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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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.
I believe it was the Victorians that set the tone. It was during the age of the ‘Great Philanthropist’ that charities first established their status in the public mind as selfless doers of great good in the world. Understandable really that, in an era before welfare benefits, they were the pious prickers of the public conscience; the saviours of last resort for the needy and woebegone, the kindly benefactors of the benighted poor.
Over the years they have glacially established their reputations as the standard-bearers of humanity and decency to the point where, today, membership of or subscription to charitable organisations is quite the highest badge of virtue. Contributing to their coffers, especially publicly, has come to be seen as the ultimate act of redemption for sins real or imagined.
Perhaps because of this, nobody seems to have noticed that some of these organisations (many world famous) have gradually shifted the focus of their energies to the point where they now energetically pursue policies that are diametrically opposite from those stated.
Take, for example, the British charity Oxfam, set up some 50 years ago by a group of young, idealistic Oxford intellectuals with a brief to help ‘feed the starving’. How very odd then to hear of this kind of thing:
The scientists complained that humanitarian groups such as Oxfam, Christian Aid and Save The Children, backed by EU funds, had frightened African governments into rejecting food aid. They said the groups had also alarmed starving populations. “Some groups have told people that genetically modified products are dangerous and could cause cancer,” said the executive director of industry body Africabio, Prof Jocelyn Webster. Webster and Prof James Ochanda, head of biochemistry at the University of Kenya, led the African delegation.
The scientific delegation said that genetically modified crops boosted yields and could make Africa less dependent on foreign food aid.
Seems that Oxfam’s mission to aleviate starvation has mysteriously morphed into an assidious campaign to cause starvation. → Continue reading: Not great and not very good
I took the quizilla test and the results were hardly unexpected:
 Libertarian – You believe that the main use for government is for some people to lord it over others at their expense. You maintain that the government should be as small as possible, and that civil liberties, “victimless crimes”, and gun ownership should be basic rights. You probably are OK with capitalism. Your historical role model is Thomas Jefferson.
Which political sterotype are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
For an anarchist libertarian, things are easy. Of course government folk find ways round every effort to limit the powers of the state – government is a malignant cancer and limited state people and minimal state people are just fools.
For those people (such as myself) who have doubt about anarchism things are difficult. We tend to fall back on ideas about Constitutions to limit the power of government – and the record of such things is not good.
Firstly few Constitutions even try to limit what things government can spend money on, and even those Constitutions that do try and do this by listing what government can spend on do not tend to hold back the state.
In the case of Australian Constitution there were amendments to the Constitution to allow the government to spend money on various welfare state programs (it is, of course, the welfare state or ‘entitlement’ programs that constitute the vast majority of government spending in all Western nations). In the American case the Constitution was simply ignored.
Some Classical Liberals and libertarians regard the fact that United States Constitution was not amended to allow for the growth of the government as a sign of hope (“the Constitution still exists, all we need to do is enforce it”), but I tend to agree with the anarchists that the fact that the United States Constitution has been used for toilet paper (without any real resistance) is deeply scary.
And make no mistake the U.S. Constitution has been smashed. Take the example of paper money. The Founders all opposed the concept of making unbacked notes money simply by government order (they had the example of the ‘Continental’ to remind them of some of the problems with the idea). And the Constitution seems clear enough. → Continue reading: Limited Government and Constitutions
Jeremy Sapienza wrote in his article called Only Terrorists Kill Innocents on Anti-State.com:
There seem to be many people, even in libertarian circles, who think that America was attacked because of abstract principles like “freedom” and “prosperity” and even “democracy.” And I didn’t want to say it, but so far it has been overwhelmingly true: the libertarians who would otherwise agree with the rest of us on most things but have done complete 180s here are Jewish. They support Israel blindly and fanatically, out of some allegiance to, as one writer put it, his “creed.”
[…]
It is a very easy concept to understand: the US government bombs innocent civilians all over the world, with hundreds of thousands dead in Arab parts, and so they hate us. They hate us because our government exterminates them like mosquitoes. So, in response to our government killing civilians, they kill OUR civilians. It is not right, but it is the only logical sustaining impetus for this utter hatred of Americans and our country.
[…]
Don’t worry, if we carpet-bomb Kabul there will still be Afghanis. I mean, they can still make more, right?
[…]
What the hell is the matter with you people!? Why are you so thirsty for innocent blood!? There has not been any arguments thus far that have convinced me that Muslims or Arabs are innately evil, or innately hate America because it is a prosperous, capitalist country. These are the ravings of people who are either lunatics or are too lazy to apply otherwise-heeded libertarian principles to their knee-jerk emotional reactions. Death is horrible. We should be working to eliminate it, not perpetuate it.
Well I am a so-called ‘pro-war’ libertarian, though 100% Goy, so I assume at least some of what is being written on anti-state.com is being directed at me and those of my ilk. However I do not support Israel 100%… in fact probably rather less that 50% if the truth be known.
