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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What follows was not written by me but by a friend of mine, Niall Kilmartin. As will be apparent, he has known me since university. – NS
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At the end of a recent post about lefties making laws for us because they think we’re like them, Brian Micklethwait asks what similar errors we make. I think I can answer with examples from his own post.
First, he talks of gun control freaks – people so violent that if they had guns to hand during temper tantrums, they’d murder – and suggests that these people want guns banned because they think we’re the same as them. Here he does have a specific, documented, public-domain example of a gun-control advocate with a domestic violence history. But let me offer a rival example.
In the week I first met Natalie Solent, she was sitting in the Oxford University D&D club chatting to two friends of mine whom she’d just met. An accident occurred outside and my friends went to help – thus incidentally establishing their bona fides as caring people to her. That situation resolved, they sat down again and – as my friends have a tendency to do, for some reason – began talking about guns. Natalie then was in some ways not Natalie as we now know her. As she told me later, if that accident hadn’t happened, she would have written them off in the unthinking way of many British people: “They like guns, guns are for killing people, so they must like the idea of killing people; I’ll not pursue their acquaintance.”
Natalie, as she then was, is far more representative of how left-wingers think than Brian’s example. No doubt Brian’s example is useful in debate: “We’re not the only violent ones. In fact, we’re not specially violent. In fact, if we can look at some among our opponents for a moment… “. But as regards political fundamentals, that argument is so like the left’s tactics, that it’s fair to use it only when debating with them. My friends’ reaction to the accident persuaded Natalie to change her mind a little. You would have got nowhere with her by saying, “You only think that because you’re so violent yourself”. It would be very like some accusations against the Tea Party: propaganda failures because it is so obvious to Tea Partiers and their friends that they are not true.
Brian’s next illustration is even worse, because he has no public domain example, just speculation about some guy who thinks homosexuality will destroy civilization if tolerated because it would destroy his mental equilibrium if he tolerated it. In a world of seven thousand million (is it?) human beings, this guy may well exist. But in my (far from complete) knowledge of the Anglosphere public domain, past and present, I cannot offhand come up with an example. I can however think of counter-examples.
Before we meet them, however, let’s meet a counter-argument. Turn the argument about homophobes being repressed homosexuals around and assert that homosexuals are really repressed gynophobes or androphobes. Here I can think of public domain examples. Women staff at Bletchley Park said that if a woman so much as spoke to Alan Turing when he was not expecting it, he would visibly shrink into himself in alarm. When the gynophobia is in itself so clear, it’s a fair diagnosis that the homoerotic symptoms are mere side-effects.
Now look instead at, for example, Noel Coward. If I were willing to argue like a leftie, I could diagnose gynophobia. Think of his joke about the queen of Tonga at the coronation. As the enormous queen and diminutive ambassador from Pakistan passed in their shared carriage, someone asked him who that was with Queen Salote: “Oh, I think that’s her lunch.” Think of the plot of Blythe Spirit: the two women make the man’s life hell quarrelling over him and eventually kill him. A clear diagnosis of gynophobia? Or a clear diagnosis of comic genius? Certainly, if Noel Coward was terrified of women, he handled it very much better than Alan Turing – unless you claim his homosexuality shows his bad handling of it, but then we’re into circular reasoning.
In short, a hand-count of examples of people who are or may be assuming that laws should be written to deal with people like themselves does not a true-for-all-cases proof make. Arguing with some supporter of Canada’s current laws against hate speech, I’d think it very fair to push Brian’s argument. But with anyone more reasonable, I would not pretend to know things I don’t know.
But as I said, I can offer counter-examples as well as counter-arguments. Many decades ago, my mother was raised, in humble circumstances, in a very straitlaced small Scottish town, attending the local school, but when she was 13 years old, she knew plenty about homosexuality – because she had a classical education. And there was nothing unusual about this level of classical knowledge even among ordinary people: many of you will know the In Parenthesis anecdote about the WWI Welsh private assigned to latrine duty who defended the utility of his task with the words “Don’t you know the army of Artaxerxes was utterly destroyed for lack of sanitation?” (I love this anecdote because it’s so easy to say “for lack of sanitation” in an appropriately-Welsh accent.)
