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Well, wow, what a day this was. I had no choice but to blog this story, because it is so darn perfect. I could have put it on my blog (that is a secret), but it just fit better on Samizdata.
It was the first time in a long time I got in trouble for defending an idea of mine (last time was three years ago). This time it was that nasty G word that the college elite love to hate. Guns! We libertarians love them (or at least I do). They give us an ability to not be a ward of the state when it comes to defending our own life. I think that is really good. Yet, these darn profs hate the guns. I found this out when I argued in favor of gun rights and the second amendment today in class (it is a philosophy class) – I should have known better but I was feeling rebellious. After uttering a quick defense of guns, I was quickly sent to the Dean’s Office so that my gun slinging ideas could be mended to the “right path” – ironic that they call it right path, huh? As he booted me out the door, I was called a terrorist supporter by fellow students (well, the fellow students who were not drugged or hung over).
Now I should say here exactly what I said in class. My friend tape records the lectures and I was blessed with the ability to listen to my exact words and tone of voice. I said quite calmly that guns protect people from over zealous bureaucrats. I said that guns most certainly could be used for wrong, but no laws could ever prevent that.
When I reached the Dean’s Office, I was told that I was trying to threaten the life of the college rulers. Not at all! Before the police were called for me (or my parents) one of my more reasonable profs (not the one who sent me to the Dean’s office) vouched for my character and I was saved from the wrath of these gun hating Nazis (and I mean Nazis).
So, all this while I was in trouble for defending the second amendment, I had a nice taste of what it feels like to not have a first amendment. How many more years till graduation? Oh God, that many… HELP!
Since as long as I can remember, I have had this method of judging people: you are a jock, a “normals”, a freak, a geek, a nerd, or an intellectual. Most of my friends (even the liberal ones) agree with me on this view of the world. However, the older I have gotten, I have started to notice policy trends in all these people, and there is no better place to observe this than in college. I think breaking down the school population like this helps explain why our society is so anti-government and (in the most part) those interested in public policy are so pro-government.
Jocks: Views the world in a very narrow view and is incredibly dense. Typically these people are found in sporting events, but can also be found amongst soldiers. Politics is foreign to the jock; in fact I’ll bet they can’t spell politics, let alone capitalism.
“Normals”: These are people that do not make any statement. They just hope to make it home alive. They raise a family and make some money, but they don’t take risks. They are lousy capitalists and often support government protecting the consumers. They think us free market people are too weird.
Freaks: People who just don’t give a damn about the world anymore. They tend to follow the moral relativists in saying that whatever is right is right and whatever happens will happen. They think capitalists are mean and are attempting to rule the world. They however are individualistic and freedom lovers, so they probably agree with the libertarians, but call themselves socialists.
Nerds: These people can program a coffee pot to run a website, but will get hit by a car because they forget to look before crossing the street. (My best friend in high school was a true geek: he made an alarm clock out of rice and wheat but then he fell in a ditch at a construction site near the playground.) They are oblivious of the world of politics and the world of business….what’s a capitalist? Think pre-CEO Bill Gates.
Geeks: They fit in with the Nerds and the Normals, except that they follow the world very closely, have a good level of practical intelligence (no rice-wheat alarm clocks here), although they do have some level of unimportant intelligence (like the nerds). Unlike the normals, they stick their necks out and don’t mind speaking their mind. Its gets ‘em in trouble (I spent a good many days of school life in lockers, trashcans, and the nurse’s office suffering from bruise attacks.)
Geeky Capitalists: Sub-Group of Geeks. They like what the geeks say and they advocate capitalism. Think CEO Bill Gates. Think Johnny Student. The geeky capitalists are the only people who care enough to defend capitalism out of all the groups identified.
