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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Many of you will never have heard of Will Hutton and for those that haven’t, this little introduction is necessary.
Mr.Hutton is pure Enemy Class. Ostensibly a journalist he has also headed up or contributed to various lefty think-tanks. He was quite influential in the formation of the New Labour project and, like all such people, he is a fanatical Federast who has adopted an ‘Animal Farm’ mindset of ‘America bad, Europe good’. Every now and then he pops up on British TV to excoriate people who are reluctant to pay higher taxes. He sneers so much that one could be forgiven for thinking that his top lip has been surgically attached to the bottom of his nose.
He is ripe for a ‘fisking’ by a higher organism such as James C. Bennett
“As a result of these moves, and the increasing prosperity of Britain in general, the island now enjoys booming do-it-yourself stores (so reminiscent of American ones, no doubt to Hutton’s disgust) and popular television programs such as “Changing Rooms” (whose American knockoff, “Trading Spaces,” is also popular on the other side of the Atlantic.)
The most interesting thing about “Changing Rooms” is the 500-pound limit on expenditure for the domestic makeover. This is not some Martha Stewart upper-middle-class consumption extravaganza. Rather, it is the application of ingenuity to ordinary people’s spaces, and conveys the message of what can be done by individual homeowners to bring delight to their own property.
Undoubtedly Hutton would rather they spend their time petitioning the local council to repair the window, as they used to. This would end their socio-politico isolation and selfish indulgence, so un-European. In Hutton’s mind, it seems, private housing is only one step from private car ownership, private gun ownership, and Columbine massacres”.
It is worth your while reading the whole thing. Not only does it skewer Hutton but it does so much else to clarify the difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’.
I wonder why it is that my dear friend Brian Micklethwait describes me as pessimist? Not only does he describe me as a pessimist but he also considers it to be a defining characteristic by the inclusion of the word ‘usual’.
It mystifies me somewhat because I do not consider myself to be a pessimist. I did not say that there will be nuclear war in South Asia, I merely assert that there might be. Does that make me a pessimist? Maybe it does. In which case, how do I become an optimist? By asserting that there cannot possibly be a nuclear war in South Asia? It strikes me that optimism along those lines is the same as daring the whole world not to disappoint you. Perhaps that is what I should do.
Still, I note that Brian describes himself as ‘(cautiously) optimistic’, a term which begs the question: why the ‘caution’?
David Carr is his usual pessimistic self concerning the possibility of nuclear war between Pakistan and India. I am my usual (cautiously) optimistic self. As I said to David face-to-face over the weekend, and as he said I should stick up here, there is one huge difference between nuclear weapons and the previous sort. Nuclear weapons can kill Presidents, Prime Ministers and Generals, as well as the lower ranks. Would World Wars One and Two have proceeded as they did if, every time you (one of the grand fromages) launched your Grand Offensive from the safety of your French Chateau or your German or British or Russian command bunker, there was a one in five chance that you personally would die a horrible death. Would the Cold War have remained throughout its duration so cold without nuclear weapons concentrating the minds of the Great People?
The Kalashnikov. The AK-47. The weapon of choice for every communist insurgent and marxist regime in the world. Not just because it was simple, sturdy and effective but also because it was produced by the horny-hands of comrade workers in the Soviet Union and so untainted by decadent and exploitative Western capitalism. Its symbolism was, perhaps, just as important as its stopping power.
But that’s all over now
“A two-year legal dispute between Russian companies for the copyright of the world-famous Kalashnikov assault rifle has been won by its original producer in the Urals.”
Ironies don’t come thicker than this; the gun that was supposed to blow away people who believed in property rights and profit will, henceforth, be produced under the mantle of both. Yes, the sinister and fearsome Kalashnikov has been co-opted into the Great Capitalist Project. If Che Guevarra were alive now, he’d be spinning in his grave! 
Lowell Ponte over on Front Page has written a superb retort to Frances Fukuyama’s latest collectivist cri de coeur ‘Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution’. Although critiquing Fukuyama is sometimes a bit like shooting fish in a barrel (Instapundit frequently makes sport of him on slow news days), Ponte does a very good job at pointing out the horrendous implications of Fukuyama’s line of thought
Who owns your body? In Fukuyama’s implicit view, the government does because “you” are merely a cog transmitting your DNA on to the collective of future generations whose rights are superior to yours. You should have no right to tamper with your own mind or body via drugs or with your heredity by cloning yourself or altering your own DNA.
