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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Mick Hume, the leftist commentator with a sharp nose for humbug and an often refreshingly libertarian streak, hits a home run with an excellent column about how the anti-globalisation movement has gotten into bed with some very dubious characters indeed by adopting a “bash-Israel-first” stance related to the current violence in the region. The whole article is worth a read, but I particularly liked this paragraph:
“Western society is infected by a powerful sense of self-loathing and a rejection of its political, social and economic achievements. It was this spirit of self-loathing that led some, of the left and the right alike, to suggest that America got what it deserved on 11 September. Those sentiments are no more progressive when aimed against Israel as a symbol of the West than when they are directed in irrational campaigns against GM crops and the literature of Dead White Males.”
I could not agree more. What Hume is really saying is that the types who attack Starbuck coffee shops, bash Israel for trying to defend itself and who want the global free trade system to be closed down are in fact, reactionaries. They broadly reject the Enlightenment heritage of liberty, reason, celebration of Man’s mastery of nature, self-criticism, open markets and the spirit of enquiry. They are flat-earthers.
Hume’s article appeared in the left-wing weekly magazine, The New Statesman (can be found in Samizdata’s ‘havens of fluorescent idiocy’ links section on our links page). That publication has offered up some pretty vile views on September 11 and the aftermath, so Hume’s article is a welcome detour into sanity. On the other hand, maybe just a rare flash of gold amidst the dross.
In a recent post, Stephen “VodkaPundit” Green managed to assign an innovative moniker to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Mr. Green objected to Kristof’s claim that domestic terrorists like the militias are just as much a threat as foreign terrorists such as al-Qaeda. After carefully weighing the evidence, Green dismissed the notion as the ramblings of a f—tard.
Kristof’s latest offering will do nothing to help him live down his new nickname. He is asking us to believe that the US is complicit in Islamic nations’ institutionalized abuse of women by refusing to sign the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, a document that is now 22 years old but which Kristof finds fit to recycle as cutting edge news.
The CEDAW treaty, according to Kristof, “simply helps third-world women gain their barest human rights. In Pakistan, for example, women who become pregnant after being raped are often prosecuted for adultery and sentenced to death by stoning. But this treaty has helped them escape execution.” See? Pakistan has to tone down the misogyny because they signed the treaty. Since the US has not ratified the treaty, US judges are free to sentence adultresses to death by stoning. Clearly, the problem here is with the US, not with Pakistan and the others who signed the treaty, right? Well, actually, it isn’t America’s fault, says Kristof. It is John Ashcroft’s fault.
If only the US Congress would ratify the treaty, Pakistani and Saudi and Iranian men would stop abusing women! Besides, everyone knows that even if these men are abusing women, it is just their way of expressing outrage over America’s support of Israel and opposition to Palestinian statehood. In fact, every evil in the world is America’s fault, even when foreigners are perpetrating the evil against America.
Kristof insists that there is no political agenda behind the CEDAW treaty, and that conservative objections to the treaty are misguided. However, the treaty openly embraces affirmative action:
Article 4.1: Adoption by States Parties of temporary special measures aimed at accelerating de facto equality between men and women shall not be considered discrimination as defined in the present Convention, but shall in no way entail as a consequence the maintenance of unequal or separate standards; these measures shall be discontinued when the objectives of equality of opportunity and treatment have been achieved.
… and asserts that a wide variety of welfare-state entitlements such as “access to health care”, paid maternity leave, free education, agricultural loans, public pensions, etc. are actually fundamental rights. Sure, no political grandstanding there.
If Kristof wants to live down his new nickname, he is going to have to do better than this. Perhaps Kristof will even join Robert Fisk in having his very name immortalized as a blogosphere synonym for, well, f—tard.
This posting began life as a continuation of the previous posting, which I suggest you read first. Adriana read the previous thing and said you’ve got two blogs there, not just one. I’ll take her word for it, and this is Part 2.
So, we’re comparing the actual Economic Calculation debate (Mises, Hayek etc.) with a proposed equivalent in the realm of Public Safety. Continue…
Another big point, which was made by Richard Miniter at the Simon Davies meeting, concerns the matter of what kind of information we’re talking about here. (Miniter is a colleague of Tim Evans at the Centre for the New Europe. His book The Myth of Market Share is coming out in October, and he will also be bringing out another book soon about the Clinton regime’s handling of Al-Qaeda. Verdict: they handled it badly.)
One of the basic impossibilities of central planning, made much of especially by Hayek, concerned the importance of “unexplicit” knowledge, the sort of knowledge that consists of knowing, without having a prayer of being able to convince a state bureaucrat about it, that this kind of product would be just, you know, nicer than that one, and that people will prefer the nicer one. An entrepreneur in a free economy is able to back his hunch with his own money.