Intellectuals: Can we really know anything? No, so we should sit around the coffee houses and chat all day about Marx, Keynes, Freud, and the complex world. Previously on this blog, I mentioned that the intellectuals are the ones who like to create complex situations – well that is all that these intellectuals do. They are friends of Marx not Smith. By the way, these are mostly the professors and other scholars at the school. They don’t really hold the corner on intelligence, but they like to think that they do.
Although this is a quick overview of the various categories of people on campus, it is clear to see why so few people at a college like libertarians.
To avoid the Ambrose condition, Johnny Student would like to thank Jane Student for her work in co-writing this post
Samizdata reader Rob Smith has some interesting observations about a common psychological link between the IRA, street gangs and Islamic terrorists:
I was born and raised for a number of my formative years in a coal mining camp in Harlan County, Kentucky. Buried deep in the armpit of the Appalachian Mountains, “Bloody Harlan” is famous for the fussin,’ feudin,’ and fightin’ that went on for years there, first between families that just flat-out didn’t like each other, then between the moonshiners and the sheriffs, then between the Company and the Union during the Mine Wars.
A common thread ran through every one of these battles. The “Code of the Hills” dictated that no one could abide any sort of insult from anyone and maintain the family’s dignity. Honor was at stake if that insult was given, and everyone knew that honor was much more important than life. So, a lot of people were killed by crazy hillbillies following their “code,” and I was raised to believe they were all heroes for either killing or being killed.
I grew out of those beliefs, but they give me an interesting perspective on Islamic Holy Warriors and IRA members and a lot of other misguided fools who continue to follow their own personal version of the code today. Some people may have a legitimate grievance against someone else, but taking to the trees and the hollows with a squirrel gun and shooting at anything that moves on the other side often is counterproductive. Sometimes, a lot of people are killed and you’ve gotta pay ’em back for that, so more people are killed, and you’ve gotta pay ’em back for that, and soon the snake is eating its tail, making a vicious circle.
The Al-Qaeda, Sinn Fein and others of their ilk are not very different from drug dealers in the ‘hood who are “dissed” by a rival gang and feel that a drive-by shooting is the only possible response to this insult. They all remind me of the hillbillies I saw do the same thing, because they never used their brains to control their behavior. Everything came from the gut.
Some things are worth fighting for. Given no other option, that’s exactly what I would do. But I would always explore other options first, then fight because my brain told me to, not my gut.
Rob Smith
I don’t know how many Americans have been dismayed at the breast-beating of the British elite and much of the British media over the apparent (and in most cases alleged) condition of the Al-Qaeda fighters currently cooped up in Cuba.
Incantations of solicitous concern for their welfare jostle for front page space with dire warnings to the US government about the consequences of ignoring the Geneva Convention. The BBC has just stopped short of launching ‘Taliban-Aid’
It’s all a delicious irony really. Most of these Guardianistas would pay good money to be hooded, handcuffed and pushed around by big, burly men in uniform
Maybe the Americans have been disappointed by all this, maybe not. Maybe they couldn’t care less. But in the event that they have been taken aback then let them take heart from, of all places, the Richard and Judy Show
The ‘Richard and Judy Show’ is a daytime magazine programme aimed strictly at the ‘British Street’, and the female part of that street to boot. It is wall-to-wall gossip, recipes, beauty tips, agony aunts, fashion reviews and is wildly popular. Occasionally, though, the producers like to get serious and hold a phone-in poll on some hot current topic or other. Yesterday that topic was the Al-Qaeda prisoners in Cuba and was their treatment fair or unfair?
Some 5000 viewers phoned in. The result? 8% thought their treatment was unfair and a whopping 92% thought that the US was doing the right thing
Assuming that these kind of polls are an accurate reflection of grassroots opinion then clearly pro-Amercian feelings are far thicker on the ground than they are in the lofty towers of the political/media nomenklatura and yet another indication of the ever-widening gap between the people of Britain and the establishment that rules over them
A man, by some miracle of medicine, is cured of bubonic plague. Then does he forget that he came close unto death and sayeth he desireth back his beloved plague because the warmth of fever, yea the very burning of his flesh, stopped him feeling cold at night in the tents of his cyber-camp. Truly, it is hard to discern the meaning of this parable.
