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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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You can sometimes overdo the business of defining your terms. Often the trick is just to get ahead and use them, and everyone can get your point clearly enough. But sometimes it is necessary to focus in on exact meanings.
Words to look out for especially are those crafted and launched into regular use by Marxists, of the ex-, sub-, gutter- or plain generic brand variety. Often the entire point of these words is to create confusion – typically to bundle together two ideas that ought to be kept separate and then to use the muddle to accuse opponents of thinking what they don’t think, of liking bad stuff and opposing good stuff.
“Exploitation” for example. Does that mean people using you in a way that is to your advantage? Or does it mean people using you nastily, against your will, for a lousy wage you haven’t agreed to? Big difference. You’re using me to spice up you dreary life right now, and you’re paying me nothing, you skinflint. But do I mind? No I do not. Exploit away.
Multiculturalism. Now there’s a word. Does it mean people from different cultures? Or does it mean people remaining in separate cultures? If from, then I’m all for it, in the sense of multicultural people coming to live and work in Britain. If remaining in, then I’m flat against it. I want the British melting pot to melt us all into a new culture – but just the one new culture please – where we can all get along contentedly, which won’t happen if we all stay stuck in ghettoes. So again: big difference.
This difference matters hugely. If you are arguing against “remaining in” multiculturalism, then you are liable, if you just carry on using the word “multiculturalism” uncritically, to come over as opposing “from” multiculturalism, in other words as a racist. But suppose, perhaps because you are determined above all else not to come over as a racist, you support “multiculturalism”. Then you risk supporting, without meaning to, the project of keeping ethnic minorities herded into ghettoes and exploited (in the bad way, nastily) by “multiculturalist” politicians like slaves exploited by plantation owners.
So, before you support or oppose “multiculturalism”, make it entirely clear which version you are talking about.
That’s it. I’ve said my bit. I love blogging. You can say in twenty minutes what it would take hours or even days to say in an “article”.
As I write, Britain’s Parliament is speechifying about the recently deceased Queen Mother. It occurs to me that her death may in time come to symbolise a change in the style of British public life, and in particular an end to the extraordinary episode of generational/emotional warfare initiated by the death of Princess Diana. This untimely event, together with the memory of the unhappy life that preceded it and with the lamentations that followed it, provoked praise of a more theatrical style of public emotional deportment. Stoicism, dignity and emotional reticence in the face of loss was held up to bitter and strident ridicule, most especially in connection with the public demeanour of the Queen.
Emotionally I am a true son of my late father, or at any rate I try to be. In his capacity as a Posh Lawyer he met the Queen Mother a few times, and, in common with most men and women of his time and type, he adored her. Like the Queen Mum, my father was a stoic. Life was a pleasure to be enjoyed, if necessary an ordeal to be endured, and a duty to be done. Pains and pleasures were both keenly felt, but both to be kept in proportion, at arm’s length so to speak.
Being my father’s son, I miss the days when footballers would score goals and then nod in modestly happy acknowledgement, instead of (as now) being mobbed like victorious streetfighters. When Halle Berry embarked upon her emotionally incontinent Oscar acceptance speech not long ago (made all the more repulsive to me by the suspicion that she may have been deliberately exaggerating the emotional incontinence of it all) I switched off my television as if killing a nasty insect. Many of Princess Diana’s performances were like that, both in their emotional revelation and in the sense you got that it was all rather calculated.
Emotional style matters. Style provokes, constrains and conditions actions. Devotees of the Emotional Incontinence school of public deportment are liable to make rasher, more impulsive decisions. My father and the Queen Mum lived to be ninety and a hundred respectively, and made themselves thoroughly useful and appreciated throughout their lives. When their contemporaries and emotional confreres died young or otherwise came to grief, they mostly did this while winning a world war. Princess Di got herself killed, pointlessly, in her thirties, in a car crash.
