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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Guardian’s Weblog links to an interesting article about how repressive regimes suppress the Internet, Censorship Wins Out by Andrew Stroehlein. (It was posted on April 4, so this is another of my better-late-than-never reading suggestions.) If your taste runs to reading only a few intelligent paragraphs rather than half a dozen intelligent pages (I know the feeling), try these:
In many ways, the Internet seems to fulfil the same role as samizdat did in Communist Czechoslovakia. Like that old dissident literature, the Internet in authoritarian regimes offers the only place for critical voices, but, sadly, it has little effect on the ground. Remember, despite the international fame of writers like Vaclav Havel, outside of a small circle of intellectuals in Prague, hardly anyone ever read samizdat within Communist Czechoslovakia. The Velvet Revolution emerged from direct action within a changed geo-political atmosphere; decades of dissident carping had nothing to do with real change when the regime finally fell.
As it was with samizdat, most people in authoritarian regimes never get a chance to see Internet publications, and the whole enterprise, both the publishing of banned information and official attempts to stop it, is more a game for elites: elite dissident intellectuals criticize elite rulers, and they argue back and forth in a virtual space. The opponents can score a few victories in that virtual space, but meanwhile, back in reality, little changes for the people on the ground.
Some may find such a conclusion a bit pessimistic, especially coming from someone who works in the field of online journalism in these countries. But it is important to keep one’s feet on the ground and neither underestimate the scope of the problem nor overestimate the ability of the medium.
And there is some reason for cautious optimism. CPJ’s A Lin Neumann, for example, reminded me that “elites, generally, tend to lead the movement toward change so the fact that the Internet is somewhat confined to elite communication in some places does not disqualify it as a change agent.” Neumann points to China, saying that the Internet has had an effect on the ground there, leading, for instance, to greater impact of stories on corruption.
CPJ stands for something called the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Stroehlein goes on to mention a website called the the Three Gorges Probe, which reports negatively on a dam scheme in China about which locals are willing to complain out loud.
In general, Stroehlein, in a manner appropriate to a Guardian linkee, tends to neglect the importance of economic influences. To suppress the Internet is to impose upon one’s country severe economic damage, and not just political harm. It isn’t just reportage and opinion that is spread on the Internet. There is also all that other boring stuff that regular people like to have, like … stuff.
Thus, suppressing the Internet will eventually erode the will to power of the elite, both by de-glamorising their own elite lifestyle, and by ruining or perpetuating the already ruined state of the economy upon which they prey. Eventually it becomes impossible for them to pretend even to themselves that their rule is in anyone’s interest except their own, and in due course not even that. By suppressing the Internet – not just because of what it is and what it symbolises, but because of what it does (and what the Internet can do now is only the beginning of that story) – they lose the future. And once you lose the future in politics, you lose period.
Over at Instapundit, His Holiness Glenn is having a public think-in on the subject of, among many other subjects of course, to what degree if any the US government or bits of it is/are guilty of having failed to see 9-11 coming. Glenn Reynolds reckons that, although 9-11 was imaginable, it makes no sense to blame Bush, the FBI etc., or at any rate not that harshly. I agree, but go further.
The underlying assumption of the complaints about the pre-September 11th US security effort is that it is a good thing for governments to spend their time preventing particular bad things, rather than doing something about them afterwards, to go around, in other words, bolting stable doors while the horses are still in residence.
I dissent. I am of the worry-about-it-when-it-happens-and-not-before school of governmental decision-making. First, and rather trivially, it may never happen. And second, if your government takes precautions against this particular pending disaster, what about all the other equally pending disasters? Free individuals can choose which disasters they will worry about beforehand and which ones they’ll only bother with if and when. But governments being governments, if you tell them to worry about disasters they’ll regard that as a reason to worry about alldisasters. This would itself be disastrous, and to some extent it already is.
This tendency to expect governments to prevent bad things rather than to react to bad things afterwards is itself a hugely bad thing.
Central to the idea of the rule of law, at any rate as my bit of the world understands it, is that the authorities are not allowed to bang you up because of what they think you might be about to do. The rule is that they have to wait until you have already done something bad, and then they try and catch you and punish you. Law court proceedings are about what the accused has or has not done, not about what he might do in the future, on account of the sort of person he might or might not be, or on account of the types of actions he was indulging in which have a remote chance of causing bad things, like being black, taking drugs, using a rather dirty kitchen, owning scary weapons, being mentally unstable without having yet committed any actual mayhem, etc. etc.
