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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Gene Expression takes exception to my earlier posting:
Of course, I beg to disagree. Let me give you an example of how race does matter, ripped off from Steve Sailer: “You’re a 5’0″ tall female walking down the street. Coming down the street on your side are four black men loudly talking to each other. On the other side of the street you see four Chinese men, again, talking loudly to each other. What do you do?”
To which I answer: “In which year?” Just to have a bit of fun with this, I’ll posit the thoughts running through our midget blonde’s matrilineal side heads:
1930: “Don’t they know their place? If one of them touches me daddy’ll have them all lynched!”
1950: “What is this world coming to? I’ll have to tell daddy so the police can arrest them.”
1970: “They’re probably angry over white hegemony. I’d better cross the street for safety.”
1990: “The one in the middle is kind of cute.”
2010: “Didn’t I go out with him once?”
2030: “I’d swear that was cousin Lonnie!”
Alex Singleton of Liberty Log links to a Sunday Telegraph piece by Leon Louw of the South African Free Market Foundation. Louw is an actual live delegate at the Johannesburg eco-imperialist fest (eco-imperialism being Louw’s verbal coinage, not mine), and supplies first hand reportage from that deeply dangerous event. Recommended. (By the way, the above link to the FMF will now get you to another Johannesburg piece by Roger Bate.)
Louw has been one of my favourite libertarians every since he spoke at the 1984 Libertarian International gathering held here in London (far outskirts of). I loved the talk he gave then, which the Libertarian Alliance published.
I especially treasure his insight that all legal principles without exception have potential grey areas associated with them in certain cases. Property rights are often hard to clarify in particular cases, “reasonable” self defence can often be hard to agree about, when is pollution pollution?, and so on. Hence the ubiquitous need for law courts to settle hard cases.
So, never disagree with your opponent’s principles merely because it can sometimes be hard to apply them, for that will be true of your principles also. Disagree with them because they are bad principles, all the more dangerous when easily applied.
David Farrer of Freedom and Whisky responds briefly to my unbrief piece about John Gray.
As Brian Micklethwait suggests, John Gray is an incorrigible pessimist. That I can understand but it’s no reason to give up the fight for liberty.
First, I don’t suggest that John Gray is a pessimist, I bloody well say it in seventeen foot high flaming capital letters. There’s no suggesting about it.
And second, to repeat the point being made in those seventeen foot high letters, Gray’s pessimism applies to whatever is the dominant optimism. And that’s now us. We used to be pessimistic about Marxism and he agreed with us about that. But he never agreed with us about the wonders of liberty, because he doesn’t believe in the wonders of anything. He’s not giving up the fight for liberty, because he never fought for it in the first place. He merely fought with us, against Marxism. Now, there’s no need for that, because that fight is over. Now we are the enemy, with our absurd enthusiasm for the wonderful things that liberty might do, in a possible wonderful libertarian future. He is, I repeat, being completely consistent.
I’ve been reading a few items on genetics recently and have also run across some assorted blog articles on the topic at Gene Expression. I must admit it’s caused much thoughtful daydreaming on my part: enough, perhaps, for several articles. For now I’ll settle on one item.
Race simply doesn’t matter much any more and is becoming less and less of an issue as each generation goes by. The US Census showed interracial marriage accelerated drastically in the last decade in America; and I have it on the best of anecdotal data from fellow editor Perry de Havilland the same is true in London.
I think I know why.
Let’s look at the generations of the last century. In a personal sense I can “reach back” to 1910 when my grandparents were born. From there I can follow the evolution of attitudes over 20 year generational intervals.
1910-1930: This generation grew up with racism as a philosophically backed reality of every day life. The underpinnings of the Nazi Aryan hypothesis were everywhere and were not just a Nazi invention. Adolph the Paper-Hanger didn’t really invent much. He just dipped into the turn of the century philosophy and ripped the arse out of it. This is not to say the Western World was Nazi or that my grandparents were; only that all existed within the same philosophical milieu.
1930-1950.: This generation was taught racism from the cradle, but grew up with World War II. They saw the horrors of the previous generation’s ideas taken to their most utterly extreme conclusion and had no choice but to reject them. Thereafter they were like church goers who have no faith but attend because mommy and daddy did, and continue to live the values they were taught because it is what they know. Ideas in motion tend to stay in motion.
