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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After the bite, after the infection has taken hold, Brad Pitt surrenders his earthly coil and joins the ranks of ‘The Undead’.
Tom Cruise commands him to “Look at the world with your vampire eyes”. He does. It is not the same world; it is not the world that others see. He sees a different, hidden, ‘other’ world of signs and symbols and secrets to which the living are not privvy. He moves through this new world and ‘turns’ others of his choosing. But there is no going back; no return to the life he had before, spent in peace and semi-blindess.
Brian Micklethwait is not a number; he is my ‘Lestat’
Have you ever been more than a little aggravated by the snotty moral superiority of vegetarians? I know I have. I also know that I somewhat dismayed by growth in popularity of this fetish, especially among women. These days I cannot find a single restaurant in London that doesn’t have a ‘Vegetarian Section’ on the menu.
This shouldn’t be a political issue, merely a matter of personal preference. But, while a vegan society remains the aim of the Animal Rights movement, it is a political issue.
Thus far, in defence of my firmly carnivourous ways, I have always used the freedom of choice arguments against the accusations that I am promoting cruelty to animals, harming the planet and ruining my health (although why these people should concern themselves with my well-being is a mystery to me).
However, thanks to anthropology there is another, and better, rebuttal available. Thanks to recent discoveries about the early history of our species we have learned of the contrasting fates of two different but concurrent sub-species of early hominid; Robust Man (Australopithicus robustus) and Gracile Man (Australopithecus garhi).
Robust Man was a vegetarian. We know this because of the extraordinarily prominent sagittal crest found on its skull. This crest could only have evolved in order to provide an anchor for enormous jaw muscles of the kind required for rumination. That, coupled with large, flat teeth, lead anthropologists to the conclusion that Robust Man ate roots, tubers and plants.
Gracile Man remains, on the other hand, consist of a smooth skull and lots of sharp teeth. He was a carnivore.
The trouble with eating vegetables is that they are difficult to digest and require a large gut in order to do so. Meat, however, is easy to digest. So Robust’s metabolic energy went into the development of his huge gut and Gracile’s metabolic energy went into the development of his brain.
As a result, Gracile went from picking the marrow out of bones to develop hunting skills and eventually become us while poor retarded old Robust wallowed around on the floor of the forest and farted himself into oblivion.
So, the next time somebody tells you that meat is murder, you can reply yes, but vegetables are suicide.
I’ve been catching up on my essential reading this evening – or rather this AM – and was annoyed to the point of blogging by a recent DOD news briefing. The fantasy mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo seemed to be the only item on the press agenda that day.
I, too, have a question about the prisoners’ treatment. One that is not being sufficiently addressed. One I suspect resonates with others from the same planet as I, ie normal people.
How are we going to keep these bastards off the street permanently?
I want assurances these people will never, ever again have the freedom and opportunity to crash an airplane into a skyscraper, release a bio-agent, smuggle radiological weapons, poison a cities water supply, machine gun a crowd, blow up an embassy or nuke Chicago and LA. I’m really not much interested in whether they’re getting the proper sun block in their Club Gitmo tanning butter.
These prisoners are excessively dangerous men. They are trained, drilled, lethal killers… every one of them. They will seek death for the opportunity to take some of us with them. No normal prison or prison guards will be capable of holding them. If it meant 50 of them had to die so one could grab a soldier’s weapon, they would do so. They will quietly wait 3,5,10 years for a guard to slip, to forget what sort of people they are, to become complacent. They will revolt and kill and revolt and kill again until there are none of them left. So exactly how the hell are we going to neutralize these arseholes? That’s the kind of investigative journalism I wish I were seeing.
I still prefer baseballs in Yankee stadium, but if push comes to shove I’ll settle for a good ol’ fashioned necktie party à la Nuremberg.
