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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Brian Micklethwait thinks that there are plenty of places in the world which don’t have welfare states but do have problems of relations between Moslems and non-Moslems. Well, funny he should say that…
I’m a fan of Charles Murray’s writings on the “underclass” which I mean to refer to a class of mostly young males who drift in and out of the labour market and depend on welfare ebenfits or crime for their livelyhoods. The unsocialized males fail to adopt the role of economic producer or father. Young women produce children as if they were paid to do so. One of Brian’s neat expressions is to say that a welfare state may not be intended to pay people to be poor, but the outcome looks a lot like it.
Looking at the Palestinian camps one might think these are devoid of welfare statism. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Palestinian refugee camps are run by international government agencies, such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (U.N.R.W.A.) in Gaza, the Gaza Strip and Amman, Jordan. The Palestinian territories are arguably the most heavily “cared for” places on Earth (the former Yugoslavia is another candidate). Oldham, Bradford and other trouble spots in the U.K. display similar characteristics: high levels of state intervention to “help” immigrant communities.
As someone who has signed-on the dole more than once and stood in hospital queues for many hours for emergency treatment, I’ve often found myself daydreaming about blowing the whole thing away with a nice heavy-calibre machine gun (bombs haven’t been the same since remote controls and timers). This had nothing to do with other people in the queue, they’re fellow sufferers, nor the people behind the bullet-proof counters (well not often), they’re mostly reasonable people asked to turn shit into gold by their superiors and their victims alike.
When there’s a riot in a town “by Moslems” it would be interesting to check exactly who is rioting, what their parents really think of it (not what a TV crew “finds”), what their source of income was before the riot, and exactly what the target was.
I’m guessing that most Moslems over 35 years old regard rioting in Britain as stupid and dangrous to all Moslems: actually it reminds me of “Rebel Without A Cause”, except these youngsters have a cause to justify themselves. Crime, especially 1) crime by those whites who see themselves at the back of the welfare queue and, 2) street drug trafficking, is main cause of Asian militancy in Britian. In the Palestinian camps, what more glamorous thing is there for an energetic young man to do?
None of this, I may be told, explains flying aeroplanes into skyscrapers. That however is so similar to the adolescent antics of the Leftist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s in Western Europe. Note that two adolescents who weren’t Moslems tried to copy the terrorists (one in Italy, one in Florida).
The solution to that problem is to make it clear that anyone who crosses the line between wishing to “blow it all away” and actually buying a heavy-calibre machine gun for the purpose is going to fail, and die, and their names will either be forgotten or misspelt. I can’t remember the names of minor players in the Red Army Faction or the Red Brigades: will anyone remember what-his-name the guy who organised the hijaking in twenty years time? Not Bin Laden, the one who arranged the pilot training.
The most upsetting thing for a young fundamentalist terrorist is not being taken seriously. Conversely, talking up a gang of teenage virgin boys with small willies whose parents don’t understand them into the heroic vanguard of a billion fanatics on the march is fulfilling their wildest dreams. I won’t be popular in the US for thinking this but 9-11 was basically a bigger version of a crazy joyride, albeit deliberately stirred up by some truly evil people. Rather than execute these kids it might actually be a better deterrent to set them loose, but never to allow them to wear trousers or underwear again.
The people who point these kids in the direction where they do the most damage are people we should be worrying about. Frankly their motives are no different whether ecologist, socialist or racial supremacist: hatred of global markets and capitalism. I don’t believe the leading fundamentalists believe in it any more than Stalin believed in withering away the state.
So the two reasons for not getting excited about a Moslem threat are: 1) most Moslems feel threatened by the same thing Brian does, for example Southall is very near Heathrow airport, 2) it encourages those who want to create a war between Islam and the West. I rather like the approach taken by the British courts when I.R.A. terrorists used to stand trial (before the politicians decided to take them seriously). The judge would simply consider the crime and the appropriate sentence. The convicted murderer would be refused any legal recognition for the political motivation of his actions. I could write at length on this subject, but it would monopolize this blog. Perhaps Brian and I should discuss this offline and come back with an understanting on where we disagree.
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.
The great convergence of all the world’s idiots into one, big indistinguishable glob is a phenomenon that has been widely documented throughout the blogosphere but is one that, hitherto, I had only read about but not actually witnessed.
That has now changed. Just about an hour ago, I was caught up in real, live manifestation of this phenomenon on the streets of Tottenham, North London. Well, when I say, ‘caught up’, I was actually on my way to a DIY superstore to engage in some healthy, life-affirming consumerism when I got stuck in traffic behind a slow-moving demonstration. On being allowed by the police to drive slowly by while it snaked its way down Tottenham High Road, I got a good look at all the banners; Kurdish communists, Sinn Fein, Hamas supporters and anti-globalisation protestors. There they were, marching and chanting side by side, arm-in-arm in protest for or against something or other. I didn’t care enough to inquire.
But, as I drove by, I felt the warm satisfaction of knowing that they were chiefly complaining about people like me. Splendid! I wound down my car windows, turned up the John Philip Sousa march that was conveniently playing on my car radio and sped off to do my bit to help spread capitalism.
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.
As you can probably tell, Samizdata is undergoing a phase of collective preoccupation with Other Things just now, not least the difficulties associated with the programme Perry uses to run the thing. And to adapt Groucho Marx, any enterprise that relies on me might as well give up now and save itself the bother. The point being, I’m busy too, even if it may not look it. I’ll tell you all about it in due course, but not until I’ve done it thank you. A man’s got to know his limitations, failing to stick to public promises being one of my worst.
So let guest writer P.G. Wodehouse take up the slack. I swear on a stack of Jeeves paperbacks that I picked this paragraph, which is from The Code of the Woosters, completely at random. The only qualification I looked for was that it lacked inverted commas, because I especially like Wodehouse when he alone is doing the talking. Here is the random paragraph:
The whole situation recalled irresistibly to my mind something that had happened to me once up at Oxford, when the heart was young. It was during Eights Week, and I was sauntering on the river-bank with a girl named something that has slipped my mind, when there was a sound of barking – and a large, hefty dog came galloping up, full of beans and buck and obviously intent on mayhem. And I was just commending my soul to God and feeling that this was where the old flannel trousers got about thirty bobs’ worth of value bitten out of them, when the girl, waiting till she saw the whites of its eyes, with extraordinary presence of mind suddenly opened a coloured Japanese umbrella in the animal’s face. Upon which, it did three back somersaults and retired into private life.
Now I know what you’re thinking. What is this whole situation? Well to echo Clint Eastwood just once more, this time from the closing moments of Two Mules For Sister Sarah: I haven’t got time for that.
Bloody Antoine. You spend half your life trying to get him to do things, and then he does something just when you don’t want him to (see below), and makes nonsense of everything in this post so far, which you might as well have anyway.
I know that individual Muslims can be the salt of the earth. I too regret the passing of the kebab shop in Tachbrook Street. Some of my best friends are Muslims. The trouble is that when one of these Islam-versus-the-rest horrors erupts, it swallows up individual salt-of-the-earth Muslims along with everyone else. In Yugoslavia for example, happily married city folks who hardly even realised that their marriage was “mixed” suddenly got shot to hell.
Plus, I’m not in favour of a war for heaven’s sakes. I’m just frightened there might be one.
An “individualist” approach doesn’t cut it, because individuals ain’t the problem. But I’ll supply a more thoughtful response when I’ve more time. (Damn, another public promise.)
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
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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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