use that term for those that hate such crudities) that one of the terrible things about market economies is the inequality of outcomes they spawn. Hence their enthusiasm for steeply progressive tax rates, heavy state spending, positive discrimination in favour of the poor and other preferred groups for things like university admissions, and so on.
A pretty classic demonstration of this mindset appeared in the Guardian newspaper <drums roll!> this week, in a column by Polly Toynbee. Polly is one of the most articulate, if consistently wronghead exponents of the Procrustean view of equality.
For her, equality of wealth is regarded as an utterly self-evident good, of no need of further justification or support. And yet surely what these folk ignore is that their view of the world depends upon us thinking that wealth is essentially fixed. For them, there is no such thing as wealth creation, only redistribution. Their mental apparatus is in this sense seriously defective.
It also misses another fairly obvious point. The wealth held by individuals varies through the life cycle. People typically save more and accumulate more capital into their middle age and then begin to draw down upon it as they reach the age of retirement. That is why claims that X own a shockingly high proportion of nation’s Y’s wealth are so misleading. They crucially fail to see how circumstances vary through time.
You might wonder, gentle reader, why I am getting het up about issues which are blindlingly obvious to Samizdata readers. Well, for one thing, it seems pretty obvious that so-called Conservative politicians no longer feel able to argue the case any more for the market. I also think that with Labour seemingly lurching to the left and with Tony Blair in peril of losing his job, the time may come again when we have to spell out the basics. It is never too early to start.
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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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