Nevertheless I think it is clear that America was indeed attacked for abstract principles, just not ones like “freedom” and “prosperity” and even “democracy”. It was attacked for the abstract principles upon which the Islamic fundamentalism is based, which is to say ‘anti-secularism’ and as a corollary, anti-capitalism. You see Islam is indeed under attack in ways that really terrify fundamentalists the world over. However it should be obvious that the people who brought us the latest in Kamikaze tactics that bombing, and violent death generally, is not what frightens and engenders hatred from Islamists… it is an aggressive, global, unbounded secularism, whose carrier wave is a global and God-neutral capitalism which they fear. Not B-52s or F-16s or Tornados or Cruise missiles, but Playboy and Nintendo and banks-which-charge-interests and cheap DVD’s and satellite TV which mullahs cannot effectively control and so on and so on…
The likes of Al Qaeda want ‘us’ to leave ‘them’ alone… and by ‘them’ they mean the world’s Muslim population. But ‘we’ will never ever do that, because ‘we’ not really controlled by any authority who can make us stop making and selling whatever nominal Muslims the world over want to buy. And so out of desperation, the people to whom the very reason for their existance on earth is an imposed morality centred on certain abstract conceptions of God and Man which the secular world cares nothing about, attack us.
But Jeremy Sapienza does not see that, just the fact Iraq has been bombed since the ‘end’ of the last Gulf War, ergo that is the reason ‘they’ attacked ‘us’. And yet on September 11th the USA was not attacked by Iraqis angry at their treatment by the USAF, so I cannot see the relevance of Mr. Sapienza’s remarks about that being why ‘they’ kill ‘our’ civilians … neither was the USA attacked by members of the PLO or Hamas, who regularly get bombed by Israel, so I am not sure what relevance that has either… and just for completeness, neither were the hijackers that day Serbians who were pissed off about losing Kosova due to US and NATO actions, or German smarting over the end of the Third Reich or Japanese lamenting the loss of the South-East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
For the most part they were Saudis… and I cannot off-hand recall the last time the USAF bombed Saudi Arabia.
But then I think the article about which I am commenting is just a litany of misunderstandings and outright fallacies…leaving aside the patently false and positively libelous notion that the USAF/USN intentionally targeted civilians in Afghanistan (or anywhere else in the last decade). I wonder if Mr. Sapienza realises ‘carpet bombing’ is a technical military term which actually has a specific meaning. If Kabul had been carpet bombed, it would look rather like Dresden or Hamburg circa 1945, with tens of thousands killed in each air attack.
So what is the matter with us? Well for a start, we are not ‘pro-war’… we are pro-liberation. If Jeremy Sapienza can come up with a way to end mass murderous Ba’athist Socialism in Iraq by using harsh language and grimaces and singing Kumbayah, then I will quickly become a generous benefactor of anti-war.com. Until that is the case, I do wish he would stop his knee jerk emotional reactions and realise that yes, death is horrible… and the best way to stop the epidemic of state sponsored death in Iraq is to engineer the overthrow of Ba’athist Socialism so that Saddam and Uday, and their coterie of thugs, end up hanging on meathooks in a public square in Baghdad.
You see, some libertarians see the world the way it really is and want to actually see tyranny overthrown with the tools at hand now and replaced with liberty and justice for all. Quaint but there you have it.
Yes we all know that what will follow Ba’athist Socialism will not be some libertarian nirvana, but it will be better that what is there now… if you are an isolationist, then call yourself an isolationist, I have no problem with that. Just don’t think you are taking a moral libertarian position. You ain’t. The article quotes the anti-war.com crowd, who are very willing to contemplate the cost of war and the benefits of peace… but that rather misses the obvious fact that the alternative to war in Iraq, right now, is not ‘peace’ but continued tyranny. So what is the cost of tyranny in Iraq, Mr. Sapienza… year after year after year?
So when he writes “Death is horrible. We should be working to eliminate it, not perpetuate it”… why is he so keen to see Saddam Hussain, the principle cause of unnatural death in Iraq, perpetuated? That may not be his desire, for I have no reason to think Jeremy Sapienza is an evil man, but that is the reality of an anti-war position.
A fable by Kevin Connors
Imagine a world not too much different from what we live in today…
Let’s say you have this neighbour who’s never grown up from his teen-age bully days. You know he beats his wife; you can hear the screaming at night and you see the bruises during the day. But she’s too terrorized by the guy to do anything about it.
But it gets worse: This guy has a bad habit of trying to move his fence over on to his neighbour’s property. You don’t live right next door, so he’s never bothered you. But once he tried to move the fence over your friend’s tomato garden. That fellow has quite a green thumb and you buy all the tomatoes you can from him at every harvest.
But further, this guys a gun-lovin’ irresponsible bastard, in fact, before you really got to know the guy, you went with him to a couple of gun shows and taught him how to reload. But he has this penchant for going out in yard every now and then and randomly blowing off a few rounds. Not a direct threat to you; you’re a few houses down the block, unless you go out on the street.
So, what do you do? Wait for his next door neighbours to act? Well, they’re kind of timid folks, deathly afraid of what he might do to retaliate. Build a high wall around your house, avoid the street, and give up on those nice fresh tomatoes? Why should you let this punk inconvenience you at all? Besides, there’s still a chance of one of those bullets going over the fence and you have it on good authority he’s shopping for hand grenades.
“Call the cops” is the obvious answer. But I forgot to mention this isn’t quite like the social system we live in; this is anarchy. Each household is truly sovereign onto themselves. Of course, being very wise in this sort of environment, you’re the baddest son-of-a-bitch on the street, an Nth degree black belt, armed to the teeth, with two ninjas for sons and a wife that can cook up bombs able to vaporize any other neighbour’s house in an instant.
Back when he pulled the tomato garden stunt, you went over and slapped him around a few times, made him move the fence back (which didn’t stop him from ripping up all the tomato plants in the process), took most of his guns away and told him to be nice to his wife. Well, he hasn’t tried to move the fence any more, but he still beats his wife, gets drunk and blows off a few rounds out in the yard.
What would you do?
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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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