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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The Opinion Journal’s email newsletter has pointed out a real gem. It seems a group of rather uneducated people have decided the famous second book in the Tolkien series, “The Two Towers” was actually named by director Peter Jackson for the World Trade Center:
“Peter Jackson has decided to tastelessly name the sequel “The Two Towers”. The title is clearly meant to refer to the attacks on the World Trade Center. In this post-September 11 world, it is unforgivable that this should be allowed to happen. The idea is both offensive and morally repugnant. Hopefully, when Peter Jackson and, more importantly, New Line Cinema see the number of signatures on this petition, the title will be changed to something a little more sensitive.”
So we are left with only two equally astounding possibilities:
(1) Tolkien was more prescient than even Nostrodamus. Some Forty-seven years ago he foresaw the Twin Towers attack and that his second book would be made into a blockbuster movie in the following year.
(2) Jackson has invented time travel. He wanted to use a title relating to the World Trade Center attack but did not want anyone to blame him, so he travelled 47 years into the past, joined J.R.R and his friends in the Oxford local and suggested “The Two Towers” would be an excellent title.
If you want a laugh, check out the petition where over a thousand of the mentally challenged have recorded their intellectual incapacity for posterity.
Some good news today. The USA has renounced its membership of the International Criminal Court.
“…When you sign you have an obligation not to take actions that would defeat the object or purpose of the treaty,”
says US diplomat Pierre-Richard Prosper.
He actually, and rather diplomatically I suppose, understates the case. The effect of signing up to the ICC is to wrap a straightjacket around any effective means of self-defence. And that’s only the start of the problems which I go into in greater depth in one of my previous post on the ICC.
Whilst I am delighted, the usual suspects are already moaning about American ‘unilateralism and isolation’. I say we put a stop to that by following America’s example and making it ‘bi-lateral’.
Proving that what goes around, comes around, Scottish socialist MP George Galloway is reportedly seeking legal advice following a comment from charismatic American actor John Malkovitch to the effect that both he and Robert Fisk were “the two people he would most like to kill”
“The source of Malkovich’s anger appears to be Mr Galloway’s condemnation of Israel’s action against Palestinians and his criticism of the west’s policies on Iraq.
What I find most striking about this is the uncanny counter-echo of Oxford-based Irish poet Tom Paulin who recently denounced Israeli West Bank settlers as ‘Nazis’ and called for them to be shot. Is there any difference? Well, as a matter of fact, yes there is. Mr.Malkovitch is highly unlikely to turn his words into action; if he did he would be guilty of murder and neither I nor anybody else could possibly even begin to excuse or rationalise it. Contrast to Mr.Paulin’s threats which were quite explicity acted out a few days later when a Hamas Death Squad shot dead four Israeli settlers in their beds, including a five year-old girl. There’s the difference. Regardless of the utterances made by John Malkovitch, Mr.Galloway will be sleeping safely in his bed. The gravest threat he faces is one of running up a large legal bill.
Oh, and by the way, at least Mr.Malkovitch had the guts to say that he’d be prepared to do the job himself.
[My thanks to the Brothers Judd for the link to this story]
One of my favorite movies is The Hunt for Red October. Lovely. You sit back and watch Cold Warriors get not just very cold, but very wet, very scared, and in a few cases very dead. In among it all an American Admiral played by Fred Dalton Thompson says, in a way that for some reason I find hard to forget (I guess that’s movie acting for you):
“This thing is going to get out of control.”
I know just how that Admiral felt. Charlie Banks of Nyack, NY USA, emails thus:
It’s an even more complicated situation than that (this is the kind of thing I learned early on back in my bartender days).
The Scots aren’t the only folks that make “whisky”… Canadian whisky is spelled the same way. Pick up a bottle of Canadian Club or Seagram’s VO and you’ll see that little “y” all by its lonesome on the end.
We Yanks, on the other hand, are of a mind with the sons of Erin in our “whiskey” habits. Woe betide the poor mixologist who would dare mix a julep or old-fashioned without something ending in an “ey.”
Congratulations. You’re now familiar with all four nationally-categorized varieties of whisk(e)y.
No Charlie. You think we all now have closure, but you don’t understand these things. Further e-mails can be expected from feuding Pacific Islands, different states in the purportedly “United” States, dissenting fragments of Northern Ireland, places in Africa we’ve none of us heard of until we learn that they have their own way of spelling “wiskee”. And can we assume that this alcoholic debate will be confined to the Anglosphere? What’s the betting the Czechs and Slovaks are already disagreeing about this? As Trevor Howard (playing Air Vice Marshal Park in another movie favourite of mine, The Battle of Britain) says, with equally mysterious memorability:
“They won’t stop now.”
I should have just e-mailed Liberty Log. I should have let David Farrer fight his own spelling battles. “This thing” has already sparked one international incident. Expect more.