A gentleman from France wrote in with some questions about what would happen in a society run under libertarian principles. He had some practical questions and I thought an extract form these remarks might be interesting to some Samizdata Readers. The gentlemen who sent the e-mail did not want to be pointed at books which he would find hard to locate, and thus I answered much by pointing him at various Libertarian Alliance pamphlets on the matters in question, as they are short, to the point and available free on-line (in .pdf format, requires Adobe Acrobat or similar to read).
Q: If there is no government/state then who pays the police?
Not all of us at Samizdata advocate full blown anarcho-capitalist social models. We range from ‘minarchists’ (small state libertarians) who see the role of the state as being security and nothing else, to other hyphenated libertarians across the spectrum between neo-conservative to anarcho-capitalist. There have been some interesting things written on the subject, such as:
Private Police and the Free Rider Problem by Max O’Connor.
Q: Who takes care of pensions?
You do. In the USA and UK (and unlike Europe), private pensions are hugely important and are the reason why as society goes ‘grey’, the EU’s state pensions are, in the long run, completely unsustainable whilst those in the US and UK are still financially viable due to [rivate sector involvement.
Q: Who regulates industries?
In the current sense, no one does. That is the whole point of the laissez-faire capitalism that underpins libertarianism. Much as in the USA there is less state regulation but more civil liability litigation, in a libertarian model, people will sue if others impose costs on them to prevent things like building a chemical plant in a residential area. The state is not the only way to achieve sensible results. As that greatest of Frenchmen wrote: said:
Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.
– Frederic Bastiat
Q: Who decides who the judges are going to be?
There are several interesting pamplets on that subject such as:
Restitution: Justice in a Stateless Society by Christian Michel
Privately Produced Law by Tom Bell
Polycentric Law Versus the Minimal State: The Case of Air Pollution by Adam Chacksfield
There are some people in the world who will go to great lengths not to be taken seriously. One of these people is a certain Mr.Paul Clark who has contributed this stupendous bit of reality-subversion on Lew Rockwell’s website.
According to Mr.Clark, Libertarians and True Conservatives everywhere could do a lot worse than look to European Union for inspiration. Well, yes, they could always look to North Korea, I suppose. He goes on to state that the USA should seek to emulate it.
“In fact, the EU offers, in many ways, an example for the United States to emulate. The EU still is what the US is supposed to be: a federation of more or less sovereign states, united for economic and military cooperation.
For those of us who advocate a small, truly constitutional government basically the same as the US had in 1800, the common response is that the world has changed, and that it is now impossible to have the kind of weak central government that existed two centuries ago, when the population and area were a fraction of what they are today. In response to that, one simply needs to look at the European Union”
Yes, he actually says that! And, to add injury to insanity:
“If I were leader of an island nation in the middle of the Atlantic, and were forced to choose between joining the EU or the US, there would be only one choice. If one were concerned with preventing a deluge of tax collectors, bureaucrats, and regulators; and if one wanted to maintain traditional culture and laws, then one would not join the US”
Do you think he means us?
The whole article is a tissue of egregious distortions and outright misrepresentations. For example, Mr.Clark claims that the EU does not tax its citizens when it is common knowledge to every European that plans to do are already well-advanced. He also claims that the EU has no army when the European Rapid Reaction Force (a rose by any other name…) is being built around our ears and with a brief to do just about anything its political masters order it to do both internally and externally.
As someone who has many friends in the USA so I am only too well aware of the exasperation they feel when dealing with their bloated and blundering Federal Government but to compare it unfavourably with the EU requires not just gall but a breath-taking turn of relativism.
It seems that Mr.Clark is yet another of that curious breed of American Libertarian that is so convinced of the irredeemable iniquity of their own government that any ANY alternative is better, be it the EU, Latin American Caudillos, the Moonies or Pol Pot for that matter. Perhaps Mr.Clark should be directed to this Blog for some clarity about the ‘laissez-faire’ credentials of the EU. He could start by trying to explain away the post below.