1950-1970: The generation of Woodstock. They were given a very watered down version of racism from their parents and easily rejected it because there was nothing behind it. Their parents racism was a hollow sham. Even their parents were losing faith as they grew older. The only thing holding back interracial marriage was an unwillingness to face the family nightmare that would ensue from grandparents and parents. This shows up in songs: Janis Ian’s hit “Society’s Child” and the later song by the Stories, “Brother Louie” come easily to mind.
1970-1990: Their parents had lusted after members of other races but didn’t do anything much about it. What little racism they recieved from mom and dad was a pass through of deference to the grandparents. When they came of age in the 90’s they started miscenegating like rabbits – thus the Census results.
We can expect this trend to simply accelerate until there are no “races” in the US, UK, Canada and many other Western nations.
I accept that my generation limits are arbitrary, but almost any cohort blocking you chose will still grow up with the above period-piece home environments. Some regions will be time-shifted one way or the other, so not everyone will “be here now”. I’m discussing trends, not particulars.
Race as a basis for pretty much anything is a dead issue in 2002. The Tranzis’ just won’t let us bury the corpse.
While Daniel Antal‘s poor farmers and street traders demonstrate for free trade and deregulation, here is a British business perspective on government regulation, from the letters page of yesterday’s (August 29 2002) Times:
Sir, The UK Government places a strong incentive on industry to monitor the amount of packaging it produces, by means of the Packaging Waste Regulations. Under these regulations, everyone from the producers of the packaging to those who sell it (for example, the supermarkets) has to pay a levy for each piece of packaging handled.
These regulations can be quite complex, and many members use compliance schemes to help them to meet their obligations. Valpak is the UK’s largest compliance scheme, with over 3,200 members from throughout industry. Our philosophy is not only to ensure that our members achieve compliance, but also to ensure that the money generated by meeting the obligations is used in a responsible manner, to aid and encourage recycling.
All of us, both industry and consumers, can help to increase recycling and reduce the amount of packaging produced in the UK.
Yours faithfully,
J. Cox
(Chief Executive Officer),
Valpak Ltd,
Stratford Business Park,
Banbury Road,
Stratford-upon-Avon CV37 7GW
August 23.
I’m sure we’d agree that recycling is a fine thing, if anyone can make of it a profitable business that doesn’t depend on anyone being compelled to do it. Millions in the third world do scratch a living from genuine recycling, although no doubt there are all kinds of Transnazi plans afoot to forbid such activities, based on the notion that the way to get rid of poverty is to make it illegal.
But Valpak is just the expansion of the public sector, done slightly differently to the way we’ve been used to. They’re civil servants tricked out as businessmen. Try to imagine what Mr Cox thinks about deregulation.
We cannot rely on capitalists to defend capitalism (sprinkle inverted commas to taste).
Let us hypothesize a fictional British man of letters in the aftermath of a terrible war, circa 1946. Imagine if you will that he is a socialist, as many in his time were, and a playwright of some renown. So interesting are his plays that even establishment newspapers on the ‘right’ take him seriously, fondly calling him a Curmudgeon of Honour.
However, let us also imagine that as the full horrors of Nazi atrocities come to light in post war Europe, our imaginary left wing playwright loudly declares that former leading member of the German National Socialist Party and head of the Luftwaffe Herman Göring should not be on trial for war crimes in Nuremberg. In fact, he goes so far as to sign a petition along with like-minded socialists to Free Herman Göring.
Now I wonder if the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian would still regard him as just another leading playwright, given his apologia for a mass murdering ethnic cleansing Nazi? Surely that would be enough for the great and good of the establishment to put him beyond the pale.
I guess not.
…The time to worry would be if he stopped attacking us.
John Gray used to defend freedom and free markets; now he denounces all such stuff. He used to be one of us, but now he isn’t. How come? Have we changed our minds? Has he? Is the fellow some sort of traitor?
There is nothing inconsistent or treacherous about John Gray. He was never more than a useful ally of the libertarian movement. He hasn’t changed the way he thinks. He hasn’t, in Tom Burroughes‘ words, “declined and fallen”. Nor have we. It is the times that have changed. These now place John Gray in opposition to us rather than in alliance with us.
The circumstance which enabled me to start seriously understanding what goes on inside John Gray’s head occurred about fifteen years ago.
Remember the AIDS scare of the mid-to-late eighties. Remember when we all made lists of our bed companions, and when they all did, and we thereby constructed vast but, as it later mostly turned out (provided that you were a non-drug-abusing heterosexual), entirely imaginary networks of deadly contagion. Remember when millions were going to die, and everyone and his lover besieged the Sexually Transmitted Disease Clinics demanding to be tested. Remember when AIDS was trumpetted to the world as an equal opportunities killer. Of course you do, even if, like me, you could not now put an exact date to that terrible moment of apparent doom.