Sadly, this principle is being severely undermined, at least here in Britain. Here, there is a plague of precautionary lawmaking going on. A centrally administered law-machine, which will supposedly end up making the world as safe as it can possibly be, is (a) running amok, and (b) making nobody any safer.
By the way, I don’t blame only our rulers for this, I also blame the general public. Whenever something bad happens, it is Joe Public himself who says: Why was this not prevented? (By the government, in other words.) Because, Mr Idiot Joe Public, that is not and cannot be their job. Refraining from serious badness before the government even knows about it is where you come in.
It always bothers me when people say that the government ought to be more “creative”. That’s not what governments are for. As a tentatively anarcho- brand of libertarian I’m strongly attracted by the notion that governments are for absolutely nothing, but if they are for anything, it is certainly not “creativity”. Creativity is unpredictable. Creativity is thinking “outside the box”, i.e. not following the usual procedures. Governments should follow the usual procedures.
The usual US government procedure for dealing with terrorist outrages is, and ought to be, that if you do something seriously bad to the US, the US will do something seriously bad to you. You can’t punish successful suicide bombers themselves, but you can go out and kill as many of their friends as you can find, and you do. Damn the expense. And you do this only after they’ve committed a huge horror. Result: this horror is not prevented, but funny how the general level of horror seems to remain agreeably low.
The usual procedure for stopping me murdering people is not for the government to spy on my every move. It is for the government to punish me, or failing that hunt me for ever – damn the expense – if I ever commit a murder. I know that. This is why I and my fellow countrymen, on the whole, refrain from murder. Again: murder stays comfortingly rare. Not by thousands of individual murders being governmentally prevented beforehand (we, the citizens do that), merely by being punished (very imperfectly and incompletely, by the way) when it occurs.
The law, and government generally, is a huge, mucky, blunt instrument. When terrible things happen and you’re the government, your job is to flail about with this blunt instrument in the general direction of the people you suspect of having done the bad things. You should not delude yourself into supposing that what you really have in your hand is a scalpel. Never, never promise that “such a thing will never be allowed to happen again.” Yes it will. Inevitably.
The US government is now being praised for hiring Hollywood scriptwriters to help it foresee future terrorism disasters. But how long before the relevant committees of “creative” people start cranking out a whole new deluge of attacks of the rights of Americans to do what they want, on account of what these creatives think it might lead to?
This is one of those bits of writing which, if I had had more time to devote to it, would have been shorter and better written. As it was, it took me almost as little time for me to write it as if has just taken you to read it. Bad luck, and all that. I hope, despite the longwinded incoherence factor, that you have found it worth your attention. Have a nice weekend.
I was in the process of polishing off an acidic rebuke to the American Jewish Congress over its campaign to boycott France, which would be counterproductive even if it was merited (which it isn’t), only to find that my colleague Mr.de Havilland has gone and beaten me to it. Not only has he beaten me to it but he has also said, more or less, everything that I wanted to say. I was going to send him an e-mail to endorse him but, in the circumstances, it is more politic that I endorse him publicly.
I have been growing increasingly uncomfortable with continued claims that the EU’s attitude towards the conflict in the Middle East is motivated by antipathy towards the Jews. I am uncomfortable because it isn’t true. To say that men like Goran Persson or Javier Solana are rabid (or even closet) anti-semites is arrant rubbish. Nor are they motivated by any feeling of kinship or goodwill towards Palestinians or Arabs. No, the discomfort with Israel has far more to do with the Israeli insistence on action over compromise; survival rather than capitulation. In post-modernist Europe such iron-will and self-belief are sins to be shunned.
And, of course, it also has a great deal to do with the USA for a lot of Euro-posturing about the Middle East is, in fact, anti-Americanism by proxy. Whatever Americans are for, the EUnuchs must be seen to be against and there is a certain breed of Eurocrat who would rather be seen publicly reading a copy of ‘Little Miss Muffin Monthly’ than taking any position alongside George Bush. If Israel’s main ally was, say, China, then I am sure we would see a very different European approach to the Middle East and, furthermore, I seem to recall that the Euro-elites were far more comfortable with both the US and Israel when they were led by Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak respectively.
Now before I start getting any e-mails reminding me of the high incidence of anti-semitic attacks in Europe and the conitnued rise of radical nationalists, please note that the attacks were all carried out not by native White Europeans but by young Arab muslim immigrants and it is no small part due to fear of those same immigrants that the radical nationalists are riding high in the polls. Whilst I am generally very averse to these kind of collectivist labels, the least I can do is implore that they be pasted on straight.