[…]
Fukuyama likes big government, especially when it grabs people by the short-and-curlies and prohibits them from using science to alter reproductive DNA. “Libertarian advocates of genetic choice want the freedom to improve their children,” wrote Fukuyama, “But do we really know what it means to improve a child?” (“I am guessing,” riposted Libertarian David Dieteman, “that Johns Hopkins, where Fukuyama is a professor, does not include this query with its tuition bills to parents.”)
This is terrific stuff and I strongly commend the whole article to anyone who holds to quaint notions of self-ownership as I do. Fukuyama and his ilk are not just misguided, they are the intellectual cheerleaders for a totalitarianism of the most profound kind… they would have the state lay claim to the very molecular structure of your body.
As John Stuart Mill wrote in 1859, “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign”. Well not if Frances Fukuyama has his way.
- Prams versus pushchairs. I know I was meant to dispense my maternal wisdom earlier, Brian, but I was caught up in dispensing a few maternal whacks round the head. (Only joking M’lud.) There is a fixed quantity of attention available to children or indeed adults. 1,440 minutes per day, less sleep time. That’s why someone-or-other called attention the final currency. It’s like land. They aren’t making any more. That said, we are all using so little of the potentially available attention supply that depriving a kiddie of seeing mama’s face for the time spent in the pushchair is insignificant, and may as you say be outweighed by the benefits of seeing the world. Pity one has to strap them in though. Gets ’em entirely too accepting of safety belts.
This goes the same way as arguments about population and productivity. The Club of Rome deserve our mockery for saying that space / food / oil whatever will run out by 1980. Of course there’s loads more good stuff being created by busy capitalist hands all the time. Eventually, however, the limits to growth doomsayers have a point. And relying on the invention of interstellar travel sometime in the late 2200s does not fully satisfy me as an insurance policy.
- UK Transport. With this Illuminated blog, it’s not how many readers, it’s who reads. Real journalists will go there to research stories, if they are wise.
- A plug if I may, for my own take on His Majesty King Brendan over at my blog.
Ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is a happy puppy. The new Miss Universe is Oxana Fedorova, a policewoman from St.Petersburg in Russia… now I am off to that historic city to see if I can get arrested.
 
Yes, just as Perry said at the end of my earlier post, I now have this quote nailed, although I have to say it wasn’t just the blogosphere – more like the Internet as a whole. And it happened in less than an hour, or so it seemed. It’s like having your own personal global Tannoy system. But it also needs the good-will of humans, not just technology..
John Daragon emailed thus, with admirable terseness:
Book 3, Chapter 5, pg. 127.
Steven Galaher e-mailed that while he couldn’t give me the chapter and page number, he could give me an expanded version of the quote:
“The Enemy, of course, has long known that the Ring is abroad, and that it is borne by a hobbit. He knows now the number of our Company that set out from Rivendell, and the kind of each of us. But he does not yet perceive our purpose clearly. He supposed that we were all going to Minas Tirith; for that is what he would himself have done in our place. And according to his wisdom it would have been a heavy stroke against his power. Indeed he is in great fear, not knowing what mighty one may suddenly appear, wielding the Ring, and assailing him with war, seeking to cast him down and take his place. That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind. That we should try to destroy the Ring itself has not yet entered into his darkest dream.”
Neither email on its own would have been enough, but put the two together (the speciality of the Internet, after all) and it wouldn’t have taken me much longer. However, the man whose email I am publishing in the first place (and whom I had also personally e-mailed), Michael Drout of Wheaton College, Massachusetts, as well as giving almost all of the same expanded quote that Steven Galaher supplied, also settled the whole thing for me thus, and I’m going to “publish” all of this too (i.e. elsewhere and not just here) because it is informative:
Citing the Lord of the Rings is tricky because there are so many textual variants (due to multiple printings and re-printings and Tolkien’s tendency to revise each set of galleys sent to him). A “clean” text was only finally developed in the late 1980’s, so most people just cite by Volume, Book, and Chapter number. Thus the above would be: TT, Bk III, ch v. But if you want a more traditional cite, it is page 100 in the Hougton Mifflin hardback edition, the closest thing we have to a “standard” edition in Tolkien scholarship.
Hope this was helpful.
Indeed it was. Thanks also to Antoine Clarke for showing willing, and to anyone else who was half way to the answer when Perry told everyone to stop.
I don’t know if this is a good way to find out about Formula One racing car racing, but this is blogland so there’s a link for you.
I’m now watching the TV re-run of the Monaco Grand Prix, which was held last Sunday and which David Coulthard won, I believe. And this has reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to say to the world for some time. Why can’t they have more racing car races in places like Monaco, which is an actual place, with hotels and houses and a sea-front with super-luxury yachts parked in it, and fewer racing car races in places like all the other places where they have racing car races, i.e. the racing car racing equivalent of out-of-town shopping centres?