Hunch. Now there’s an interesting word. Hunches are those things that old-fashioned policemen also used to have. They would have a feeling that something bad was being planned, or that someone bad had already done something bad, and they’d act.
Mostly how they’d act is by trying to obtain some more information, of the explicit sort, the sort that you can type into a computerised database without being accused of unsubstantiated waffling. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing that people should be banged up in jail just because some old copper doesn’t like the smell of them. What I am arguing is that the shift from observation to action and hence, perhaps, to something like prevention, should not depend on persuading the Great Centralised Security Beast in Washington or London or wherever that this is a good idea. Public safety, I’m arguing, is a lot more like washing machines that work and for which you can get decent spare parts and maintenance than public safety is now assumed to be.
(See also my short Libertarian Alliance piece The Menace of the Apocalyptic Individual (Political Notes 164), towards the end, for a brief elaboration of that last point. This was written before 9/11, but survives 9/11 really quite well.)
Well, I could go on, and at the privacy(?) of my own desk I intend to. But maybe all this has been said before and said better, and if so I’d like to know. I could live with that. I’m one of Hayek’s second-hand dealers in ideas. I only resort to trying to make an actual car in my own garage (or more realistically, to urging others to get to work on the thing) if the required intellectual vehicle does not already exist.
Harold Pinter is a well known British playwright, a scourge of the Tories and impassioned voice for the statist left. None of this matters one jot to me as the world is full of people declaiming incoherent left wing world views. He is also a signatory to the free Slobodan Milosevic petition, which makes him an apologist for Europe’s most prolific socialist mass murderer since Joseph Stalin. That most certainly does matter to me and to any rational non-idiotarian who views support for mass murderers as prima facie evidence of off-the-scale immorality.
So one would think that this would put Harold Pinter beyond the pale in polite society in Britain, right? I mean if telling a mildly racist joke ends your political career, then presumably showing solidarity with a man who ordered the systematic raping of Croat and Muslim women in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the slaughter of tens of thousands by government backed Serbian einstztruppen must mean there is hardly an open door in Britain for such a man.
Er, no. It means you get mentioned in the latest list of honours. This ‘non-political’ award by the British state is of course replete with political meaning. If you are a vocal left winger then standing up for a mass murderer is regarded as little more than an endearing eccentricity that in no way detracts from being ‘The Great Man of Letters’. This sort of thing is exactly what I do not dislike the British political class.
I hate them.
Ahn Jung Hwan, take a bow. He misses a penalty in the early minutes of the game, and then he scores the golden goal that ends it in extra time. What a story. South Korea 2 Italy 1. France, Argentina, Portugal, and now Italy. Who’s next in the cull of the Great Soccer Nations? Brazil? We wish. (Brazil play England in the next round, early in the morning on Friday.)
As for doing something about poverty, Antoine, maybe regular folks are better off giving the World Cup their undivided attention, but I think that we libertarians ought to be able to do better than that. In pursuit of such positivity I will tonight be attending a lecture organised by the Institute of Economic Affairs to be given by the great Hernando de Soto. Expect a report here, and hope also for a picture, of one of the truly great men of our time.
I did my best on the radio the other day, that is to say I tried to do my best. I pointed out that the Trade Justice campaigners were only fighting symptoms, and ignoring the “underlying causes” of why this nation (South Korea being a fine example) does well economically, while others do badly. (For a country that has done badly look no further than North Korea, who played with distinction in the 1966 World Cup Finals in England but who have since faded away football-wise, and done a hell – and I do mean hell – of a lot worse than that economically.) However I wasn’t persuaded by what I said. These trade justice campaigners are at least fighting some symptoms, even if not all or exactly the ones I would have liked.
I remember how Amnesty International used to be accused of the same thing. They too used to fight individual cases with individual faces, while carefully ignoring the ideologically divisive matter of what makes nasty governments nasty in the first place, and well done them. Amnesty went into decline, at any rate in my eyes, not because it “fought symptoms” and ignored the “causes” of tyranny, but because its literature switched from featuring photos of unjustly imprisoned poets and tortured opposition politicians from far away places to having photos of already much celebrated celebrity supporters from the world of showbiz, and because it branched out into the perhaps correct but in my opinion utterly unrelated matter of campaigning against the death penalty. Also, since the end of the Cold War, the enemy went from being Tyranny to being Chaos, and writing begging letters to Chaos asking it to be nicer doesn’t work so well.
Oh well, live and learn.
Also, British TV today is full of the video of a firefighting airplane in Colorado crashing after its wings had exploded and fallen off, killing all three on board. So no more jokes from me about people starting fires.