This should not be read as any sort of defence of or apology for the ruling European elite because, as anybody who has read my posts on the subject before will know, I find them loathsome and untrustworthy in almost equal measure. And that is rather the point behind this post because when accusations are made that turn out to be baseless and hysterical it only serves to contaminate the accusations that are meritorious and deserved.
We at the Samizdata are busy building our dossier of ‘Peace Crimes’ against the EU. Please don’t muddy our waters. Thank you.
Who says the Germans don’t have a sense of humour? By extending constitutional rights to animals they have presented the world with a cornucopia of comic possibilities [“Sheep claim Wool-fare benefits”, “Rabbits sue for workplace hare-assment”].
It is rather less amusing to contemplate the scope of this. Exactly what animals does it extend to? Rats? Cockroaches? Amoebas? Viruses? Will innoculation become a war-crime? Will fly-paper become an offensive weapon? How many Germans are going to bask in the warm glow of self-righteousness when they find that the mice in their kitchens are protected from eviction?
Like all the best comedy, it is actually the height of absurdity. Animals have only one right and that is the right to be served in the appropriate sauce and whilst it is deeply morally wrong for humans to be wantonly cruel to animals or subject them to unnecessary suffering, this is far from the same thing as declaring that those animals have ‘rights’.
If a dog is as good as a human being then a human being is no better than a dog. But in the through-the-looking-glass, relativistic and future-phobic world of the European polity, reversing the last two million years of agonising evolutionary development is seen as ‘progress’.
“The main impact of the measure will be to restrict the use of animals in experiments.
There hardly seems any point. The Germans are suffering from a sickness of spirit that no amount of medicines will ever cure.
Chris Cooper’s Blog is slowly getting into its stride. It may never proceed at faster than a slow walk, which is fine by me. So far the postings have been longish and rather scholarly, in keeping with the new title at the top, Blogosophical Investigations. If Chris sets a slow pace but sticks to it, then all honour to him, I say. On current evidence I recommend a visit about once a week, with Friday being the day when the most seems to happen.
The latest posting is a meta-contextual comment on the abortion issue, which concludes thus:
There is no such thing as a right answer here. That’s not sitting on any fence: pointing to the existence of a hundred-foot high fence isn’t the same thing as sitting on it.
So chew on that, objectivists. It means that in a free society, people are going to divide into communities of divergent moralities, and the anti-abortionist ones are just going to have to live alongside communities of people whom they regard as murderers. As they already have to do, of course – but they’re not reconciled to the fact.
A week ago, there was a piece, with lengthy quotes, concerning the argument between Bjørn Lomborg and the Scientific American. No sitting on that fence either.
Over at the Liberty Log Alex Singleton comments (“Attack enemies, not friends” – May 16) on the ruckus between the Libertarian Alliance and the Daily Telegraph. Alex is not impressed by the LA’s anti-Telegraph stance, and notes that Andrew Dodge is likewise unimpressed. For whatever it may be worth, I agree with these criticisms.
However, far more dangerous than the occasional spasm of Libertarian Alliance activity that I personally find embarrassing would be the absence of activity. I got a phone message the other day from Patrick Crozier who writes UK Transport and is also the Transport Spokesman for the Libertarian Alliance. He wanted my “approval” for a letter he had in mind to send to a newspaper about some railway matter, and regretted that I wasn’t in to bestow it. I listened to him regretting my absence and I said, out loud: “Send it mate, send it! It’ll be fine!” “I’ll send it anyway” was how his message concluded, to my delight. And of course the letter (“Nationalisation is NOT the Answer”, posted on UK Liberty – May 14) is fine. In another recent phone conversation with Patrick I recycled for his benefit a business slogan which I’m fond of: “Load! Fire! Take Aim!” Do stuff. Think about what worked and what was stupid. Then do more stuff, and more. Shins get kicked. Feet sometimes get tripped over. (I don’t suppose my LA colleagues have loved everything I’ve written here, or always agree with the line I may take on the radio, e.g. this morning when I was defending Political Correctness). But every time we make one of these little efforts and or strike some spark or other the LA website counter creeps upwards, and the word about liberty and libertarianism gets around.
Gene agrees with The Law is there to perpetuate the state, not protect its subjects and has his own perspective on who ‘owns’ the law
Contrary to the lesson from many of the cowboy movies I was reared on, that you can’t take the law into your own hands, I have learned that you dare not allow the law to be taken out of your hands.
Since the just powers of a government are derived from the consent of the governed, the government has no legitimate authority that is not a natural right of the individual, derived from the natural right of self defense.
To the extent that a government restricts one’s right of self defense, that government ceases to be a representative government and becomes just one more highwayman extracting a ransom from those who pass by.