Don’t fry your food, don’t butter your bread
Don’t drink at work, don’t smoke in bed
Don’t try too hard, don’t fool around
Don’t hunt with guns, don’t hunt with hounds
Don’t be too fat, don’t be too lean
Don’t eat red meat, don’t eat fresh cream
Don’t drink and drive
Don’t smoke and drive
Don’t eat and drive
Don’t talk and drive
Don’t sneeze and drive
Don’t drive
Don’t mobile phone, don’t stare at screens
Don’t buy hot drinks, don’t wear tight jeans
Don’t play with knives, don’t make a fist
Don’t play with fire, don’t take a risk
Don’t have sex, don’t procreate
Don’t fantasise, don’t masturbate
Don’t stay up late, don’t exercise
Don’t innovate, don’t theorise
Don’t dare to dream, don’t raise your voice
Don’t make a fuss, don’t make a noise
Don’t climb mountains, don’t sail oceans
Don’t make sudden, jerking motions
Don’t play sports, don’t break sweat
Don’t play roulette, don’t make a bet
Don’t brave the storm, don’t ride the waves
Don’t get too cold and don’t sunbathe
Don’t ride a horse, don’t fly a plane
Don’t strain your heart, don’t use your brain
Don’t read a book, don’t get too tense
Don’t say a word, don’t cause offence
Don’t run, don’t jump, don’t stretch, don�t fly
And above all don’t do DIY
Don’t lust for life, don’t dance till dawn
Best of all, just don’t be born
The regular last Friday of the month get-together by London libertarians at Brian Micklethwait‘s place featured an interesting talk by Antoine Clarke about the reality of the introduction of the €uro, particularly how it occurred in France, and about the possible future of the EU from his well informed and rational libertarian perspective.
As usual after the formal talk was concluded, the assembled libertarian rabble had a forthright exchange of views in which hardly anyone actually got bitten…
Why is it called the “Kate Kennedy Club”? Search me. And search The Liberty Log while you’re about it and you still won’t know. But you will find a thoughtful piece posted this lunchtime about the Kate Kennedy club by St Andrews University Liberty Club‘s Alex Singleton. Apparently this evil Kate Kennedy Club is run entirely by males, and the PC meddler tendency of St Andrews U’ want something done about that. Alex ends his piece thus:
The distinction the anti-Kate Kennedy Club protesters are making between public and private is a false one. The Kate Kennedy Club is a private club, funded and organised privately. If the University decides to ban the Club, it needs to be able to explain just why it is OK for a collection of individuals to do something but not for a collection of individuals who have chosen to give themselves a name.
It’s a nice piece, but this last bit bothers me. One must be careful about telling meddlers to be more consistent. They might reply: “Singleton, you’re right. Good point. We must do something about all those damned collections of individuals.”
Don’t worry Alex. I’m being contrary pretty much for the sake of it. The way to spread ideas is to argue about them. Keep it coming. And thanks for the speaking invite.
It is a widely accepted axiom that our memory plays tricks on us. I beg to differ; it does not play tricks, it is just pitifully unreliable.
Technology is always a good indicator as to the truth of this. Many of us are rather wary of ‘new fangled things’ when they first appear on the market. But enough of us adopt them to make them viable. Then more of us adopt them and, before long, they are universal.
I bought my first mobile phone (cellphone) back in 1994 and have had one ever since. I was in the minority then. Now I am just a part of the crowd. More than that I can barely remember how I managed to cope without my mobile phone. How on earth did I ever get along without the convenience it provides? But I know that must have done.
A similar phenomenon applies to state regulatory regimes. Governments enact them to initial responses of suspicion and confusion but, applied vigourously, in a few short years they become a part of the social fabric and nobody can imagine living without them nor how we all coped beforehand.
A perfect example of this is Britain’s planning and building control regime which requires all new building (and even alteration of existing buildings) to be approved by a committee of local bureaucrats who, in turn, are answerable to central government.