As has been argued on the Samizdata in previous articles, liberty is not genuinely advanced by legal maneuvers but by cultural shifts. I am all for the overturning of laws that infringe civil liberty on-line and certainly I wish well to groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation which fights the good fight against attempts to censor the Internet and the monstrous Digital Millennium Act in the USA… but this is not an American or a British or an Australian problem. It is a global problem and the solution is a global one.
Encryption cracks, DVD decoders and all that good stuff can be made illegal in the USA but so what? If it can be found on a server in Romania or Taiwan or Indonesia, who cares what the law says in America? You want what the US called non-exportable ‘weapons grade encryption’? No problem, if you know where to look: there are several servers in Eastern Europe that offer you crypto as good as or better than what is commercially available in the USA, plus it is less likely to have a NSA or GCHQ backdoor. Much of the good stuff of that nature is written outside the USA and EU to begin with. If a server gets shut down, there will be another with the same software up and running a day or a hour later somewhere else. Peer-to-peer transfers make this an even more robust process.
Liberty is furthered by simply making unreasonable laws unworkable and this happens when enough people refuse to comply and find viable ways to circumvent them. This can take form from minor disobedience all the way up to Boston Tea Parties. Let the democratically sanctified congresses and parliaments of thieves spew out ever more regulations: if the reality is that continually evolving technical means of distributing the codes of liberty continue, then we win and they lose regardless of who wins in the courts.
Sure, they can find a few people using these unauthorized things and throw them in jail, but if a code crack for a DVD can be downloaded for free in a matter of seconds off some off-shore server and used in the privacy of your own home, the fact is 99.999% of the people who do that will go undetected regardless of the huffing and puffing of the large US media companies and the finest politicians their money can buy.
But no, do not write to Samizdata asking where to find this stuff… that is what UseNet and Search Engines are for.
There is an excellent editorial in The Telegraph called Not your business, Mr Straw which makes the points that need to be made about the Al Qaeda prisoners in Cuba
Yesterday’s Mail on Sunday [Ed: mouthpiece of the British Idiotarian right], on the basis of a few photographs, told its readers that the suspects had been “tortured”. This has sparked some predictable howls of rage from America’s traditional foes on the Left – may of whom were oddly silent when the Taliban were practising genuine torture on their own citizens.
Although the US is understandably being careful with potentially dangerous men, there is no evidence of human rights violations. These, after all, are not prisoners of war, but terrorist suspects.
The whole point is that these people are accused of either terrorism or war crimes, neither of which accord them the protections of the Geneva Convention, not that such legalisms are all that important. What is important is that they be treated in an objective, appropriate and reasonable manner according to the nature of what they are: extremely dangerous terrorists.
I’ve been reading how some NGO’s are worried whether the al Qaeda prisoners held at the Guantanamo Naval Base are being given “culturally appropriate” treatment. They were upset the US military shaved off prisoner’s lice-infested beards. The Horror! And not to mention the mortal fear Americans might commit nightmarishly inhuman tortures like… Allah Forbid! providing a side portion of Bob Evan’s spicy pork sausage for breakfast!
This got me to thinking. In 6 months or a year the trials will be over and it will be time to send the lot of them to their patiently waiting Houris. We really should be culturally sensitive about how we go about this. We wouldn’t want to insult the Muslim Street now would we? So… I’ve a suggestion that should satisfy everyone’s requirements: we send them to Yankee Stadium for a good old fashioned stoning! What could possibly be more culturally appropriate? After all, they do it to women in Saudi Arabia don’t they? So doesn’t that make it an appropriate death for terrorists?
Instead of rocks, we’ll use baseballs. After all, this is an American-style stoning we’re talking about here. Baseballs are also better because each person can write witty little messages on them. It’s really, really hard to print legibly on your average rock.