Gene
I did well enough to blog about it, so here goes. I took the line above, that sometimes Political Correctness isn’t going all that mad, it’s just people trying to be correct and not hurt each other’s feelings. I also mentioned that when I was helping a friend run some maths teaching classes some while ago, I took some photos of the children and my friend asked me to stop, because, you know, it might not look good, so now I’ve outed myself as a paedophile. Oh goody.
Mention was made of the phrase “nitty gritty”, which the British police are apparently not allowed to use now as it’s some kind of reference to slave ships. I’d been told this was going to get a mention, but as usual you only think of what you should have said afterwards. And what I should have said is that “nitty gritty” is objectionable not because it’s racist, but because it is a massively overused managerial cliché. If the PC brigade could also decide that “at the end of the day” is offensive on account of being a disparaging reference to Muslim daily prayer habits and that “the bottom line” is also verboten because it causes fat women to be unhappy about the size of their bums, then good riddance to those two cliches as well.
I’ve just fixed to be on the Mike Dickin Show, on Talk Sport Radio, just after 12 noon today. I’m to be asked about various varieties of “political correctness gone mad” stupidities, like a grandad being stopped from videoing his grandkids at a party, because he might be a paedophile, or something … What will I say? I look forward to finding out.
Talking of Sport, did any of you Samizdata consumers see the Zidane goal for Real Madrid in the Champions League Final last night? It was one of those “worth the price of the ticket alone” moments. Basically the ball went ballooning up into the air and took an age to come down, but when it finally did ZZ volleyed it into the top left hand corner, in a manner which would be extremely hard to do on a practice ground. To do this to win the biggest cup final in the world outside of the European National Championships and the World Cup is astounding. Like all the very best goals, it didn’t look to be seriously on until it had been scored. But I won’t be talking about sport on Talk Sport. I’m one of the token political commentators that they have to justify their franchise. Sadly, broadcasting in Britain is still heavily controlled by the politicians, although radio less so than TV. Soon, this kind of stuff (i.e. stuff like Samizdata) will be spoken as well as written, and the radio “professionals” will be bitching, just like the print pros bitch now about blogging.
Last time I boasted about the fact that I was going to be on the radio an Australian dominatrix tuned in. What exotic persons will listen this time? Sorry, no link to that, because I’m in a hurry, and I still find it complicated doing links back within Samizdata. If I do well, I’ll maybe have a brag here about it. If I don’t brag about it, draw your own conclusions.
Got an email the other day from, I think, a Mr (and I’m betting it is Mr) E. Palmeri, who signs himself “erp”. He refers to the story I began to tell in a previous posting about Pfizer and its support, via such things as the Pfizer forum, for capitalism and for the free market. Like I say, it is a story, and I ended my posting with those exact words. Which erp took exception to.
“And written or not, like I say, it is a story.”
Like it or not, it’s always as I said, it’s never like I said.
His emphasis on never. erp implies (and this is what got under my skin and provoked all the thoughts that follow), that I don’t know the regular as-I-say rule. Actually I broke this rule on purpose. I was trying to suggest an air of unfinishedness about my thoughts, of me talking aloud rather than presenting the finished article. I was trying to push people into thinking about Pfizer, into finding out about Pfizer, into telling me and the rest of us about Pfizer, not to nail down the final truth of the matter. To this end, I deliberately used the frequently heard by me and quite often said by me unruliness of “like I say”.
erp knows the kind of thing I mean, because the second and final sentence of his email to me goes thus:
Love your blog anyway.
And there goes another grammatical rule, the one about sentences like that one having a subject, in this case a first person pronoun. But we can all see why erp dropped the “I”. Fearful of being thought a pedant and nothing else, he ended with a deliberately colloquialised attempt to soften the blow, which he didn’t intend really to hurt, and as far as I’m concerned it worked fine. Glad you like it mate. Thanks for the kind words.
Why do I make such a fuss about this? Partly it’s a technique thing. erp is complaining about one of the very things that we Samizdatans regularly go out of our way to do, as do a thousand other bloggers. This is a blog that likes to talk in different tones of voice to suit the occasion, and to suit the different voices of the different writers. What, asks Perry in the spiel at the top left, is “on the minds” of the Samizdata people?
This is a good question. And what’s on our minds is not always perfectly grammatical.
One of the best ways to persuade other people to share your thought processes, in our case libertarian thought processes, is to describe your own thought processes accurately. You persuade by writing out how you really do talk in your own head about what you are truly persuaded of. As an editor, I constantly find myself saying to a writer whose writing has got gummed up: “Step away from the keyboard. Tell me, out loud, what you’re trying to say.” Time and again the next thing I say is: “Great. Put that.” If the price I and my writer have to pay is that what’s being said doesn’t get enough of a grammatical polishing to suit all the erps out there, well, so be it. At least there’s a recognisably human voice being used.