I thought this was not going to be political, but as I blog the question I realised what the answer is, and it’s deeply political. In Monaco you are allowed to take your own risks. You are allowed to race a racing car at 200 mph within two yards of a concrete wall, if you’re good enough and if some insane millionaire or cigarette salesman will pay you. And you are allowed to stand just above the concrete wall in the direct line of fire of any bad driving that might occur and watch all this insanity. At most grand prix circuits you need a pair of binoculars to see what the hell’s happening, because before a racing car driver can stage a decent crash for you he has negotiate about a third of a mile of gravel and a giant wall of rubber tires.
It is no coincidence whatever that in Monaco they also allow you to keep most of your money. In most parts of the world they run your life, and tax you half to death to pay their wages. In Monaco you run your own life, almost entirely.
Two different things: low taxes and a fun racing car race track. Same underlying philosophy.
With less than 48 hours to go until the commencement of the Football (Soccer) World Cup, one could rightly expect the outbreak of a ‘footbal fever’ in England. And, indeed, there is a tingle of breathless anticipation in the air and a sweating of the palms at the prospect of our opening game against Sweden on Sunday.
We all recognise this. We’ve all been here before. But never, ever can I recall quite the level of overt patriotism that is clearly on display all over London. Driving to work this morning, I was waiting at a set of traffic lights behind a dozen or so other vehicles all of which were displaying either the Cross of St.George or the Union Jack boldy from their aeriels or emblazoned in their rear windows. Houses, shops, offices and restaurants are festooned with bunting and flags. Everywhere I look, there’s a flag.
I get the feeling that this is about more than football.
People occasionally ask me why I work as a journalist. Is it the thrill of interviewing British Chancellor Gordon Brown, covering aspects of the Enron disaster or implications of September 11th?
Well I guess the answer would be yes to all of the above. But, gentle readers, it is stories like this one that really make working for Reuters so rewarding. It is libertarian, in a not terribly intellectual kind of way. Enjoy.
democratic adj. 1 of, like, practicing, advocating, or constituting democracy or a democracy. 2 favouring social equality.
Brendan O’Neill is a republican in the British sense of the word, which is to say he wants to abolish Britain’s figurehead monarchy. He wants to do this because it is ‘anti-democratic’. Of course when a Marxist says ‘democratic’ it is useful to actually ponder the meaning of the word and how it is being used. After all, communist East Germany was the ‘People’s German Democratic Republic’… and Brendan is both a self described republican and in favour of democracy, so clearly one must not just assume that when the D word gets bandied about we all mean the same thing.
Or do we?
When I use the term democratic, it is generally in a negative pejorative sense. To me it means my neighbours voting themselves some of my money, in effect mugging me by proxy when the state taxes me for their perceived benefit. To me ‘democratic’ means allowing my neighbour a say in how I build my house and how I raise my children and what chemicals get put in my food and water regardless of what I want. Democracy is at its core about denying the concept of ownership, even of your own body, because other people get to use the violence of the state via their ballots to reduce my actual ownership. When the state intermediates itself, it negates society, because state and society are two completely different things. The morality of several ownership, even of yourself, gets superceded by the force based political state.
So when I hear people like Brendan say something is ‘anti-democratic’ I usually assume that whatever they are referring to is actually a good thing. The US Constitution for example is quite anti-democratic because it severely constrains (in theory at least) the ability of people to vote for laws that would abridge liberties (such as freedom of speech or the right to own the means to defend yourself)… so things that act as a check on that violence backed tyranny of the majority called ‘democracy’ are generally a splendid idea. For me, voluntary social interaction is the source of legitimacy, not the sanctification of the ballot box and the violent intermediation that springs from it.
Yes, I suspect Brendan and I do indeed mean the same thing when we use the term ‘democratic’, I just happen to regard it as the means by which a vast engine of criminality powers itself whereas Brendan sees it as the key to an egalitatian Utopia at gunpoint.
So whilst I must confess to being infused with the widespread indifference to the monarchy Brendan mentions, the fact is the Queen steals a great deal less of my money and poses a far lesser threat to my liberty than the democratically elected thugs in Downing Street, so I for one am happy to use the Jubilee as an excuse to hoist a few drinks to toast the health of ‘Her Majesty’, who reigns without ruling, something I am unlikely to ever do to the Capo di tutti Capi, the Prime Minister, who rules without reigning.
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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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