My mother, aged 13, imagined that homosexuality was one of those things, like polytheism, human sacrifice and slavery, that had been common in the past but had died out under the beneficent influence of Christianity. Not that anyone told her that – it was a 13-year old’s way of understanding what she was taught in the light of where and when she lived. (My mother aged 16 had become aware that “died out” was putting it too strongly.) Until half a century ago there were many people like her – people who were not taught to respect Socrates because he was homosexual, any more than they were taught to respect him because he owned slaves, or worshipped Zeus and Athena. Although they saw homosexuality as a perversion, they were taught to respect Socrates, and to see Athens killing him as a tragedy – not as good riddance to a nasty pervert. They knew exactly what they believed, but they were also taught to know intimately and respect a culture, and people in that culture, who had very different values from theirs.
Now imagine presenting to these past people – who would certainly fail the Haringey council “anti-homophobia” test or similar – the idea that they believed what they did because they thought tolerated homosexuality would destroy civilization. They would have thought of two responses.
– They would have thought of Sparta, where the idea that homosexuality destroyed a civilization is a possible thesis. The Spartans made homosexuality obligatory for their military training, and (uniquely amongst Greeks), had a positive, rather than just contemptuously tolerant, view of female homosexuality. The Spartans suffered a 90% decline in their citizen body during the classical period; eventually it destroyed the old Sparta. The Spartans had customs – marriage-by-capture, willingness to let visiting nobles sleep with their wives – which it’s easy to explain by saying that their homosexuality was easier to learn in their teens than unlearn when it was time to procreate. So yes, if it is promoted enough, our ancestors would have argued, homosexuality can indeed destroy a civilization.
– But they would have set this level high, because they would also have thought of Athens. In Athens, philosophers taught that men who desired other men showed better taste than men who desired those inferior creatures, women. (And so women who desired women showed bad taste, but then women were inferior, so they would sometimes show bad taste – no need to get in a tiz about it.) Athens did not suffer a decline in its citizen body. If Athens destroyed itself – as one can argue it did – it was for other reasons. Just as with teenage-Natalie and guns above, so for our ancestors – and, today, for those who reject political correctness – Brian’s explanation is simply an irrelevance.
These I think show ways in which we can avoid the vulgarities of left-wing argumentative methods. When you’re forced to debate with such people, it may be fair to use their own tactics of pick the (unrepresentative) example or even invent the hypothetical (irrelevant) example. With anyone fairer, understand what they believe and the reasons why they do.
So much for Brian’s post. One last reflection: writing this raised a question for me – and gave me my answer. People who defend Canada’s anti-free-speech laws say they must because the alternative is the laws of the past. I’m sure that’s just another of the lies the left uses to keep us in line. But suppose (God forbid!) they forced me to believe it? Suppose I had to choose between evils: between Canada’s laws today and the laws of my mother’s youth? Actual sex acts are by their nature private. Free speech is by its nature public – more effectively subject to law. In his first letter on the French revolution, Burke lists requirements for liberty: “… a simple citizen may decently express his sentiments upon public affairs … even though against a predominant and fashionable opinion…”. So I have my answer.
Instapundit linked a while back to a very short blog posting entitled Why are anti-gun activists so violent? This being in connection with a news story about a politician accused of abusing his wife.
The question seems to be rhetorical, but I can think of at least one possible real answer, which you arrive at by reversing the question. Why are violent people inclined to be anti-gun activists?
If you are yourself of an unusually violent disposition, and if you yourself sometimes believe that, had a gun been handy for you, you might have been tempted to kill your wife with it during a domestic disagreement, and you simply add in that one crucial extra assumption so often added, so wrongly, in so many situations, to the effect that most others are just like you, then it would make sense to say that you and your fellow men-on-the-verge-of-a-murderous-tantrum ought to be denied the means of committing murder. Arming the majority, in your eyes, is no answer, because the majority shares your own tendencies. That would only make things far worse.
In my opinion, an amazing number of mysteriously vehement, evidence-defying opinions can be better understood once you understand that the expresser of such opinions is unthinkingly assuming that most others are, in some particular respect, just like him.
Consider another quite common figure in our world: the repressed homosexual, who assumes that most “heterosexuals” are, like him, homosexuals who manage to suppress their natural homosexual urges. Such a person quite logically believes that homosexuality constantly threatens to overwhelm society (merely because it actually only threatens to overwhelm him) and to bring child-rearing and with it civilisation itself to an abrupt end.
