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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Now at some risk of provoking an adverse response, I am going to have to raise a point regarding what is and is not a reasonable view regarding violence.
Although we have written many articles about the subject on Samizdata, I am not talking about self defence this time, which to most libertarians is a ‘no brainer’… if you are threatened with violence, you may defend yourself. Nor was I talking about the legitimacy of war against Iraq, which though more contentious is, I think, also a legitimate use of violence.
No, I am discussing the use of violence in everyday life. Now this is still a subject many have written about on this blog, usually with regard to violence and coercion directed at children as one of our contributors is the redoubtable Sarah Lawrence of Taking Children Seriously fame, and two of our frequent guest writers are supporters of TCS.
But I am not really talking about whether or not a child should be hit by their parents specifically but rather whether it is ever justified to use force outside the context of self-defense. When discussing the use of coercion against children, I was once asked if I would ever use force against an adult just because I disapproved of their behaviour in non-self defense situations. My answer was that whilst I would agree that as a general principle I am indeed against the use of force, there are indeed situations in the real world in which violence in the only way to communicate meaningfully.
About 18 months ago, I was crossing a street in Battersea with my 81 year old grandmother. A driver recklessly rounded a corner and only just managed to slam on the brakes in time to avoid running my grandmother down. Far from apologising for his reckless driving and the fact he nearly killed her, he blew his horn and abused her.
There were no witnesses to hand, meaning a formal complaint would just be our word against his, and as he was clearly about to drive off, I was faced with either doing nothing or expressing my displeasure forcefully. I reached in the open window, dragged him out of his car by his collar and punched him in the face. Although we did not discourse at great length, I can say with some confidence that I am sure he understood the causal links which had lead to his face and my fist coming into close proximity.
Do I recommend this as method of communication? Generally no, but the choice I had was simply to allow him to drive away after having nearly killed my grandmother or use force to demonstrate that such behaviour in entirely unacceptable. If there had been witnesses to hand I suspect I would have noted his licence plate and called the police but that was not so… I chose to react forcefully and would do so again in similar circumstances. It may not have been the legal thing to do but I would contend it was the correct thing to do.
The point I am trying to make is that in the real world, sometimes people act entirely unreasonably and thus to try and reason with them is unlikely to achieve much more or less by definition: they are unreasonable. 99 times out of 100 violence is not the answer. On that 100th time however, some level of violence is the only meaningful reaction. The world is a messy place.
Then you clearly have not been exposed to the Daily Mirror.
They call it an editorial. I call it a vomit-inducing hagiography, the final paragraph of which has the capacity to keep you awake at nights like the trauma of a mugging:
“It was a magnificent speech from a man who is rapidly becoming the greatest figure in world politics, second only, perhaps, to Nelson Mandela.”
Anyone care to hazard a guess as to who is number 3 on their list? Personally, I shudder to think.
USA: HIGH
UK: SEVERE
This meme hack is brought to you by the voice of critically rational libertarianism, www.samizdata.net. We now return you to your regularly scheduled torpor.
There is a splendid little article in the NY Post about well known Tranzi, Idiotarian and British national embarrassment Anita Roddick, of Body Shop fame. That she sees herself as being martyred by the ‘right wing’ along with a veritable ‘who’s who’ list idiotarians like Noam Chomsky, is particularly entertaining. We are not ‘right wing’ Anita, and we think you are a buffoon too.
Think what fun it would be to see the results of half a ton of Body Shop bubble bath being dumped in Boston Harbour! 
Today I came across this on my wanderings, a US Libertarian Party candidate called Ken Krawchuk who seems to be making some kind of impact, in particular by wiping the studio floor in a TV debate with his Republicrat opponents. A huge haul of votes, forget it, but the serious spreading of some of our memes, definitely. Such as:
We’re letting murderers and rapists out of prison to make room for pot-smoking Grateful Dead fans. That’s insane!
That got a cheer from a mostly college audience. And there was another good one about a handgun being a girl’s best friend. Thanks to Heretical Ideas for the link.
In my last two postings about war on Iraq, I tried to set out the moral grounds for using military force against another country, as well as distinguish between civilians and combatants. The blogosphere had already been teaming with opinions, moral or otherwise, about the war on terror, Iraq, the US military power and its proper use. when Steven Den Beste posited the conflict as more than a mere ‘war on terrorism’ but rather clash of cultures and civilisations in his article last week.
The majority of reactions were, predictably, based on the respondents’ previously established positions. Some agreed because they agree with Den Beste and his ‘Hollywood-style patriotic wanks’ that make them feel good about themselves and the country they live in 1. Some disagreed for the sake of disagreeing; some may have even had genuine grounds for dissent although I am yet to see a counter-argument that would rise to the challenge. We at Samizdata have taken, ehm, a rational approach, and judged his ideas on their merit. We found that we could not disagree with the fundamental points of the treatise and were ready to admit it openly. Long live our unbiased and rational intellects!