I was going just to email the guys at Liberty Log, but then I thought, no, it’s an interesting item of dirty washing, worth doing in (approximately speaking) public. There’s nothing like a little unpleasantness between comrades to keep us all honest and any passing non-comrades entertained.
And the bit of dirt is: when alluding to and linking to Freedom and Whisky for the first time, they spelt it “Freedom and Whiskey“. (Or they did when I looked. Maybe by the time you get to bother with this they will have been e-heckled by F&W‘s David Farrer into correcting the matter.)
Scotch whisky is whisky. Whiskey with an e is Irish Whisky. That’s what my extremely Little Oxford Dictionary says, and how it says it: whiskey n. Irish whisky.
I guess that’s what happens when some English guys, an American and a Slovakian are running a club based at a Scottish University. They try to be Scottish, but every so often their alien underwear shows through.
Maybe I’m being all superior about this whisky/whiskey thing because I’ve only just learned it myself. When I first set eyes on the words “Freedom and Whisky” at the top of Freedom and Whisky, my immediate, instant reaction was: Holy Christ on a Buffalo he’s mis-spelt the title of his own blog!
I have been mentioned, nay singled out, in despatches over at Warbloggerwatch
In case you are wondering precisely what the measured and temperate Justin Raimondo is responding to, it is this
I am particularly fond of this zappy piece of analysis:
“And what a statist mentality it is — influenced, perhaps, by a bit of the typical British “cane-the-wogs” and long-live-the-Empire arrogance.
Anyway, must dash. I have to go and teach the damned fuzzy-wuzzys a thing or two.
Tony Millard writes in from Tuscany with an excellent perspective on the ‘war’ on drugs.
It was refreshing to hear on Radio 4 last night that Mo Mowlam taps my e-mails to Libertarian Samizdata as I had written this on Saturday (she has called for drug legalisation). Perhaps Samizdata should invite her to submit a webwaffle blog of her own.
Raising the tax burden is about the redistribution of wealth – making drugs illegal has been about the redistribution of misery as a Bristol police report on crack cocaine crime-wave demonstrates. The process of criminalisation has not reduced demand but merely shifted the social cost from the addicts (in illness and premature deaths) to the law-abiding masses whose assets are appropriated, often violently and in public, by such users to pay for the inflated cost of their cravings. Such inflation of cost is directly proportional to the efforts of state law enforcement agencies. Freeing and legalising all drugs would shift the bulk of the misery burden back to its ‘beneficiaries’ and originators – the drug users.
Also, imposing a tax on the ‘product’ according to the true cost of the care of addicts would have two benefits – it would bring the distribution and quality control in from the shadows and deal a death blow to the underground drug economy with the terrorism and horror it fuels. (Guess what paid for the funding of September 11th!). Legalisation would be tempered with strictly enforced (and enforceable) rules relating to where the products can be taken and where they cannot. Whether we like it or not, this is informally already the case in England, Lambeth in South London being a case in point. Such measures would provide a relief for the majority, a safer, harassment-free environment for the minority, and a sweeping reduction in crime generally just in time for Mr Blair’s self-imposed September deadline. Over to you Tony.
Tony Millard (Tuscany, Italy)
Sometimes, you can gain amazing insight into a person’s whole mentality from merely a simple phrase, a snatch of conversation or a casual comment. A little crack in the curtain can allow you to peer through and shudder at the desolation that lies beyond.
I have had such an experience while perusing the website belonging to those purveyors of fine aluminium millinery antiwar.com. The thing that caught my eye was a headline which reads: “Latest US Menace to Okinawa: Falling Jet Parts”
For a moment I did a double-take. Was I reading that correctly? Yes, I was. I clicked on the link to find this prosaic bit of reportage concerning some bits which fell off a US military jet whilst it flew over Okinawa. This monstrous ‘war crime’ resulted in:
“…no injuries or damage and said the incidents posed no threat to the local community.”
Oh the inhumanity! Oh the oppression! How long can the poor Okinawans be expected to put up with being ‘menaced’ in this way? Weep, WEEP, for Okinawa!!
On the other hand, don’t bother. I may be no expert on aviation but even I know that bits periodically fall from all flying aircraft and I think it is safe to say that it is one of the less worrisome perils of modernity for most normal people. Not so the antiwarriors. No, for them it is a heinous act of US imperialist aggression. I suppose that it easy to do provided you have already settled in your own mind that the USA cannot but be wrongful (despite all the demonstrable evidence to the contrary).
Much of the thrust and complaint of the antiwarriors is directed at the extent to which traditional civil liberties in the USA have been traduced. In this, their complaint is meritorious and noble but I cannot help wondering if they are actually a part of the problem and not the solution. In order to win arguments about civil liberties (or anything else for that matter) the first requirement is to be taken seriously by serious people. But when your outlook is so jaundiced that you brazenly attempt to construe some minor workaday incident as murderous conspiracy then you can only be taken for a crank. Cranks do not help good causes; they pollute them by sheer dint of their crankiness.