Now, it will come as a surprise to nobody to learn that I think the whole mountain of legislation in this area should be scrapped; placed on a bonfire and burned to ashes while we all dance wildly around till dawn. I have good reason for wishing it so and I am not reluctant to broadcast this view.
Yet, whenever I do, I am greeted with almost uniform blank incomprehension.
Don’t be ridiculous. How could we live in a civilised society without planning laws? How would buildings be planned? Who would control land use and building quality?
My answer is, of course, nobody. The first planning laws were not enacted until 1949 amidst the post-war euphoria for sovietisation and when bureaucratic planning of every aspect of modern life was considered by all to be the wave of the future. Yet the vast majority of Britain’s towns and cities grew and prospered without the benefit of such mandates.
But how would I stop my next-door neighbour from opening an all-night discotheque? How would we stop greedy developers ruining our country with monstrosities and eyesores?
Valid concerns but long before we handed over responsibility for them to our elected officials, they were more than adequately dealt with by private treaty and mutually enforceable land covenants. Indeed, they are still in use today only now they are subordinate to the wishes of state-appointed officials who minister for our alleged good.
But what about architectural quality? How would this survive were it not for the state intervening?
In my view, it would not only survive but true architectural achievement would undergo a rebirth. Britain is fortunate to still retain so many buildings from its glorious past; the kind of buildings that inspire Hollywood movies and which tourists travel from all over the world to marvel at and photograph. All of them were built before 1949 and just about every soul-destroying eyesore and ugly edifice of urban blight in this country has been built since 1949.
It would not be right to say, though, that the dead hand of planning regulations have no effect because they do. They have the effect of suppressing innovation, reducing available housing stock and unnecessarily inflating the cost of the housing stock that does exist.
Yet, everybody believes that we would be lost without them despite that fact that we fared far better without them and within living memory.
The analogy with my mobile phone ends here because I can dispense with my mobile phone if I wish to. However, it benefits me both professionally and socially by facilitating communication at a reasonable price. Therefore it improves the quality of my life and I choose to keep paying for that.
Would that I could exercise such freedom of judgement when it comes to building a home.
Language expresses thought. But do the unexamined everyday idioms embedded in different languages cause bad thoughts to be thinkable, and good ones to be unthinkable? Are some truths suppressed by language, and are some falsehoods inculcated by it? George Orwell thought so.
An important bad idea from which we libertarians suffer is that, believing as we do in freedom, we are also assumed to believe in social isolation, in social “atomism”. This accusation is derived from another wrong idea, that sociability only happens because powerful politicians make it happen and pay for it to happen. So if someone doesn’t believe in compulsory, tax-funded sociability, then he must be against sociability itself. It is said that libertarians believe either that (in the notoriously wrong-headed pronouncement of Margaret Thatcher) “there is no such thing as society”, or that, insofar as there is such a thing as society, that’s bad, and that “freedom” must smash it to pieces.
The truth is that we libertarians are well aware of the reality of and value of society. We merely think that, like most things of importance, society shouldn’t be bossed about by the government. Society exists, but shouldn’t be a nationalised industry.
On Saturday morning I was tidying my desk and I chanced upon a print-out of the quotations section on the St Andrews University Liberty Club website. One of these quotes is from the film actor Clint Eastwood. In a March 1997 interview, Playboy magazine asked Eastwood how he would characterize himself politically. Eastwood replied:
“Libertarian … Everyone leaves everyone else alone.”
“Leave me alone!” We’ve all said it thousands of times. Sometimes we even mean exactly that. Someone is being nasty to you. Forget about them being nicer. You just want them to go away. But often we say “Leave me alone!” to soften the blow of the whole and real truth. What we really mean is: “It’s you I don’t want to be with. I want to be with others instead.”