Another consequence of the unexamined assumption that everyone is like me is that society becomes quite easy to plan from the top, because we all have the same tastes, preferences, ambitions, beliefs, and ways of going about things, don’t we? Us deciding about how to satisfy other people’s wishes does no great harm, because we effortlessly know what these wishes are. They are just like ours!
I first collided heavily with this everyone’s-like-me notion not in political discourse, but in the course of doing, of all things, career counselling. A client who thinks that everyone else wants what he wants is caste down into unnecessary pessimism about his own chances of a happy life. He desperately wants to be a hotel manager. But so does everyone else! Brain surgeons, motor mechanics, professional sportsmen, hairdressers, estate agents, popular novelists – all these unfortunates are merely frustrated hotel managers. So what chance can he possibly have to buck this universal trend? The same inevitable fate awaits him. He is doomed to eke out his living by becoming a movie star (who occasionally gets to play a hotel manager), or some such hideous and soul-destroying compromise. Shining a torch on such everyone’s-like-me assumptions can provoke lasting happiness. Hey, I might get what I want after all! There are far fewer people in the race I’m trying to do well in than I thought!
In what way does my sometimes vehement libertarianism result from assumptions that I make about others mostly being like me? What do libertarians generally assume to be true of people generally, which actually isn’t?
Archbishop Rowen Williams has never heard of me and he never will. However, I now believe I have done him an injustice in various thoughts and comments. I am fully aware that most people on Samizdata are atheists – but you do not claim to be Christians, and I am saying that I have been unjust by assuming a man who said he was a Christian was lying (i.e. was a fraud).
Archbishop Williams is a social gospel man and I have assumed that, like most such folk, he is a disguised atheist – someone who when they use the word “God” really means “society” or “the people” (or whatever code word for the state). However, this was an assumption on my part – I never bothered to do any background research (exactly the sort of failure I attack in others – when they make statements about the “moderate” Barack Obama, or whatever, without spending five minutes doing any research).
Recently I came upon an exchange between Bishop Spong and Archbishop Williams which leads me to the opinion that I have been unjust to Rowen Williams. Although the source is Wikipedia I have spent enough time reading this thing to have a good sense of when articles are false and when they are true. → Continue reading: I have done Archbishop Rowen Williams an injustice
Some days ago I went via Instapundit to an article about how the surge of Pentecostalism in Africa may help America in the War on Terror, and from there to this Pew Forum article on the global rise of Christianity, especially in Africa. Very much especially in Africa.
It may even be beating Islam.
I would guess I am a lot happier about Africa’s emerging Age of Faith (in its Christian variety at least; I fear Islam) than most of you reading this post. Yet I cannot repress a sense of disquiet when I remember that there are more people in Africa who think the freeing of Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga a bad thing than think it a good thing. If there is a similar case next year the margin will probably be larger; and eventually that will change what happens. Western pressure will no longer work. Indeed, the boot may be on the other foot: the Pew article also says that there are already something like 2,000 Christian missionaries from Asia and Africa at work in Great Britain. Hard work at the moment, but that could change. Most people in the West assume that religion must inevitably decline as the world becomes richer and better educated. I tend to assume, gloomily, that its decline proceeds as the world embraces state welfare. But even the tide on Dover beach turns some day.
I do rejoice for my African brothers and sisters and my political fears may not come to pass. A fervent Christianity can be and has been a force for political freedom. Vile, cruel and hypocritical as the history of the United States is, it is slightly less vile, cruel and hypocritical than that of most nations – they never quite forgot that the Pilgrim Fathers on the Mayflower were Puritans fleeing persecution rather than instituting it.
Even the teetering balance between Christianity and Islam might do for Africa what the teetering balance between Protestantism and Catholicism did for Europe: let secularism sneak in as the second best option for all sides.
Or we might do a great deal worse. The other rising tide in the world is that of the global progressive elite, the Tranzis. For the first time in human history there is no technological obstacle to a world government. That I have long feared but now a new fear joins it. Barefoot religion meets the bureaucratic, unitary state, how does that work?
Perhaps, led by Africa, we are moving towards something like the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace.
Mental hospitals in this case.