Most of the analysis of the Arab World certainly made sense to me despite the occasional twinge of disagreement. It still did not add up to opposition in principle and I have continued to seriously think about Den Beste’s ‘Modest Proposal’ to subdue and transform Arab Traditionalism, to find out why I agree or why, if at all, I disagree with him. Re-reading the piece point by point did not yield conclusive result. I decided to re-examine my own fundamental reasons (both moral and practical) for supporting the war on Iraq.
This means that I will not fisk Den Beste’s proposal for his opponents’ benefit, nor will I please those who wish the world to agree with their ‘champion’. It is perhaps aimed at those who may share his conclusions but not the journey to it. → Continue reading: War and Peace
(Photo: D. Amon)
…but who can help me identify the arcane Techno-mage, Transterrestrialist, Anglosphericaloid and, er, Pundit, who make up this sinister cabal before whom the world trembles?
We have had a few e-mails (plus a couple comment entries) asking how is it that whilst numerous articles on Samizdata.net have bitterly decried farm subsidies of any sort, we are also writing articles in support of tomorrows Countryside Alliance March in London.
The answer is to be found in the slogan of the Countryside Alliance March itself: for Liberty & Livelihood.
Supporting ‘Liberty’ is not exactly unusual for us: we are libertarians! The liberty in question is the right of country people to hunt in Britain as they have done for centuries, without bigoted class warriors using the violence of law to criminalise their way of life. Hunting is an activity not of ‘state’ but of civil society… and the state simply has no business intruding into what goes on across privately owned land (and of course as libertarians, we believe that the only ownership of land that is legitimate is private ownership). That is why we support the Countryside Alliance’s March.
As for ‘Livelihood’… Hunting is also a significant source of jobs in many areas and in that respect we are all in favour of the state not putting those people on the dole queue. The most vexed issue however is that of farm subsidies. It must be clear to all who regularly read Samizdata.net that all of our contributing writers are in favour of true laissez-faire capitalism and therefore resolutely opposed to subsidising any businesses (i.e. farm subsidies or industrial subsidies)… and the great granddaddy of all market distorting, theft based systems of redistribution-by-subsidy is the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
What CAP means is that efficient farms (and by European standards, British farms are indeed efficient) are made to subsidise inefficient farms, and other sectors of the economy are forced to prop up agriculture generally. Moreover, even the way efficient farms are run is distorted by subsidies and directives that have the effect of addicting even the stoutest souls to state handouts like so many heroin addicts. One major result of this being massive overproduction of food and agricultural overcapacity on a truly epic scale.
So for a farmer to remain in business when competing within the massively subsidised and mind-bogglingly regulated British and European agricultural market, clearly just cutting all subsidies to the UK would mean capital intensive UK agriculture more or less drops dead over night.
Thus clearly the most rational solution is a complete Europe-wide ban on all farm subsidies in any form… with no exceptions whatsoever. No doubt many farms would indeed go bust as there is simply no rational economic reason for their existence when detached from the fantasy world of state planning… and that is just too damn bad. Yet business go bust all the time, so why should farms be any different? Food is a colossal interlinked global market and so there is no reason at all for the great trading nations of the world to protect indigenous food production on non-economic grounds.
The fact is socialist and paleo-conservative farm policies are the reason food is so damn expensive in the developed world. The so called ‘friends to the poor’ in the Labour Party in Britain and their friends in the dominant statist wing of the Conservative Party are the self same people who are responsible for poor working men and women in Britain paying vastly more for food, the very stuff of life, than would be the case if free markets decided what things would cost. Not only that, these are the self same people who claim to care about poverty in the Third World whilst at the same time denying the First World consumer access to their cheap agricultural products whose sale would actually improve the economic situation in the Third World.
Of course the situation in the United States is only slightly less subsidy distorted than the EU, so one would hope that eventually taxpayers over there will also decide it is time for some ‘tough love’.
Therefore when we go to the march tomorrow, we will be supporting the liberty of entire communities to not be beggared and persecuted by state sponsored bigots regardless of the sanctification of such tyrannous acts by democratic politics… and we will also be reminding the country folk that if they want to insist the state stop interfering in countryside pursuits, that should logically also mean an end to interference by subsidy and regulation. British agriculture is more than capable of looking after itself, if only it is allowed to play on a level playing, field rather than a CAP distorted one.
The essential problem of campaigning for the proliferation of handguns is the same as for proliferating nuclear weapons. The suspicion that the first million people who would choose to take advantage of the restoration of legal handgun ownership in the United Kingdom are precisely the million people least trustworthy with such weapons.