Small wonder then that the antiwarriors are left to plough the lonely furrow of providing intellectual succour to vile thugocracies and tinpot demagogues. Like them, the antiwarriors have trapped themselves in a straightjacket of hate and crippled their own faculties with delusions of persecution.
Theodore Dalrymple, a prison doctor, has written a remarkable article in the Sunday Telegraph called A world where no one is to blame:
Replying to the suggestion that he and his brother were gangsters who terrified people, he said: “Gang culture is nothing like that. It’s just youths. A group of youths growing up on the estate.” The implication here is not only that no one has a right to criticise gang “culture”, because all cultures are equal and he had done only what every other person in his circumstances had done. Of personal responsibility, not so much as a squeak: he was Pavlov’s dog, responding not so much to a bell as to a Peckham housing estate.
I can only speculate why local people do not start simply banding together and applying polycentric law of their own to deal with such problems, given that the state has not only failed to apply its law but is in fact the root cause of the problem in the first place.
On Constable Potter’s face was that hard, keen look which comes into the faces of policemen when they intend to do their duty pitilessly and crush a criminal like a snake beneath the heel. It was the look which Constable Potter’s face wore when he was waiting beneath a tree to apprehend a small boy who was up in its branches stealing apples, the merciless expression that turned to flint when he called at a house to serve a summons on somebody for moving pigs without a permit.
-P.G.Wodehouse (Uncle Dynamite, 1948, quoted in Wodehouse Nuggets, selected by Richard Usborne, 1983)
Which is to say, best taken in moderation. Racism is always poison because it is completely irrational, based on either stupidity or (even worse) pseudo-science. ‘Culturalism’ of the sort David Carr talks about however is just saying ‘the values of my culture are better than the values of that culture’… and it may well be true.
Provided one realised that what matters is the liberty actualising aspects of a culture and not all the other clutter over which people periodically feel the need to kill each other, then a degree of ‘culturalism’ is not just ok, it is vital.
Just don’t over do it as in the minds of some, it is not about which culture enables liberty and prosperity best but which culture ‘stinks up our streets with curry’ or ‘builds hideous Mosques in our Christian towns’. Discerning ‘culturalism’ is just fine but ignorant cultural chauvinism is not. I realise it is the former not the latter which David Carr is advocating, but it is a distinction worth making again and again. Like Slivovica or Whiskey, a little is a wonderful thing but too much dwelling on culture seems to send some people completely bonkers.
There has been a widespread outbreak of harumphing, moaning and hand wringing by the forces of statism across Europe over the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen‘s National Front Party in France.
Yet when Le Pen declares he is “socially to the left, economically to the right”, his remarks go reported but largely unchallenged. However somehow regardless of his being bitterly opposed to market driven mechanisms, free trade, ‘Americanization’ and globalization, the newspapers demonstrate yet again that the term “right wing” is largely meaningless.
John Lichfield of the Irish Independent tells us “Let us not exaggerate. Let us shut our eyes and think of France, the real France” after himself pointing out that when you add the neo-fascist vote in France for Le Pen to the extreme Troskyist vote for the far left, it is a whopping 35% of the French electorate. Sorry John, you cannot write off one third of a country as ‘not the real France’. Violent collectivist statism is as French as camembert cheese, Laetitia Casta, the Eiffel Tower… and the Guillotine.
It is the long process of erosion that French civil society itself has been undergoing for over 150 years that provides such welcoming ground for the Jean-Marie Le Pen’s of this world. Jaques Chirac is not part of the solution but is rather part of the problem. ‘National Greatness’ conservatives like him are no less statist than socialist Lionel Jospin or neo-fascist Jean Le Pen. There simply is no significant political constituency in France that does not see the state as being the very centre of society, rather than just its boundary keeper. Almost all significant interaction is touched on by the state and thus reduces society to a series of competing political, rather than social, factions, all clamouring for the violence backed recourse of the state to champion their interests. These people who are aghast at the rise of Le Pen are the self same people who tilled the soil in which he grows.
Statist political interests of ‘left’ and ‘right’ appropriate a vast swathe of the national wealth, encouraging people to simply vote themselves other people’s money, and then wonder why folks have no time for tiresome and time consuming social integration or a dynamist assimilative culture. Why bother when it is clear that the normal way for solving all problems is the hammer of the state? You don’t like American products competing with French ones in the shops regardless of the fact other people want to buy them? “There ought to be a law against it” and both socialist Lionel Jospin and conservative Jaques Chirac agree with that. You don’t like the sound of all those English language pop songs on the radio and TV? “There ought to be a law against it” and both socialist Lionel Jospin and conservative Jaques Chirac agree with that too. If all these other unjust things are democratically sanctified, then if you don’t like Africans or Moroccans, well, I guess there ought to be a law against them as well if that is the way everything works. If everything is up for grabs by the ‘democratic’ state, well, don’t be surprised if everything really does mean everything.
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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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