I sometimes get stick on Samizdata for pointing out that the demands of practical politics in a media democracy mean that it is pointless to try the public statements of politiicans against an ideological touchstone, and unreasonable to believe that they believe everything they say from day to day. But I do greatly resent two consequences of populist pandering: first, the willingness to distort the facts to flatter or inflame public delusions and foster moral panics; second, the blithe adoption of policy that is logically or strategically utterly incoherent, suggesting they have no understanding whatsoever of what they are doing. Today brings an example of the latter:
The Conservatives’ planning system would remove potential obstacles to the development of new schools by curtailing the power of local authorities in this area, according to the document.
The leaked planning policy says “for the [education] policy to be successful it is essential that unnecessary bureaucracy is not permitted to stifle the creation of new community schools”.
Fine. Perfectly sensible. Get the monopoly producer interest out of the way. That is entirely consistent with an implicit aim of Tory education policy (definitely not publicly advertised as such) of permitting competition between schools. But..
Under the policy, as well as planning decisions on new schools being taken by the secretary of state for children, schools and families, anyone would be able to turn an existing building into a school without the need for planning permission.
Which might be good, but the madness is starting to creep in. If any building can be converted into a school ad lib (excellent), then what “planning decisions” could there be for the Secretary of State to take? And how does that accord with a general claim to be in favour of decentralisation?
And when an existing school closed, that land would not be allowed to be used for any other purpose without the agreement of the schools secretary.
Straightjacket for Mr Neill, please. That is just crazy.
“Let us establish a ratchet/racket whereby the proportion of land and other property occupied by schools is calculated to increase, regardless of demand. Let us destroy much of the advantage of the freeing up of planning, by making it clear to investors that they may be stuck with the change of use. Let us put future Secretaries of State in the position where they are directly politically responsible for the closure of any school, and therefore likely to be under pressure to resist it from concentrated interest groups, and constantly preoccupied with campaigns over particular cases. Cottage Hospitals, you say? What are they?”
Today’s Guardian leader, purportedly on social class, is worth reading. It is utter rubbish. But it is worth reading because it is utter rubbish.
It is an informative compression of the muddled thinking of the reflex left: non sequitur piled on fallacy, piled on miscomprehension of both theory and real people, piled on all-or-nothing thinking, piled on misprision of fact, bonded together only with a sticky, sighing outrage. Read it out loud and you may find yourself using that furious-sobbing-child tone and plonking emphasis affected by professional radical activists—especially women—to convey how strongly they feel about the world. As is universally acknowledged, strength of feeling is the same as strength of argument.
I say ‘the reflex left’ because the alternative, ‘the conventional left’, though it offers the pleasure of mocking the unoriginality of the radical, suggests a developed coherence in what is usually just attitudinal stamp-collecting reinforced by mutual approval (libertarians beware). Considering that the reflex left is obsessed with economics and sociology, and professes to derive its policy from them, the arrant ignorance of either, even as they are invoked, is an unending wonder. (Libertarians beware, bis.) That is on fabulous display here in a jazz hands incursion into social mobility, offering numbers that are not numbers (“But a child born 20 years later who is a successful professional now would probably come from the top quarter…“) and that lead to no detectable conclusions, which can only have been included for emotional colour. Impersonal social forces are held to dominate, but paradoxically regarded as tools of the wicked if they do not do what is wanted.
There is another way that ‘reflex’ is appropriate: this is reflexive discourse. It preaches to the converted. It says, “Look! We were right all along.” And assumes therefore that nothing need be said to engage the unconvinced (and again, beware). It is offered within code.
The best non sequitur in the piece is an epitome of an epitome. I considered offering it as a quote of the day. It has everything: it erupts into the discussion from nowhere, is complete nonsense, is nowhere meaningfully followed up, involves an appeal to shared attitudes and beliefs in the reader as reinforcement, and contains an implied accusation of wicked motives in others:
Politicians want us to believe that it is possible to make better-off people richer without making poor people poorer.
The Guardian leader-writer thinks we already do believe that it is impossible. Not even unlikely. Impossible. If we object that sometimes people have got rich by enslaving and impoverishing others, but that mostly both rich people and poor people have got richer together, though at different rates, then we must be wrong. The rich are richer ergo the poor are everywhere poorer. If the Prince of Wales is running his Aston Martin on spare wine and skiing every winter, it can only be at the direct expense of the Duchy of Cornwall’s serfs – who are now starving in greater numbers than in 1337. The politicians stand accused of denying such an inconvenient truth
No wonder the people think they are out of touch.
