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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Let me first of all state my basic position. I love America. There, I have said it. But I think there is a problem. I think the citizens of the United States are deluding themselves that they live in the ‘Land of the Free’.
As I write this, in the downtown financial district of Boston Massachusetts, I am a hundred and fifty yards from the site of the historic Boston Tea Party, right here on the harbour lip of Fort Point Channel. In my opinion this site rates as one of the most significant places on Earth, third in my list of inspirational locations which I have personally visited, right behind Avebury and Stonehenge, and even creeping ahead of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Yes, I am one of those obsessive libertarians. I really am that sad.
Because in the future, when all of the current omnipotent state machines of the world have shrunk to nothing, this site in Boston harbour will be hailed as the Mohawk-dressed pinprick which first burst their bubble, the very point in space and time where the idea of the necessity of the state first started to die.
Birthplace of a libertarian revolution But I fear we have a long road to travel before we reach that heady day, when the final Byzantine Emperor of the state is killed defending its walls of mediocrity, defending its rights to general taxation, and defending its monopoly provision of both justice and security. Because what I discovered, in Boston, admittedly in a state which ought to be renamed Taxachusetts, was a shock. → Continue reading: Letter from America – Land of the Free?
Having just returned from a roundtrip flight to Texas during the “high” level alert this past week, I can report first-hand on airport security and its hidden costs.
First, I didn’t notice anything new in airport security procedures during the high level alert. Whenever I travel to Texas, I take a rifle or two. Not as protective coloration, but because Texas in general, and my father’s ranch in particular, are full of things I want to shoot. Specifically, during the Christmas season, white-tail deer. I am pleased to report that my shooting iron did not set off any alarm bells (by now, I know the drill for transporting firearms by air), and I had a very pleasant conversation with the guard in Wisconsin who confirmed that it wasn’t loaded. Whereupon I locked it up in its case, as required by law, and didn’t think twice about it until I got to Texas.
I drove out to the ranch at the first opportunity, gun and various hunting supplies in tow, and had barely been sitting in my blind for an hour when one of the larger deer I have ever seen in the wild came strolling by. He passed within 40 yards of my blind, and I watched him feed and mess about for over half an hour. He was a big eight-pointer, with heavy, symmetrical antlers.
At this point, one of the hidden costs of airport security reared its ugly head. I had, you see, forgotten to unlock my gun case when I got to my parent’s house, and had left the key firmly attached to my briefcase sitting on my bed. I was sitting in my blind unarmed, the rifle securely locked in its case back at the pickup. I didn’t get my deer, and its all BUSH’s fault!
Of all the tax payments I make in a year, either direct or indirect, the largest cheque I’m compelled to write has to be registered in Her Majesty’s Treasury by January the 1st, each year. This is so Gordon Brown can then burn it, of course, on even more government regulation, on even more government corruption, and on even more government waste. And today was the last day free for me to get the ink onto the paper.
Ho ho ho, Gordon. I hope you choke on it.
Having just returned from the Post Office, where I schlepped the loot over, I wondered whether the British state has ever had it so easy. The Sheriff of Nottingham, in Robin Hood’s day, had to go round digging up peasants’ gardens, to see if they’d buried any taxable wheat. Here, in modern Britain, even one of Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s (slightly critical) Austro-libertarian extremist disciples will calmly walk into a government controlled bank, and just hand the loot over, knowing full well that every penny of this hard-earned moolah will be wasted on Guardian Reader parasites.
No, not every penny. Most of it will be wasted on Guardian Reader parasites. The rest of it will be spent on making the life of this humble Austro-libertarian even worse, with an even greater intrusion into his life, and an even greater government commitment to increase the regulation over his already over-regulated life. Don’t ya just love state socialism! → Continue reading: Happy New Year, from HM Inland Revenue
The Lord God is a jealous God, and in his Christian form he is followed by hypocrites and fools. Or at least, that’s what I was thinking yesterday after a ‘debate’ with what polite British society calls a ‘Mad Christian Socialist’. I say debate, but what I really mean of course is a verbal fight to the death.
Much of socialism draws its strength from Christianity. Indeed, you could argue that socialism is simply late radical Christianity by another name. Instead of worshipping God, its followers worship the State. Instead of donating a tithe of their income to the Church, they donate a tithe of their income to the Socialist Worker ‘newspaper’ collective. Instead of blindly following the teachings of Jesus, they blindly follow the teachings of Marx, another heretical Jew with a beard.
