Samizdata

I can assure Tony Millard (see below) that mine shines through pure and strong throughout the ages having started its life on the wrong side of a Habsburg bed…

As to being led by one’s ancestral star, I see the task more like building my own constellation…

In my capacity as the Supreme Pamphleteer of the Libertarian Alliance I am assembling the next Stuffed Envelope operation, consisting of, you know, publications. Arising out of this exercise in twentieth century nostalgia, and for reasons I can’t be bothered to explain, I find myself searching, at present in vain, for the exact chapter and page number of the following quote, probably from The Fellowship of the Ring, and probably from Chapter 2 (“The Council of Elrond”), said, I’m told, by Gandalf (good) about Sauron (bad):

“That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind.”

A magnum of warm virtuous feelings for the first person to tell me the answer and put me out of my editorial misery.

Update: [Editor: Ah, the power of the blogosphere…Thanks for the help, the information is now safely lodged in Brian’s head]

Despite Perry’s recent preoccupations, Samizdata seems to be bowling along nicely, doesn’t it? The pattern is, there’s an eight hour silence, Perry is out on the town trying to sign up more Samizdatans and getting somewhat “tired”, I decide it’s up to me, I post a page-and-a-half of waffle about whatever comes into my head and other Samizdatans read it and say to themselves we can’t have all those Americans thinking all this is is Brian waffling we’d better do something. So they do. And I now have some rambling to do in reply.

I liked Paul Staines’ bit about Britain’s growth rate having sunk like a stone. What this confirms is that British government income is now as high as it can be. Increasing the percentage rate of taxation doesn’t increase government tax income, it merely slows the economy down and causes government income to remain static. Similarly, if the government were to reduce the percentage rate of tax, government income wouldn’t decrease. This would merely cause the economy to surge forward, and the smaller slice of a bigger cake would end up being the same size as the bigger slices of smaller cakes. Britain is now at the top of the Laffer Curve. Isn’t that exciting? In plain English, the bastards are taking us for the absolute maximum amount they can, and if they get any greedier we stop coming through their bit of the forest.

If they truly want to spend more on the British National Health Service they are going to have to spend less on other things.

Aaron Armitage liked my ramble about gun-control, but wants to add that: “… people who are more likely to be shot are more likely to buy guns for self-defense. In other words, the risk of getting shot causes the gun ownership, not the other way around.” Quite right. Capitalise the P, take away “in other words”, and we have another anti-gun-control aphorism for the collection.

I didn’t pay much attention to that David Caruso movie, but by the end Marg Helgenberg was making excellent use of a gun to kill a bad person. David Caruso, if I understood matters correctly, continued to disapprove and instead of remaining with Marg like a Real Man and having some more sex with her in her swimming pool instead buggered off to Rio de Janeiro. Good riddance. Whatever happened to David Caruso? (E-mailers: I do not care what happened to David Caruso.)

I was delighted that Alice Bachini responded to my bit about pram design. I feared that this pram posting had disappeared into the oblivion bucket labelled Things That Belligerent Men Of A Certain Age In T-Shirts With Jobs In IT Don’t Care About. “Prams? Prams?!?!?!?! We want threats to H-Bomb the Middle East, girls in black leather on motor bikes, GNP statistics, guns, jet planes, pictures of Kylie Minogue in see-through clothing …” [stay tuned gentlemen]. “We may not be Real Men, but at least when we’re sitting at our computers allow us to pretend that we are.” Etc.)

Anyway Alice, thanks. You caught me committing an error I’m fond of denouncing others for, which is another Fixed-Quantity-Of fallacy, in this case the Fixed Quantity of Infant Attention fallacy. Your point being: outside stimulation increases the total capacity of infants to pay attention to things in general, such as and including Mum. They don’t either attend to the outside world or to Mum. They pay more attention to both. Makes sense.

That’s enough rambling for now. I’ll get to Antoine later. As usual, most of what he’s saying I agree with.

Dodgeblog is doing a multi-part series on sex, drugs, and rock & roll… well as Andrew is a rock critic, these are subjects about which I would venture he is more than passingly familiar

Update: Part II and Part III are also up.

During this past week, I managed to catch a late-night documentary programme on Channel 4 about a young British woman’s interest in reincarnation and her search for her past lives. Unfortunately, it was late, I was tired and feel asleep before the end of the show so I never discovered whether or not she was successful in her quest.

However, I was conscious to witness much of her journey during which she encountered like spirits who were searching for their past incarnations and, in many cases, claimed to have found them. Well, ‘found’ may not be exactly the right word; ‘adopted’ may be more accurate because a startlingly high number of these perfectly ordinary every-day folk were convinced that they were once Cleopatra or King Louis XIV or Horatio Nelson. One middle-aged chap from Leeds claimed to be a reincarnation of the Egyptian God Horus. Not for any of them was the grey, ignominious life of a peasant labourer from the Russian Steppes who died boringly of old-age or an anonymous factory-worker from Manchester who gave up his ghost in the First War. Far too prosaic.