Well, I happened to meet up with John Gray, with whom I was then acquainted, just when this moment was at its most scary. He it was who conveyed to me the full horrors of the sexually transmitted doom that supposedly then awaited us. He had just come back from America, he told me. And in America, he told me, they were predicting deaths by the million. Something like, if I remember his figure rightly, twenty per cent of the American population were going to die hideously, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, they could do about it.
There wasn’t much talk of the strength of the evidence for all this, merely the assertion that it was definitely so.
And he loved it. He wallowed in it. Just when the world was ceasing to make sense to the rest of us, it was making perfect, wonderful, glorious sense to him. Disaster is just around the corner! Yes!!!!
Now what’s going on here? The simple answer is that John Gray is, as Tom Burroughes says, a pessimist. But he is a consistent pessimist. He has always been a pessimist. He always will be a pessimist, until the moment he dies – another moment which will also make perfect sense to him. He never has and he never will betray the camp of pessimism. His coat will always be deepest black, and he will never turn it. He can be depended upon to see disaster around every corner.
Disaster, in John Gray’s world, is the result of optimism and enthusiasm, of “constructivist rationalism”, as Hayek put it, of some formula which lots of people are getting excited and happy about. All such formulae, for John Gray, will inevitably end in tears.
I don’t know why John Gray is such a pessimist. Perhaps when very young he had his one episode of manic, insane happiness and optimism, and he ran joyously around his Welsh house shouting hosannas. The world was a happy place. He had just proved it, just read a book about it. It was progressing. Every day, in every way, it was getting better and better. Hallelujah!! And then just as the graph of his joy was reaching idiotic heights, his gloomy Welsh uncle dropped by with the news that his favourite Welsh aunt – who was in fact his favourite human being in the entire world ever and who had only that morning been telling little John that the world wasn’t all misery but in fact a happy smiling place full of joy and love and good home cooking and nice clean houses with indoor plumbing such as there didn’t use to be in the bad old days – had just been killed horribly in a car smash
→ Continue reading: The consistent pessimism of John Gray
Many people (including me) bitch about George W. Bush.
However, at least he is not in South Africa applauding the endless insults directed at the United States and supporting the demands for a world government to be set up to direct money from the “islands of wealth” to the poor of the planet.
This is exactly what Mr Gore would be doing.
Paul Marks
I do have a life. I know because I was holding on to it at 7.30am last Thursday while sliding down the tarmac unseated from my Monster bike by an act of altruism.
Well, altruism mixed with incompetence but it’s the motivation that counts. I was hit by a scooter who rammed into the back of me. Those who have seen a picture of my Ducati Monster Dark may ask why would a 900cc bike be worried about a scooter?! Well, this baby was a 400cc Piaggo weighing about 200kg (400lb)!
The cause of the collision was a cyclist who just spilled herself and her bags to the left of me and I, moved by an altruistic impulse, decided to stop. I checked the road to my left, started braking and as I was about 10 yards from the hapless cyclist, the earth moved closer and then disappeared. When I came to, there were three men peering into my face asking me whether I am OK. After I replied “No I am bloody not!”, two of them disappeared, leaving a rather peevish looking scooter rider behind to face my wrath.
The whole incident boils down to the fact that both of us were looking to help the cyclist. My brakes being far superior (the same as Formula 1) to the scooter’s caused the rider to miscalculate the braking distance. If one or both of us simply decided to ride past nothing would have happened. As it is I damaged my bike, my helmet and more importantly my knee. I have been out of action for several days and have suffered pain for no other reason than trying to do the right thing.
So here we are altruism does not pay and if I were rational, I should not repeat the same ‘mistake’ next time. However, I know if I face the same situation, I couldn’t live with myself, if I didn’t stop for a person who just had an accident. So am I irrational and therefore immoral? Balls!
I am not really interested in arguments such as that stopping to help someone is not really an act of altruism because one can do this in hope that others will stop for you when in need and belief that this needs to be generally encouraged. Or the anti-altruist classic that such an act makes me feel good (or not stopping causes negative feelings), and so my action wasn’t without self-interest. Why don’t I buy those arguments? Because it is harder to prove that an altruistic action is motivated by self-interest somewhere along the motivation chain than it is to disprove that a self-less act is just that.