There are problems of course. Where do you come up with a couple hundred thousand baseballs? And what do you do for people who are just too far away? But these are problems I’m sure good old Yankee ingenuity and mass production can solve.
First toss at tickets must of course be reserved for the family and friends of the victims. Remaining tickets would be auctioned, with all proceeds going to the New York Fire Department and charities they endorse. Why, the Fraternal Order could build an Historically Correct (HC) memorial statue with only a fraction of the money raised!
Imagine the cheers as President Bush throws the first baseball! Just to be inclusive Hillary or Bill (depending on which one can throw a baseball) get to throw the second ball. (The reasons why they can’t cast the first baseball should be obvious even to the retarded). Even more money can be raised by auctioning off a few other early throws. Grandma’s get to take turns on batting practice machines with laser sights. Think of the fun of smacking your favorite al Qaeda in the gob with a Bob Feller fastball! Imagine what new meanings will be injected into quaint old Bronx colloqualisms like “In your ear!” or “Up your nose!”
The mind just boggles at the possibilities.
Hawkish G.I. pundit Sgt. Stryker replies to my views on Steven den Beste’s article. His remarks are essentially an expansion on Steven’s thesis and amount to a quite accurate detailing of what is the received historical wisdom from the American point of view. I don’t really have any grouse with Steven’s assessment of why the US rightly tends to ignore European views, it is his historical analysis I disagree with and the same applies to my views of Sgt. Stryker’s. It is quite a lengthy post so I will only address what I think are the most egregious bits.
1. There wouldn’t be any Poles, Chechs and Hungarians were it not for Wilson’s supposed, “trashing all vestiges of the potentially stabilising old order.”
That is a gross misreading of the nature of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire… it was not called the ‘dual Kingdom’ for nothing: the Hungarian part jealously guarded its Magyar identity and Imperial areas of administration from Austria. Likewise the Czech and Croats and Slovenes and Slovaks may have been administered from Vienna or Budapest but were always quite distinct ethnic groups within the Empire.
2. You seem distraught that these peoples lived under 50 years of Communist rule; yet having them live under the rule of a foreign Hereditary Monarchal Empire is just fine with you because it would bring stabilization. Yet the Communists, for all the wrongs they committed, did stabilize Eastern Europe. All those Eastern Europeans were for all intents and purposes under the domination and influence of a non-democratic foreign power. So what, I ask, is the difference between Communist foreign domination and Monarchal foreign domination that makes the latter more pleasing to you and the former an abomination?
You presuppose that a democratic-republic is by definition a preferable state to that of a monarchy with local government. Your views were of course shared by Woodrow Wilson, but not me. Britain evolved into a true democracy quite successfully, but an attempt to force the pace resulted in the proto-fascist Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell. Democracy works where it evolves naturally, which is why in the long run I am so pessimistic about Europe now. The Great War was just a territorial dispute and did not truly become an ideological one until the arrival of the Americans. The rise of fascism was as a result of unstable alien democratic regimes being forced on nations that did not even have traditions of being independent nations, let alone democracies and for that Woodrow Wilson was the prime mover. It was hardly surprising that democracy in the 1920/30 was a fiasco in much of Eastern and Central Europe as it was imposed rather than evolved. The last echo of Woodrow Wilson’s folly was the recent Balkan Wars.
It was not even the American military involvement in the Great War that was so damaging but Wilson’s disastrous ‘Fourteen Points’. If the USA had been content to assist crushing the Central Powers in response to its U-boat attacks and then go the hell home, history might have been very different and probably not worse. I would take the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns over the Nazis any day.
Over on AintNoBadDude, our pet pinko Brian Linse makes an excellent case for why TV cameras have no place in a court house.