In a posting earlier today, Paul Marks said some nice things about South Dakota. It’s an interesting place — wide open spaces, low taxes and few people. You might wonder why in this place of rugged individualists Democrats consistently win public office. Perhaps the South Dakota website didn’t mention the large number of Indians (Native-Americans as they are now called) who vote a solid bloc for Democrats who continue to keep them in the bondage of federal handouts. This population has opted out of assimilation encouraged by the federal agency whose existence relies on maintaining this population literally ‘on the reservation.’
Driving through these reservations is a mind altering experience. Vast tracts of featureless landscape dotted with tiny habitations looking like a National Geographic documentary on public television depicting the deperate poverty of equatorial Africa. It’s a disgrace and the natural result of what happens when people are encouraged to believe that they are victims and can’t be expected to be responsble for themselves.
Evelyn Palmeri
England is at now a standstill watching the wretched Danish football team collapse in the face of England’s team, and thus allow England through to the last eight of the little soccer tournament in the Far East that we keep referring to. Watching and now celebrating. The Danes were never in it, poor fellows, and I really feel for their goalie, who had a “mare”, as one of our TV pundits rather charmingly describes unsatisfactory dreams. So some bloggage from me is in order, to keep the blog rolling.
Last night (Friday June 14) Mark Littlewood of Liberty spoke at the June Putney Debate, and confirmed how useful it was for the likes of Tom Burroughes and David Carr to show up at that Liberty Conference. Mark stressed how just a couple of questions from the floor can change the whole atmosphere of a day. So Tom was right about how it’s worth our team attending these things, and David probably did far better then he realised.
I committed a hideous social blunder. My socialising skills are excellent, with just four deviations from total perfection: (1) I have a shocking memory for names, (2) I have a shocking memory for faces, (3) I am shockingly bad at putting together any names and faces that I do sort of remember, and (4) I am, in general, often quite rude to people. So when I arrived I saw lots of familiar faces, and one that I knew I knew, but didn’t actually know. I know you, I said, but, please tell me who you are. It turned out to be Mark Littlewood. The last time I met Mark, he was a speaker at a libertarian conference and I was chairing the session. He’s a long time Libertarian Alliance supporter and we’re supposed to be well acquainted. We are well acquainted. What a mare. Oh well. Sorry Mark.
The most serious thoughts provoked in my mind by last night’s proceedings need to be thought about and written about separately, which I will do, hopefully today but if not then Real Soon Now. The most intriguing other titbit I picked up came courtesy of Christian Michel, who will be the speaker at my next Brian’s Friday (June 28). Christian said that, concerning the subject he will be addressing (what libertarianism should do about crime) he has now changed his mind. He did a piece a year or two ago about Restitution, which he has now removed from his Liberalia website, because it’s wrong, he now says. (Wrong? What kind of a reason is that to take something down from a website?) But aha! The Libertarian Alliance still has Christian’s now abandoned intellectual child (as Legal Notes No. 33: Restitution: Justice in a Stateless Society), and always will have it. Anyway, my point is, it should be an amusing little gathering on June 28, and we all know what to read by way of preparation, to find out exactly which misguided fool it is that Christian Michel now disagrees with. Himself. Seriously, I believe that the willingness to reject what you later decide are your own errors is one of the key indicators of a superior mind.
Final titbit of news. Tim Evans has now moved to his new job with the Centre for the New Europe. He said that he was already agreeably surprised by the number, quality and academic grandeur of Continental Europe’s libertarians. You will definitely be hearing more from Samizdata about these people and their various writings, sayings and doings.
Bring on the Brazilians.
I often claim that the United States is just as bad (in its own way) as Britain (this fits in well with my “we are all doomed” view of the universe). However a couple of things over the last 24 hours have produced doubts in my mind.
Yesterday I was playing with my computer and looked up the website for South Dakota. It was not a very impressive site and it did not seem to have been created by very bright people, but I did say some things of interest. The Governor of the State casually announced the State’s balanced budget (the State has had a balanced budget every year for the last 113 years), he also mentioned (in passing) that the voters (not the politicians) had voted to get rid of the death tax (the state inheritance tax).
South Dakota does not seem to have much in the way of taxes – no income tax, no business profits tax, a sales tax that is a fraction of ours. It also seems to have little trade union power and the Governor has finished selling off all the state enterprises that were created in the early 1900’s.
The leader of the Democrats in the Senate represents South Dakota – perhaps he should look at his own State sometime. It is not just a bunch of subsidized farmers anymore.
Meanwhile back in Britain. I went to pick up an inhaler today (interesting contradiction – I claim I want to die and yet I go to absurd lengths to stay alive). I presented my prescription to the lady at the chemist shop and she said “you have not ticked any of the exemption boxes”. I explained that I was exempt – that I paid for my prescription. “No, you must tick one of the exception boxes” (said the lady). I pointed out the old saying that “someone, somewhere must pay” – “you have met him” I said “it is me”. “You have not ticked any of the exemption boxes” (said the lady).