You can see how a movie star might equate freedom, especially in his leisure hours or when trudging through extra-curricular duties in the company of a media-hack, with simply being left alone. And you can see why libertarians, dazzled by such stellar endorsement, might be glad to reproduce this hurtful little meme-package. But as a libertarian propagandist I insist that there is a fundamental difference between different company – company that I am glad to have, company that I have consented to – and no company at all.
I mean he is begging for it… and so in order to indulge his rather interesting masochistic habits, he is walking down the virtual beach and kicking sand over all the big 250 lb guys on the beach. He wants to get bitch slapped by the liberals (by which he means American socialists), challenged to fisticuffs by the conservatives (by which he means American Republicans) and shot by the libertarians (by which he means us, I guess).
Well I don’t feel qualified to respond for the first two groups but for the last… well sorry John, I am not offended. In fact, I thought it was hilarious and not far off the mark.
But seeing as how I know John will be heartbroken if I don’t reply more ‘in character’… asking for the reason why libertarians don’t get elected is rather like asking why so few Jews are pork butchers. I am sure there probably are a few Jewish pork butchers (probably Russian ‘Jews’ living in Israel or Highland Park, New Jersey, who no doubt have a fine Slavic sense of irony) just as there are a few ‘Libertarians’ who get elected to put their hands on the levers of state oppression in order to manipulate society with the state’s proxy violence…
…perhaps you see my point. Or not.
Oh, and John, I would hazard a guess that the reason I blog a lot more than you is I probably have a lot more money. I made it via an obscure and very complex arbitrage deal that involved hiring other people’s kids to blow strangers for crack. Damn I love capitalism.
But the fact remains… John’s article is funny and contains a fair element of truth about ‘liberals’ (socialists), conservatives and libertarians.
P.S. Stay the hell off my property!
There is an interesting article about a meeting of libertarian science fiction writers over on Hollywood Investigator. The splits between libertarian thought (and libertarian ‘thought’) are made very clear by the views on parade at this dinner.
Andrea Harris is the Fox News guest blogger and showcases former US Libertarian Party candidate Harry Browne‘s wit and wisdom.
So will people please just read this and then stop asking me why I keep saying that Browne and his Libertarian Party do not define libertarianism in the USA. Guys, face facts… as long as you have a barking moonbat like Browne who thinks a libertarian society could survive contact with reality in the manner he advocates, the vast majority of US libertarians will continue to either vote Republican or if they cannot stand that, just not vote at all.
There are a lot of great people in the US Libertarian Party. Unfortunately those folks are not the ones running it.
 Update: As many e-mails have pointed out (and indeed as I alluded to on my final line above), many LP members both take a very rational view regarding the current war and do not think either Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan were ‘provoked’ by the mean old USA and Britain into World War II and if we had only been nicer to nice Mr. Hitler all that nastiness could all have been avoided. After all, our own Dale Amon has LP ties and he is extremely ‘sound of mind and sharp of sabre’ on all such issues.
Nevertheless, some LP remarks ‘from the top’ since September 11th have indeed fallen into the tinfoil hat and black helicopter category of barking moonbat mating calls… and this is rather a problem for me. Getting rid of Browne is certainly a start but his whole associated idiotarian meme stream is going to be decisively flushed down the toilet as a minimum pre-requisite for getting many pukka libertarians to even touch the LP with a barge pole.
At long last, true progress can be seen breaking through the glass ceiling of yet another reactionary institution as Lloyds List, the world’s oldest shipping industry newspaper, announces that it intends to drop the demeaning practice of referring to ships as she and will, from now on, use the the more gender-neutral and inoffensive word ‘it’.
“Mr Bray, 38, who has been the editor for two years, said: “I decided that it was time to catch up with the rest of the world, and most other news organisations refer to ships as neuter.”
A very welcome, if overdue, recognition of the diversity and multi-navigational reality of modern shipping and another sign of the imminent demise of the white male hetero-sailist orthodoxy which has always sought to marginalise and persecute differently-ruddered ships and hold them back with the anchors of oppressive language.