Even the glorious European Union, that flowering of socialist omniscience, can be seen as the latest papal plot to castrate the protesting rabble in England, to bring them under the heel of Rome. Or should I say, the Treaty of Rome. But yes, I’m getting off-topic, and straying towards Godwin’s law, so let’s get back to the central thrust of my point. → Continue reading: God is a libertarian
Today my salary appeared in my bank account. I am definitely happier than I was yesterday, when my bank account contained a very little indeed. The conventional wisdom is that I should not be happier. “Money does not make you happier,” the anti-progress crowd say.
But if that were true, then Africans who get clean water for the first time are not any happier than when their children were dying from disease. OK, maybe the anti-progressites merely mean that once you get to a certain basic income, earning any more from that point does not make you happier. Really?
Let’s take a young family who pay fees to send their children to school. It is a bit of a struggle paying the fees. If they had a bit more money, they would not have to worry about it. Would that do nothing for their happiness? Or let’s say environmentalists had their way and they had less money. The fees would become much more of a burden. Surely that would make them less happy?
…can also be our enemy too. Just because a person dislikes the regulatory state, that does not mean they see several liberty as first of all virtues.
Here on Samizdata.net, we have written many articles abominating the coercive law enforced process of moral relativism called ‘Political Correctness’. As a result, it is a measure of how bizarre some commenters can become when they starts accusing us of being PC because we do not have a problem with women joining the military, regardless of the fact none of us ever suggested a significant number of women have the physical strength to be front line infantry. It is apparent that the reason we are called ‘PC’ is that we do not think the only reasonable role for a woman in society is that of bearing and raising children.
Now I for one am all in favour of people who wish to have and raise children doing exactly that. Yet when it is suggested that a woman who might like to, say, spend her time flying a combat jet or wandering around lawless Basra as a military policewoman, we start seeing quack-science trotted out about ‘evolutionary biology’ and psychology and words to the effect that ‘real women are just unsuited to such things’ regardless of the mountain of evidence to the contrary… whilst somehow missing the rather obvious fact that actual biological evolution seems to have equipped woman, as well as men, with vastly powerful brains imbued with a capacity for reason and informed choices beyond crude instinctual motivations. Women have absurdly overpowered heads if the totality of their lives is driven by evolved psychological imperatives to immerse themselves in simple tasks such as having sex and keeping the house clean. → Continue reading: The enemy of our enemy…
We have written a couple articles recently about the passing of Concorde, but I have just seen yet another twist which, as I am also someone who lives directly under what was that magnificent bird’s flight path, brings an incredulous smirk to my lips.
Anti-noise activists in Queens, New York, are claiming that it was their protests against the aircraft that lead to its withdrawal from service. Ok, so let me get this straight… this supersonic aircraft has been flying in and out of the USA for 25 years following the utter defeat of attempts to prevent that in 1977, and against a backdrop of the well known fact that civil aviation has suffered a general reversal in fortune in the aftermath of September 11 , and yet we are to believe1…
“We lost a few battles, but after 25 years, we finally won the war,” said Frans C. Verhagen, the president of a coalition of civic groups in Queens, Sane Aviation for Everyone. “It took 25 years, but a bunch of citizens in Queens stopped the SST from proliferating into the rest of the United States and the world.”
I wonder if this is all a result of the irrationalist cult of self-esteem. It reminds me of the comical Greenham Common Women jubilantly dancing and banging drums claiming they had seen off the USA when the missiles were removed from the UK between 1989 and 1991… as if the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed in 1987 with the rapidly collapsing Soviet Union did not have just a little something to do with it. Doh!
It is widespread delusional mindsets like, these with an inability to grasp anything beyond the most rudimentary causal links that sometimes get me muttering things like “the more people I meet, the more I like my cat”.
1 = NY Times link requires free registration.
This year’s hunting trip to the Great American West was (another) success, venturing forth heavily armed into the lovely country in south-central Wyoming, amongst the sagebrush flats and quaking aspen. The view from our line cabin:
Another look at the countryside: → Continue reading: Home from the hunt
Given the appearance of some gloomy prognostications round here today I think it appropriate to shed a little light on what I consider to be a much under-examined issue.
Damien Thompson writes in the Telegraph about the triumph of feeling over thinking:
How many people in Britain do you think work as “counsellors” of one sort or another? Ten thousand? Fifty thousand? According to Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, the actual figure may be closer to half a million, though no one can be sure. What we do know is that the number of mental health professionals has more than quadrupled since 1970, and that the ranks of registered psychotherapists were swelled by more than half between 1997 and 1999.