I realise that reincarnation is a central doctrine for both Hindus and Buddhists and may well be true for all I know, but I can’t help getting the feeling that, in the hands of vulnerable Westerners, it is a matter not so much of faith but therapy. Watching these people gave me the impression that they were victims of an inverted ‘Cult of Celebrity’. Those unlikely to be touched by fame and fortune in this life can comfort themselves by arrogating some from a ‘previous life’. If you can’t ask the question ‘Don’t you know who I am?’, you can at least ask ‘Don’t you know who I was?’.

The impression I got from most of the participants was of mildly unhappy or unfulfilled people and whilst I’m all for the pursuit of happiness I am not sure that seeking past lives is the way to do it. There is something very negative about the whole exercise of seeking yesterday’s glory rather than tomorrow’s promise and I am sure that finding out I was Hernan Cortez in a past incarnation would only throw the relative mundanity of this life into sharp relief. Better, in my view, to devote one’s efforts to finding fulfillment among the living rather then searching for dubious glamour among the ranks of the dead.

Antoine totally missed my point, and bounced the point that I did make back at me as if I thought the opposite of it. Those mixed married people weren’t looking for trouble? That’s exactly my point. But trouble – this-thing-is-bigger-than-both-of-us trouble – nevertheless engulfed them. It is the nature of that trouble, and what I think is the nature of that trouble, that now seems to elude Antoine. He thinks that I hold all individual Muslims individually responsible for all the Islam-v-the-Rest grief that’s happening now. How many times do I have to say that I believe the opposite of that? He jumps to all manner of really quite insulting conclusions about what I think ought to be done about all this stuff, when I have not even reached any conclusions, still less stated any, beyond that it would probably be better to talk about this stuff than not, and that the situation is indeed serious. (Although if someone wants to tell me that even to talk about this stuff only makes things automatically more serious, I’d be fascinated to hear from them.) Is Antoine perhaps falling into the trap, in the manner of John Simpson when he interviewed Pim Fortuyn, of thinking that because I “sound like” certain other nasty people, such as the British National Party, that I automatically believe in all their vile and aggressive policy proposals?

Antoine’s ideas about how welfare exacerbates all this may be right, and they may not. Personally, I don’t think that putting an end to the British welfare state would solve this problem. There are plenty of countries where there is no welfare state to speak of, yet the grief between Muslims and the Rest is as grievous as ever. And part of the problem is that Muslims run their own private sector welfare systems, in a way that Libertarians would thoroughly approve of – except that, in among running youth clubs and keeping young men out of trouble and off drugs, they also use their resulting influence to turn a few of the same young men into suicide bombers and terrorists.

I think, to generalise, that what we may have here is an argument about whether “society” exists in a serious and sometimes seriously life-wrecking form, or not. I say that it most emphatically does. And Antoine, the way I hear him, is arguing as if that is not just wrong, but so obviously wrong as not to be worth even considering. For me, the Islam-v-the-Rest THING is a classic example of an over-arching social fact that is capable of ruining individual lives. It is, for example, capable of taking a happily married couple whose behaviour towards each other and towards everyone else is impeccable, and making them take opposite sides in some huge fight they had no part whatsoever in starting. And if that isn’t society asserting itself, I don’t know what is. But maybe I misunderstand Antoine. If so, he now knows how it feels.

Perry, please umpire this. Stop us if you think it’s getting annoying.

As for the general point of Antoine joining in with this blogging business, despite its regrettable timing last night when he was blogging fit to bust and I was blogging fit to bust about how no-one else was blogging, I’m delighted, truly delighted. That posting about the impact of the Le Pen campaign on French crime was a fine example of something that only Antoine, in London libertarian circles, would know about and bother about. Does everybody realise that Antoine is fluent in both English and French? Yes he is.

What, London libertarians may be asking, about Christian Michel (who runs the excellent Liberalia website)? Well, yes, he’s bilingual in English and French and libertarian and dead clever. But he is a quite different sort of intellectual personality, with nothing like Antoine’s enthusiasm for intriguing titbits of news, indeed for journalism in general. Antoine could feed – and I suspect would greatly enjoy feeding – a steady stream of brilliant news items from Francophonia into the Anglo-blogosphere, and I really, really hope that he will. If the price I have to pay is to have frustrating rows with him in which I say (among other things) “A” – and he says “no that’s all wrong – the situation is A!!”, well, I can live with that.