Besides which, all these rules can be and are all the time being broken. erp is mistaken. Quite often these day, it is“like I say” whether erp likes it or not. English is not, thank goodness, one of those languages where if you ever stray from the official tracks some committee of erps will tell you to behave yourself or else, which is surely one of the reasons why it has spread so luxuriantly. (The contrast with French is painful, to the French. “But we control our language so much more carefully! Why isn’t it winning?” That could just be one of the reasons it isn’t winning, sunshine. Ever thought about that?) The English language is the ultimate anarchy. If I and thousands of others are saying “like I say”, and the people we’re talking to or for that matter writing for in a blog get what we’re saying (which everybody does including erp, even if they don’t all like it) then there goes that never, never to return.
If you want to be a good writer you probably need to know what most of these rules are, as I do, but you don’t have to follow them slavishly. Writing which is perfectly grammatical can be rather like the music written by all those contemporaries of Mozart, which obeyed all the rules but achieved little else. Mozart, meanwhile, who knew the rules inside out and every which way, would regularly have fun and games breaking them. For a famous and easy-to-find example, try the first few bars of Mozart’s “Dissonance” String Quartet K465. The erps of the day all had seizures.
I’m not saying: “Mozart broke the rules – I break the rules – so I’m Mozart”. I’m merely saying, you can do it. Grammar goblins won’t chase you to hell if you omit a noun or pronoun from the start of a sentence, or if you put like instead of as, or if (to mention some other rules I know about but break from time to time) you end a sentence with a preposition, or if you dare to – sparingly, and when you’ve got a good reason, like when an adverb absolutely has to be right next to the verb it qualifies without so much as a “to” in between, or when you don’t want any confusion about the adverb referring back to something else just before it so you put the “to” between it and what you’re wanting to separate it from, or if, as I am here, you’re having a laugh – split an infinitive.
Life is full of “rules” which in fact aren’t. I still remember the joyful moment when I realised that you don’t have to read a book by starting at the beginning and reading all of it in order. You can start anywhere you like, and stop anywhere you like. If you do this, no one will arrest you. Some dead schoolteacher may be yapping away inside your head when you break such “rules”. If so, think about what he’s yapping, and if you decide you’re not going to do what he wants, tell him to shut up.
Now don’t misunderstand me. I’m not putting a different rule in place to the effect that you should never read a book straight through from beginning to end. I’m just saying, you don’t have to.
This like-as business is trivial but the fact that it’s trivial isn’t so trivial. An essential part of living the free life (and thereby not being inclined to try to inflict unfreedom on others) is deciding which rules you really are going to stick to because you really believe in them, and which rules you’re going to allow yourself and everyone else you have dealings with to play harmless games with.
Loved your email anyway.
Via Instapundit, I went to i330.org (13 May 2002 20) for this ‘distrousering’, as my late father would have put it, of Matthew Engel, for writing silly things about the USA and its guns. I remember Engel as a very funny cricket writer. I used to buy The Guardian just for him during test matches (that’s cricket internationals for all you uncricketpersons out there). Then he became the Editor of Wisden, the annual cricket bible. I think the difference was he likes cricket, whereas he isn’t, as The Guardian’s man in the USA, allowed to like the USA, except the bits of the USA that don’t like the USA either.
We ought to do this kind of thing. Not with British correspondents in the USA but with US correspondents here. Are there any? I bet if there are they get all kinds of things wrong.
Alex Singleton of Liberty Log rang me at 5 am this morning (not quite, but it felt like that) to check that I’d got a cheque he had sent me for travelling expenses (yes thanks), and he also mentioned that they’re thinking of starting some kind of campaign up there concerning the alleged superiority of Muslim culture. He mentioned a Reason online article. I’m in the middle of reading it now and I enthusiastically recommend it. It’s called “In Praise of Vulgarity” and is by Charles Paul Freund, which is probably a name known to lots of Samizdata’s readers but is one I haven’t attended to before. The article was published in March, but better late than never if like me you missed it the first time around.
I’ve just finished the bit about the USSR’s “stilyagi” subculture of the immediate post-WW2 era, and am about the read the bit about Algeria, and the use of pop culture there to get back at the Islamist suppression of the everyday pleasures of life.
I just checked the Liberty Log link above to make sure it worked, and they link to this article too, and you can see Alex Singleton’s brief comments on it.
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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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