A new priesthood? Arguably, I suppose. But I have yet to be convinced that ‘psychotherapy’ is anything except institutionalised quackery.
Never before have so many people been dependent on some form of therapy. Night after night, our televisions instruct us to pick up the phone “if you have been affected by any of the issues in this programme”: the message is that every difficult experience requires expert help. We must all raise our “awareness” – of stress, low self-esteem or some recently identified personality disorder.
We must all raise of ‘awareness’ of this worrying trend towards mental and spiritual incontinence…
Government, social workers and charities work tirelessly in this cause. It costs money, of course, since awareness-raising requires special training; and, despite ritual denunciations of underfunding, it is usually forthcoming. In a recent disbursement of National Lottery money earmarked for health, 25 per cent went to advice and counselling schemes; only six per cent was allocated to research charities.
…and the vested interests that actively promote it.
Thanks to media willingness to spread “awareness” of previously undiagnosed emotional illness, prophecies of mental anguish tend to become self-fulfilling. People learn to be stressed (which is not to say that their unhappiness is not real).
The BBC works particularly hard at cultivating therapeutic anxiety. Last Tuesday’s Woman’s Hour opened with the alarmist statement that “one in five young people rates stress as unbearably high most of the time, and the claim is backed up by a number of organisations”.
The thing that BBC supporters seem unable to grasp is that antipathy towards that organisation is driven not just by its lockstep soft-left bias but also by the vanguard role it has arrogated unto itself in disseminating and propogandising this kind of grotesque agenda.
Yet, like the state socialism of the postwar years, the detailed management of emotion requires a formidable apparatus of bureaucratic inspectors. No government can hope to build such a structure on its own: it requires entire professions (such as the police, post-Macpherson, or the BBC) and large sections of the public to submit willingly to ideological control. That is how totalitarianism works.
That is exactly how is has worked. Nor is this class-interest driven programme of gradual infantilisation a transient or trivial matter. It isn’t about ‘caring’ its about controlling and manipulating. It isn’t about ‘help’ its about dependence. It isn’t about more humanity its about less humanity. In the final analysis, it is all about the sleep of reason and the sleep of reason will, sooner or later, breed monsters.
Now this is one American import we could well do without especially as it appears to be selling rather well.
Among the distributors are Simon Jenkins who devotes his latest column in the UK Times to ‘The Untimely Death of a Liberal Generation’:
Three British liberals have died in the past few days, all before their time. Jim Thompson, Gareth Williams and Hugo Young were still in their sixties. Each was outstanding in his profession, as priest, lawyer and journalist. They cut their political teeth with the rise of the welfare state and sharpened them on the Thatcher era. They lived to see what they regarded as Thatcherism’s denouement in the Labour landslide of 1997. They are gone. Something has died with them.
I certainly hope so because, as the brief obituaries which follow make abundantly clear, these men were not ‘liberals’ they were socialists.
I don’t care if I am ploughing a lonely furrow, I am not going to stop campaigning against this gross distortion of language.
For the benefit of our student readers, here is a cartoon pointing out some of the ideas being put forward by university anthropology departments.
For the last 15 years, or so, I’ve earned my daily bread in and around the arena of Unix programming, whether that has been managing databases, programming in various flavours of shell script, writing technical specifications, or teaching programming. When one is living in ‘Unix World’, there are certain conventions that one must adhere to, and the central one is wearing sandals.
Fortunately, being a contrary sort of person, I’ve managed to resist this. I have occasionally succumbed to the continuous 24-hour donning of SuSE Linux polo shirts, the drinking of large quantities of real ale, and the growing of beards (once), but until this year I’d managed to avoid the big one.
But alas, no longer. With the collapse of the database and telecom networking industries in the Thames Valley, where I’d carried out many cosy assignments, I was forced out of my air-conditioned sub-one-hour trips to Abingdon, Camberley, and Reading, and plonked into the sadistic clutches of Thames Trains, Network Rail, and the London Underground, as all the consultancy work contracted into a small hard-core area of central London.
So what’s all this got to do with sandals? Well, I’m a cold weather person. I like snow. I like skiing. I like warm fires, and thick blankets, and cocoa round the hearth. What I really can’t tolerate is hot humid weather of the sort we’ve been having this summer in London and its surrounding regions, especially when trapped within a Thames Train cattle-truck where the windows won’t open and the air-conditioning has failed, or at any time on the Bakerloo line, where I swear the humidity last week hit 763%. Or at least it felt like it did. → Continue reading: Shoes ‘R’ Us
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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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