If I were on trial for my life, I’d want to be sure that the prosecutor wasn’t campaigning for DA on my time. I’d want to be certain that the judge wasn’t auditioning for a syndicated series. And I’d want to be damn sure that the lawyers weren’t trying to get booked on Larry King. If there is even the slightest chance that a citizen might be deprived of their life, or even their freedom, then the possible impact of cameras must be seen as a threat to the Sixth Amendment. The impact on the press and the public of keeping cameras out of courtrooms is insignificant by comparison.
It is pretty hard to argue with that.
I note that I have been ever-so-gently upbraided for my lamentations over the apparent pacification (and pansy-fication) of marxist rebels; more particularly the FARC of Colombia who appear to have retired after a long career spent decapitating villagers and moved to the negotiation table
Surely, this is a step in the right direction, no? Surely, pursuing peace is better than pursuing a savage war? I regret to say that my answer is no. As for it being the ‘right move’, well, I’m sure that the FARC consider it to be the ‘right move’ as the negotiating table will assuredly take them far further then their AK-47s ever did; from fetid jungle encampment to lording it up in the halls of Colombian power within 10 years at most, I’d say
The FARC have learned these lessons well from their European and American comrades who made this transition 30 years ago and just look how far it’s taken them.
They handed in their guns, bombs and incendiaries and equipped themselves with altogether more stealthy (and infinitely more lethal) weapons of inclusivity, diversity and sustainability. So ended the the dream of revolution and began the grim determination of the long march. The fiery radicals of yesteryear became the outreach workers, counsellors, legal-aid lawyers, community activists, environmental campaigners, journalists, professors, social workers, teachers and union delegates. Carlos the Jackal became Charles the Educator and he lives next door to us now. He wears a well-tailored suit, expensive shoes, drives a car, sends his kids to private schools and writes a column in the Guardian
Thus many of us, nay, most of us were fooled into believing that the marxist rebs had finally grown up and ditched their war with civilisation. Tosh and horsefeathers, I say. We were merely blinded by the brief incandescent light of Thatcher; deafened by the noise of tumbling bricks in Berlin. The Third Way was not so much a coming-to-terms with reality but, rather, a tactical realisation that reality had to be upended by other means. The programme remains on course; it is merely the method that has changed
And, in a sense, they were right. Now it is they who rub shoulders with those in power while we squat in our cyber-camps, seething and scheming. Hell, in many cases they are the ones in power. What an extraordinarily successful application of the black art of cognitive jiu-jitsu that left the rest of us lying spread-eagled on the mat, bruised, dazed and wondering how that happened. Well, now we know how that happened; the marxist radicals chose peace instead of fighting
So I say, let us return to the bad old days when the interminably neurotic children of the bourgeoisie were yomping around the countryside blowing up electricity pylons. It made it so much easier to put their lifeless bodies on display to a grateful public without so much as a hint of equivocation. They were them, we were us and the only decision anybody ever had to make was to pick a side. We knew exactly upon whom we had to set the dogs and, more importantly, why
The triumph of civilisation has always lain the in the vigourous trumping of stupidty by reason and it is only the purblind obsession with ‘peace at any price’ that has caused us to forget this biblical simplicity. ‘Stop making wars’ they implored. What they meant was ‘Stop making wars we can never win’
Come back, Che Guevarra. Lead your comrades out into the jungle again. You can have back your sweaty T-shirts, your ghastly berets and your molotov cocktails. We’ll have back our moral certainty, rule of law and our armed citizens. You can be free again to shout Long Live the Revolution and we can shout Let’s Roll
Perry mocks the Black Kittens. David laughs at the soppy little FARC-ers. Can I just remind you boys that, if you must be some sort of revolutionary socialist, it is at least less bad to be a halfway peaceful one. Let’s not make it harder for them to move in the right direction.
Along the same lines, may I also offer my heartfelt congratulations to any ex-Taliban among our readers who cried “uncle”, hid, shaved or ran away during the recent readjustment in Afghanistan. Well done. Right decision. You think I’m joking at your expense, but I’m not. Welcome back to the real world.
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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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