But maybe I am leaping to judgment. Maybe Mr.Clark has merely written a ripping satire. Maybe he is deliberatly trying to be provocative in order to make some other subtle point. But, if not, then I regret to say that it isn’t just the prisoners at Camp X-Ray who are hooded and goggled.
There is a much better obituary for Robert Nozick in the Telegraph that the rather pallid official Harvard one I linked to before.
Now just a dang minute, Perry! Older, yes, but fatter? That varies in direct proportion to the amount of Guiness I’ve consumed that day and I’m proud to report I can still fit into the pictured outfit.
I sure do miss that white cat, though.
The ubiquitous Mommabear writes in with a rant about Amnesty International’s selective conscience
Where is Amnesty International when someone really needs help? If an individual is truly in jeopardy but not held by the “big, bad, Satan America”, forget about it.
Those NGOs who bleat and wail about The United States of America, with far too much support from biased and political media groups, should be held accountable for any detrimental or deadly results in this particular case. For openers, they should be stripped of their tax-free status; when they start lobbying from a political position, they violate the laws by which they are permitted to function. They need to be exposed, over and over, for what they really are: poseurs with political bias.
Here is a legal case that cries out for worldwide condemnation. If Amnesty International and other like groups fail to perform, castigate, or at least condemn this judicial situation, then they expose the truth about themselves, which belies their current posturing completely. They should be ashamed.
MommaBear
Unfortunately, this is not a hoax
[Editor: this story is totally fowl]
It is not just about huge multinational mergers or collapsing energy conglomerates… it is also about small entrepreneurs struggling to make a deal here and develop a property there. Tonight I am delighted to be able to take my good friend Nikki Brandt out to dinner in order to welcome her back to London after an extended stint in Jamaica. She has been trying to breathe some life into a holiday resort development out there in these difficult post-September 11th times. Londoner Nikki is a partner in a small and rather lovely hotel in Negril, on the western tip of Jamacia.
Clear proof that entrepreneurial activity leads to great legs
Andrew Ian Dodge has feelings of déjà vu when he reads Johnny Student’s Samizdata article.
Johnny Student‘s latest post (Thursday, Jan 24th 2002) is no surprise to me, having been on the front-line of the PC wars in the 80s. I was at Colby College in Waterville, ME at political correctness’ flowering.
It does amaze me now, to see how much Republicans in the US complain about political correctness in higher education. They were given the chance to help fight it in the 80s and they ran away. Those of us on the front line were left by ourselves to face the onslaught.
Just like Johnny Student, I routinely got in trouble with the administrators and professors for expressing my right-of-centre opinions, both verbally and in written word. Let us hope that JS does not suffer the academic abuse I endured. I fear his anonymous postings may not fully protect him. In a bizarre episode, I managed to get called to the Dean’s office for smoking a cigar in a designated area. I was let off, and the next year they changed the rules to exclude cigars and pipes, but not cigarettes (of any kind).
For even more depressing reading on the subject, I recommend The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses by Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate. You can read more about my experiences in my book Statism Sucks! Ver 2.0
Johnny Student’s post has left me stunned. Let me just restate the facts as I understand them.
Johnny was in a college, the place you go to be exposed to different ideas and thereby expand your horizons. Specifically, he was in a philosophy class, the quintessential place to discuss varying points of view. Instead of debating a philosophical issue, the “instructor” sent him to the Dean to explain his actions before calling the police.
Johnny’s supposed crime was not parroting the “all guns are bad” line.
What can you say? That’s not a college. It’s a farce.
Three cheers and hats off to Johnny for sticking to his guns. It’s gonna be a long semester. I’d say invite the professor along on your next range session, but he would doubtless be convinced you were planning his demise. Pathetic scared little man.
As for your classmates; yeah, the second amendment supports terrorism like the first amendment supports hate groups and the fourth amendment supports perversion. (sigh).
As John Stuart Mill, a real philosopher once said:
One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.
Maybe that’s the trouble. Today’s professors can’t bear the thought of people with belief expressing themselves. It might make other people think, and then where would we be?
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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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