… people are beginning to be afraid of the state – but they are also afraid to be without the state
– Chris Mounsey
But I think, in fact, it is worse than that. There are many people – and you can often tell them by their fierce, defiant pronouncements that they have nothing to hide, they have done nothing wrong – who are in a dependant, abusive relationship with the state. They feel the bullying and their fear itself as evidence they are wanted and have a place in the world. Being pecked is reassurance that you are somewhere in the pecking-order. Seeing people who are outside the hierarchy of subjection as evil, a threat, and pleading one’s own inoffensiveness at every turn is a way of legitimising one’s own pigeonhole.
It is a nasty tendency. The feeble people who are trying to hide in the mainstream make up the lynchmob. And it is entirely equivalent to the morality of the prison-house, where violent gangsters are at the top and sex offenders are brutalised at the bottom, of an alternative chain of being. “You may think I’m scum, but at least I’m not one of them.”
(Hat-tip: Iain Dale, even if he was only advertising his magazine)
Why do so many libertarians like insurance models, when they hate regulation and the precautionary state?
Insurance companies are at least as risk averse as public bureaucrats, and more minute judges of behaviour, since they have a direct interest. If we let insurance companies decide road speed limits, the man with a red flag walking in front of every motor vehicle would be back after 110 years’ retirement.
Surely the Second Coming is at hand!
The way to absolute power is to dress up empty cruelty as public virtue, and have the organs of propaganda promulgate it for ‘carers’ to inflict on children. Finally they have an excuse to take Teddy Bears from toddlers.
Which is why you can’t trust nature. Anatole Kaletsky is worried about stagflation. Can this be the same Anatole Kaletsky who only six month ago called for government to “punish savers”?
As I wrote at that time,
[Unsubbed original:] The purpose of banks used to be to make a profit by using the deposits in their care productively at second-hand. That is why they pay interest: to bring in funds to be lent. If they don’t do either then they are no longer banks but state-sponsored rentiers.
Far from encouraging productive capital, Mr Kaletsky’s prescription would have us reverting to a pre-capitalist economy where those with savings dare not recycle them. Their personal cash will end up converted to valuables, hoarded, and hidden to keep them safe from predatory tax farmers. Printing money is also a well-tested means of encouraging the same sort of behaviour.
For a recovery we need capitalism and the market to do their work. However painful, that is better than reversion to the Dark Ages because governments and their advisors want to be seen to be doing *something*. Doing nothing may be the best alternative.
Mr Kaletsky has got what he asked for and now finds he does not want it. Human, all too human.
I had to read the headline twice. Then I read the article twice. I still don’t get it.
What I first thought it said was,
International development minister urges firms to pool HIV patients
Weird, obscure line, but no weirder than a lot of things that come out of the international development department, and potentially a lot more sensible. I suppose it might make sense for the big southern African companies, especially, to combine their employee health programmes. But if it were more effective, wouldn’t they already be doing it? Wouldn’t the South African government, in any case (now they have got rid of that barking health minister), be the one doing the urging?
What it actually said was,
International development minister urges firms to pool HIV patents
Now that makes a lot less sense. It is quite up to the standard we have come to expect from DFID, a real candidate for economic illiteracy of the day.
[Mike Foster MP] wants companies to contribute to a “patent pool”, which the international drug-purchasing facility, Unitaid – set up by a number of donor countries, including the UK – is trying to establish.
“While it is absolutely vital that we work to reduce the human cost of HIV by focusing our efforts on preventing new infections, we must also face up to the stark reality of the treatment challenge we face. The pharmaceutical industry has an opportunity to act now to help prevent future human catastrophe. It is time for them to state their clear commitment to make new HIV medicines affordable to those who need them most.”
According to the all-party report, if HIV patents are put in a pool, generics companies – which make the cheap combinations now used in Africa – will be permitted to make low-cost copies of newer drugs and devise new combinations in a single pill, which is important for people living in poverty.