The assumption behind the global crusade to keep nukes in the hands of a global establishment is the same as that which would only allow state officials to carry guns.
Yet we have a case example of how nuclear proliferation need not make the world less safe: India and Pakistan. Both sides have governments that are itching for war: the Indian nationalist government believes it would win a conventional war and the Pakistani military regime stands to gain legitimacy from a show of force against India.
There is a balance of terror which ensures that neither side has opted for all-out war, as well as keeping neutral bystanders concerned enough to pressure both sides into staying within certain bounds.
Even deranged leaders seem to accept the balance of terror. One of the curious differences between the First and Second World Wars was the use of battlefield chemical weapons. Civilians in London and Paris carried gas masks during the early months of the second world war in the expectation of gas attacks by the German air force. No such attacks were made because Hitler believed that the British would retaliate (the British government planned to use anthrax bombs).
Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Kurdish people living inside Iraq and against the Iranian foreces during the 1980s Gulf War. He did not however use them against Israel or the Gulf states, despite firing missiles at both during 1991.
As a libertarian internationalist, I have no problem with free countries liberating the unfree, by deposing tyrants. I support a global assault on leftist, fundamentalist, racial supremacist and eco-terrorists. However, I have misgivings about wars started to impose global gun control, especially as this is so selective: why no war to disarm North Korea, Israel, India, Pakistan, or France? Would Australia be a target, or Brazil, Morocco, Turkey, Japan, Germany and Iran if they planned nuclear weapons programmes?
I have a theory that nuclear powers are simply not allowed to develop crack-pot governments: one way or another they are weeded out. If true one could say “A nuclear armed society is a VERY polite society.”
Intellectual property rights are a hot issue now, probably because there are at least two distinct intellectual and political traditions who want to talk about them. The left are having a huge push about (especially) pharmaceutical patents in the third world as Alex Knapp of Heretical Ideas reported last Sunday. So does this press release about a new book that also contests such notions.
Meanwhile many libertarians are particularly interested in the impact of the new instant copying technology that is now spreading to every other desk on earth. It used to be quite an effort to photocopy a book (although even that got the patent lawyers and lobbyists very jumpy). Now you can copy whole movies in minutes, and individual music tracks in seconds. Entire industries are tottering.
But hot issue or not, the Libertarian Alliance will always be interested in publishing a piece like Nigel Meeks’s An Individualist Anarchist Critique of ‘Intellectual Property’: The Views of Benjamin Tucker (1854-1939) (Libertarian Heritage Number 23). Follow the link and read all of it (although I’m embarrassed to say that we are still only producing our stuff in Acrobat format, a situation I hope very soon to correct). This piece is the ideal introduction to Tucker’s ideas about how ideas should, and more particularly should not, be protected. → Continue reading: New from the Libertarian Alliance: Benjamin Tucker and intellectual property rights
Paul Marks feels that Alexis de Tocqueville is more quoted than read.
I have been re-reading this work (no, security guards do not have a lot of time to read – that is, sadly, a myth).
There is a lot of ‘good stuff’ in Democracy in America and it is well worth reading (although please be careful that you do not buy or borrow an edition with bits cut out, it only takes a few seconds to check – by reading what the translator has to say for himself).
However, I would warn anyone against treating Democracy in America as an accurate picture of the United States in the 1830’s.
Firstly De Tocqueville is fond of making sweeping statements (I almost find myself typing ‘like so many Frenchmen, De Tocqueville is fond of making sweeping statements’). For example, we are told that Americans know little of the various schools of philosophy. → Continue reading: Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America”
As they are both about to drop off the front page and we are still getting visitors looking for them…
The article mentioned by Kathleen Parker:
…To those suffering anger deficiency, click over to http://www.samizdata.net/blog (linked by Instapundit.com) to jump-start your moral outrage. The Web log features a photo – of a man plunging headfirst from one of the towers – that ought to help us remember exactly what no one deserves…
The article Kathleen refers to is called News from another universe.
And the article mentioned by James Bennett:
…However, after I returned to my office, I began looking at some of the Web logs I like to follow. On one, samizdata.net, there was a modest little posting. Perry de Havilland, one of the site’s contributors, based in the posh London neighborhood of Chelsea, had walked out at lunchtime, and had been stuck by the fact that “shop after shop are displaying signs saying words to the effects of ‘At 1:46 p.m. today, we will be observing two minutes silence in remembrance of the atrocities on September 11th of last year in the United States.’ Others are expressing memorial sentiments, still others just displaying small American flags.”…
The article James refers to is called The real England speaks.
Just another fine service from samizdata.net!
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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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