Not all ships are TransAtlantic; some are TransGendered, cruising the lonely sea-lanes at night to find solace and company in a world which refuses to even acknowledge their existence!
The first faltering steps to their liberation have been taken as ships everywhere find the courage to shout: “I’m coming out of dry-dock. I’m Tran-Sport and I’m Prow(d)”
Looking at another country from afar is rather like viewing it through a spyglass. In the case of Britain, with its huge on-line media presence, with the wave of a mouse you see what UK media writes about in detail without seeing what lies around the issue. Then you see what the media in one’s own country says about things going on in the UK, and finally you base your emergent views within the meta-contextual references of your own culture, as we all do.
But a little learning is a dangerous thing. If I were to read the LA Times and NY Times from afar day after day without having lived in the US for many years, I might conclude I have a shrewd idea as to the undercurrents of US society and reasonably deduce that the United States was a very different place than the one it in fact is.
A great deal of wildly generalised commentary has been written about anti-Semitism and racism in ‘Europe’ recently. John Braue, who is not an unreasonable commentator much of the time, discusses Euro-racism in terms which are correct to an extent but also very misleading as he makes sweeping assumptions that tell us as much about his meta-contextual frames of reference as about the subject at hand:
It’s not contempt, it’s outright racism. Europe is the home of the Tribal State; if you are not a member of the Tribe, you can never be a member of Tribe, not even if you are a tenth-generation immigrant. You are at best a Gastarbeiter, to be given the scut work to do so that the Volk can collect their government benefits in peace; at worse, a nuisance to be run out of town if, inexplicably, one of the Volk wants your job instead of just cashing his monthly check as an “occupational reservist”. That, incidentally is the reason for European anti-Semitism; the Jews not only (in their view) cannot be assimilated into the Volk, they don’t want to be; they act as if being Jewish is as good as being English, or French.
From my discussions with French friends, there is some truth to that. Likewise one only has to read the nominally libertarian Hans-Herman Hoppe‘s works to realise how different German and Anglosphere views of the nature of society are. Every nation has its intolerant elements, but to think German and French racism on one hand, and English racism on the other have a common root is to fail to understand that ‘England’ (John does not say ‘Britain’) is not Europe.
To suggest that at its core, English culture has a blood and soil volk ethos is to fundamentally misread the often repeated messages of English history. By that logic we should still have Huguenot ghettos in London. How can the enormous number of Jews who have been senior government ministers over the last 50 years be explained away? The Jews of Britain have been the masters of successful assimilation precisely because being a Jew does not make a person less British or even English, any more than being a Catholic makes me less British or English. As a splendid example, when one reads David Carr’s articles to this blog, one is struck not by his jewishness but by his effortlessly pugnacious Englishness.
I am sure John and other commentators of similar generalised views reads the on-line Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Reuters etc. and are therefore very up on current events as reported in the UK media but I wonder if John also knows that there are more members of ethnic minorities in local government in the UK than in any other single country in Europe.
To be British is much like being ‘American’. It is a meta-context to which one subscribes, rather than be born into. Britain, and in particular England, in fact is no less integrated than the United States and probably more so (and with far less heavy handed intrusions by the state to make that happen) and far, far more so than mainland Europe. Mixed marriages are endemic, which is far and away the best measure of social assimilation. The proof of the sheer extent of miscegenation in Britain can be seen walking hand in hand down the high streets of Britain in glorious and damning rebuke to those who believe free choice without the direction of state leads to social separation. Is there racism and anti-Semitism in Britain? Yes of course. In a few areas it is very serious but it is hard to escape the view that race relations in the UK overall are almost a case study in socially driven (rather than state driven) assimilation.
For another splendid example of the reality of the ‘English Volk’, I recommend you check out the site of fellow British blogger, Adil Farooq of MuslimPundit and see Islam interpreted in ways which spring from a truly British meta-context.
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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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