What can this possibly mean? There’s no real explanation here of how a ‘patent pool’ might work. It sounds like pharmaceuticals companies are being offered to the opportunity to swap an unstable legal monopoly for an internationally approved cartel, and to pose as humanitarians while doing so. Would that really lower the cost of HIV medication, and improve its effectiveness in general? It is far from obvious why that should be the case. Would medicines that are both cheaper and more effective be permitted to flow back to Western countries? I doubt it.
Which points up the weirdness of the whole exercise. In order to be economic in Western countries, HIV medicines have to be very expensive to buy there. That is not just because they are expensive to develop, but because the absolute numbers of people who need them are small. In the West, just as in poorer parts of the world almost no individual can afford to pay for their own treatment. So there’s a different sort of cartel effect maintaining the oligopolistic market. Government protects the patentees; and government subsidies end up paying for the consequences.
You don’t have to be a believer in the efficacy of beetroot and garlic as anti-virals to notice that the difference between the scale of the epidemic in parts of Africa and the richest parts of the world is not a consequence of the availabilty of drugs – or at least not the availabilty of anti-retrovirals. We have fewer people getting the disease in the first place. But we have fewer people with all sorts of infectious diseases. Malaria and dengue are not more treatable than they were when they were endemic in Europe, and the US, less than a century ago. The difference is better living conditions that everyone will work for if they have the chance.
Patent pooling, it seems to me, is no better than patent farming, in that it seeks to exploit artifical restrictions on innovation that just happen to be there for the benefit of a restricted interest group. It is an exercise in dinosaur husbandry, with little real relevance to improving the lives of us mammals. A reconfiguration of corporarate welfare, with its concentration on subsidising treatment of a particular disease, and bureaucrats swapping targets with bureaucrats, is a distraction from the less collectively ‘manageable’ task of avoiding the spread of infection, which is the invisible part of the virtuous circle of the people who are not sick getting better general health and more comfortable lives. That isn’t going to come from government drug programmes. I suspect it might come from “people living in poverty” having a bit more access to the non-patent and never-patent – but still restricted – technologies of choosing their own priorities and exploiting their own comparative advantages.
There has been endless fuss about MPs expenses. Most of it is either with a tone of envy, or focussed on the apparent dishonesty of some claims. I’d like to suggest thet there has been a much more malign effect in the massive inflation of the parliamentary allowances system in the last 20 years.
Career politicians with no outside interests have been effectively exempted from the tax system as it applies to everyone else. Their tax returns are even dealt with by a special office. (For a while the Revenue has produced a special suplementary return form for parliamentarians. I saw one in the early 90s when helping an MP with his bookkeeping.)
This makes it easy for them to tighten the screws: raise rates and rake-offs, increase the tax-collector’s powers, without caring to comprehend the consequences. It also gives them the idea that everyone else must be milking the system: that rich people have got rich by postitional parasitism, since that’s how you get rich either as an MP, or as one of the providers of government services that they deal with among the quangocracy and PFI tsars.
The Prime Minister’s reaction to this: to try to isolate MPs further, by ‘naming ang shaming’ those who make money honestly in the outside world, and do therefore have some idea what things are like for the rest of us.
I couldn’t give a damn about peculation. It is the isolation of politicians, particularly, but not exclusively, politicians of the present ruling party, as cushioned servants of the state that is fundamentally corrupting. The theory of parliament, the root of its legitimacy, is that it stands between us and the rapacity of the crown, and holds taxes to what are fair and reasonable and are applied in the interests of the kingdom as a whole. That was the ground for the Great Rebellion and the Glorious Revolution. It was the ground on which de Montfort set up the first parliament, attempting to settle an earlier revolution.
Once parliament was filled with the independent rich, well-heeled professionals, and the sponsored, among the latter the old Labour members whose unions or philanthropy paid for them to live in Westminster. They had interests, they had views, but they were self-chosen, not neatly alligned with one another, not bound by a party machine, not tied to the public purse-strings or the rehearsal of instrumental populism.
That is what has been corrupted away almost completely. MPs have been reduced to gold-edged agents of the state, and have prospered the more, the less resistance they have offered the executive. Ministers are often closer to mouthpieces for their departments than their masters. They don’t control the state for us, because the state devotes our resources to keep them in a distanced shadow-world, immune to the effects of what they do at its motion.
I can’t wait for Mr Brown to publish what he thinks are damning details of member’s outside interests. We have had quite enough of inside interests. It will be an excellent guide who to vote for.
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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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