Eventually I was able to pay for my prescription. However, I think this type of conversation is the death rattle of the Welfare State (and not in the nice sense that we are about to see free market reform). I do not think I would have this sort of conversation in South Dakota.
Paul Marks
Is this “Paul Foot” who condemns “corporate greed” and “boardroom fraud” the very same “Paul Foot” who – as a lap-dog of the late Mr Robert Maxwell M.C. at the Mirror Group – took money from a crook who was robbing his colleagues’ pension fund, ignored the accumulated evidence of investigations into his masters frauds, and to my knowledge has never shown the slightest remorse for covering up – by his silence – the biggest corporate crime in British history?
I trust that I am completely mistaken, otherwise I could never look at Private Eye or the Guardian again without worrying about the editorial integrity of these fearless organs.
Several comments stuck in my mind that were made by speakers at the Liberty Conference on Saturday in central London at which I was present along with David Carr and some other Samizdata and Libertarian Alliance members. The following will not be forgotten easily:
“Er, Mr Chairman, we live in a managed society. We all manage each other. We cannot have a world where we just have freedoms and certain rules”.
This was uttered by a man who claimed to be a member of Liberty, the civil liberties lobby. Perhaps he should lobby to have that organisation’s name changed to something more appropriate to what he thinks should be its true values, such as ‘Nanny’.
As David said, it was not a particularly encouraging event, although a few half-decent contacts were made and a lot of Libertarian Alliance pamphlets were taken away.
As with many such events, the best course of action is to behave like a decent human being. However, and at the risk of sounding arrogant, most of the people there did not have the intellectual equipment to figure out the exit route from a damp paper bag.
Over on Liberty Log there’s a long but good piece by William Cooke in praise of skycrapers and critical of the Prince of Wales for being critical of skyscrapers. Some while ago William Cooke asked me if the Libertarian Alliance might like to publish this piece. My problem was the way it ended:
If we resurrect the Twin Towers and make them better and stronger they will be living memorials and signs of hope for the resurrection to come on the great day of the Lord. Every family member who lost a loved one, when they look at the new Towers, will not only be able to see that we refused to surrender to the terrorists, but that we have hope and trust that in the end God Himself will set all things right and see that justice and peace are brought about on the earth.
Well they may be able to say such a thing, but what if they think that everything after “but that” is gibberish and don’t want to say it? And what if many more, who didn’t lose any loved ones in the outrage but who likewise don’t want terrorism surrendered to, feel similarly? This paragraph is a pointless exercise in coalition breaking, an attempt by a Christian to take posthumous possession of some classic symbols of don’t-care-what-religion-you-are-so-long-as-you-want-to-do-business secular materialism for his team.
But although Cooke’s piece ends very religiously, the thing as a whole is insufficiently religious. The religion is merely bolted onto the end. This means that it can’t really be a Libertarian Alliance Religious Note but would be a bit odd as anything else.
But the fact that I was unable to classify this piece of writing to suit my own editorial categories, and instead put it to one side (the side you never get back to unless prodded), shouldn’t put anyone else off reading a mostly very good piece.
Just before Cooke’s piece gets religion, it goes like this, agreeing with the Anne Coulter piece that I linked to on Friday 7th:
But, the best memorial may be two giant towers, like the ones that stood there before. Atta and his gang hated the Towers for their architecture and for what those buildings stood for – namely freedom, capitalism, western power, and modernity. To rebuild would send the message that they didn’t win and that our society and our culture will prevail. Those people who died there would want us to go forward in the world with that message.
Which is how and where the thing should have ended.
I would like to apologise to any visiting Argentinians or Argentophiles for yesterday’s rather visceral outburst.
My temporary use of such inflammatory and pugnacious language, whilst regrettable, was purely the product of a temporary bout of fog-inducing euphoria following Englands Word Cup win. Let me assure you that I bear no ill-will towards the Argentinian people. Indeed, they have my every sympathy given the chaos into which their venal and corrupt political class has plunged them. I hope, pray, nay expect them to rise like a phoenix from the flames.
Contrast, however, the mode of celebrations in Croatia from whence Natalija reports on the sounds of gunfire filling the air following the unexpected victory over Italy today. How spontaneously joyous.
I long for the day that I, too, can rejoice in Englands victories by firing my carbine into the air. But, due to the UK’s ridiculous prohibition on the private ownership of firearms, such healthy and safe expressions of national enthusiasm are forbidden to me and I am forced to resort, instead, to malevolent jingoistic slurs.
I apologise for any offence caused but I must lay the ultimate blame squarely at the feet of HM Government. Thank you for your kind attention.
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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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