I believe altruism is connected to free will. To say that all our actions are motivated by self-interest at some level smacks of determinism to me. If we are free to act, we should be able to act without the constraints of self-interest and be able to chose an act that may not bring us any direct benefit.
As things stands I hope my bike will get repaired and my knee will heal soon, so I can continue to make the world a happier place. 
I love the taste of tarmac in the morning
it smells of…victory
It is a sad fact that one of the things that causes the libertarian movement to get stronger is other groups in society getting weaker.
Consider Britain’s gun owners. Until recently they were very content, using their guns to attack targets, animals, and even the occasional bad human being. Most of their intellectual effort went into discussing amongst themselves which guns were the best, how to hit targets even more accurately, how to make sure that the only other creatures they shot were creatures they were trying to shoot, and so forth.
Then suddenly the government (worse, almost the entire country) held the gunners responsible for a couple of gun massacres of good human beings and decided to take their guns away from them. Somebody had to take the blame, and the actual perpetrators were already dead.
Suddenly a sublimely apolitical group got politicised. Suddenly they found themselves trying to persuade others of the wisdom and rightness of them being allowed to go on using their guns, which you can’t do only by talking about the technicalities of guns, although God knows they tried that. They found, far too late, that they would have to learn about politics, and in particular about whatever political principles might allow them to keep on owning their guns, or failing that, might one day allow them to own guns again. Thus many persons who formerly cared only about guns, suddenly started to care about things like libertarianism also.
I believe that another group which is about to be policised are the home schoolers, and not just of Britain but of the entire Anglosphere. Everywhere you look, in Britain and in the USA certainly, and I’m sure everywhere else where “education otherwise” is still allowed, efforts are being made to end what appears to professional state educators as a strange and scandalous legal anomaly. → Continue reading: Guns, the attack on home schooling, and the growth of the libertarian movement
Paul Marks points out that truth is rarely allowed to get in the way of objectives.
Libertarians who study the history of thought are well aware of the power of lies.
To give one example: Generations of people accepted that the labour theory of value was universally accepted (at least in the English speaking world) because J.S. Mill, in his “Principles of Political Economy” (1848), stated that the theory of value was now settled and not disputed. Actually most economists in the Italian, French and German speaking worlds opposed the theory and two of the best known political economists in England also opposed it. These economists were Samuel Bailey and Richard Whately (the work of both men was known to J.S. Mill).
I wonder how many people in the last one and half centuries have been tricked by J.S. Mill’s ‘no one disputes’ tactic. This tactic is deployed whenever wants to pretend that no one opposes a piece of statism he happens to favour. In “Principles of Political Economy” we are told that no one disputes the need for police (in fact hotly disputed and not made compulsory for local communities till 1856), or the need for the government to be engaged in street building, water supply, drainage, rubbish collection etc (all hotly disputed at the time).
If one wishes to make something happen, pretending everyone agrees with it may be a good tactic. However, it does not work for free market reform – as it has always been too obvious that some people oppose liberty, so the lie that no one opposes it is too transparent. We have to be honest whether we like it or not – otherwise we look absurd.
How is this all relevant to the present day? → Continue reading: The Power of Lies
Barbara Amiel delivers a damning indictment of the New York Times, pointing out:
Super-liberalism has led the Times into a lot of nonsense. The Israeli government is routinely described in its news stories as following “hardline” policies while no such negative description is given to governments such as those of Saudi Arabia or the Palestinian Authority.
Indeed, the Saudis are routinely described as “moderates” in news stories or “pro-West” allies of America – even as they fund al-Qa’eda and their official newspapers spout virulent hatred of the West.
Amiel also points out that the New York Times recent attempt to portray Henry Kissenger as opposed to the Bush strategy on Iraq was:
The new-look Henry K was so blatant a piece of deception that, on August 19, the Wall Street Journal parted with its tradition of keeping quiet about its competitor’s editorial policies and published a leader with a damning indictment of the “tendentious” claims of the New York Times, suggesting that the paper keep “its opinions on its editorial page”.
She also links to the splendid Smarter Times website, which records the NYT’s dissembling stream of half truths and outright deceptions. The whole article is well worth a read.
However for me there is a certain resonance to it all as one does not have to look as far away as New York to see the phenomena. Samizdata.net’s own Brian Micklethwait recently had to ‘Fisk’ his own article after The Times (of London) published it ‘edited’ in significant ways that changed what he was actually trying to say. That said, what the London Times’ editors did to Brian’s article pales compared to the outright deceptions masquerading as ‘objective news’ routinely printed by the New York Times.
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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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