On The Voice of Reason (slogan: “A penny saved is a government oversight”), there is a pretty clear headed little essay of what I think is most the reasonable position on this absurdly emotive case.
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For many Americans who see the state as being the central and most important institution there is, the axis around which civil society orbits, the whole idea of ‘dual nationality’ is deeply disturbing. A person born in a different land can assimilate into civil society, adopt the mores, trappings and affectations of the place in which they now live and even accept being marked as a political subject of the government (become a citizen) but if they do not in fact repudiate being a subject of their previous home, to a statist American the question often asked is “can that person really be an American?” I have heard people in the US say that of the many Jewish Americans who also hold Israeli passports and now increasingly that question is asked of Mexican Americans who retain ties to Mexico. Cosmopolitanism is seen as somehow dangerous and almost wicked. That dual nationality is particularly disturbing to some Americans is not surprising seeing as how the USA claims a proprietary interest in Americans nationals even if they do not live within the lands within which the US state claims sovereignty over (to the extent that even foreign people with US green cards who are not US subjects and who no longer live within US territory are still supposed to make US tax returns and incur US tax liabilities!). In most of the rest of the world, the moment your cross a national border, the nation you lived in generally looses interest in most of your economic and political activities, making dual nationality rather less emotive an issue other than in times of war between the two nations in question. Being a US ‘citizen’ is like having a big brand on your arse which stays with you regardless of where you go, making claims that US citizenship is somehow superior because it is not ‘ethnic based’ somewhat odd… it is more analogous to creating a new ethnicity, at least politically speaking, called ‘American’. But for many, probably more who hold dual nationality, it is just a means of being able to live where they please and cross borders to places where they have friends and family without being harassed by the state’s border guards and pettifogging officials. The truth is that for the great majority of people the state is not the axis around which their life revolves and the bit of coloured cloth that flaps over them is really not a big deal. As a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ myself, I make no secret that I see collecting as many citizenships as possible as useful way to dilute the influence that states have over people. That does not mean I am blind to the possibility of political leaders in one country making mischief in another country by appealing to notions of ‘Volk’ or ‘La Patria’… yet political antics can be trumped by simply allowing the natural (yes, natural) process of assimilation to run its course, rather than distorting and delaying that process with crazy ‘identity politics’ which reward primitive tribalistic attitudes, and social welfare programmes that invert the traditional motivate for people to become immigrants in the first place. March 22nd, 2005 | 55 comments - (Comments are closed)
 … but if you think that means the idea of banning smoking in the UK has been condemned, you would be wrong. The headline appeared in the Telegraph above the article reporting that plans to restrict areas for smokers in pubs were denounced as inadequate last night by campaigners pressing for a ban. The anti-smoking campaigners denounced the agreement of more than 20,000 pubs in Britain to introduce restrictions on smoking to make around 80 per cent of bar space tobacco-free within five years. Smokers in these outlets would be restricted to specified areas or rooms. The ‘anti-choice extremists’ for the smoking ban, apparently encouraged by evidence suggesting that a big drop in tobacco sales in Ireland due the prohibition on smoking in pubs, are pushing for more. Deborah Arnott, director of Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), said:
I must be missing something, I did not notice any spin for a smoke-free initiative. It is a question of choice, not an imposition of a health-fascist measure. Rob Hayward of the British Beer and Pub Association, which brokered the deal, argued with sensible points:
Indeed. I do not like cigarette smoke in pubs, bars and restaurants although I am partial to a good cigar. But I do like the right of owners to let customers do in them what they wish on their premises. And it seems that even a government survey cannot produce better than 20 percent support for a total ban. Surveys nothwithstanding, the ban in Ireland caused a 15 per cent drop in trade. A similar loss of business in Britain would lead to the closure of 5,000 pubs. And that’s got to be a bad thing.  September 10th, 2004 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
I did a few postings on my Education Blog at the beginning of this month, but these aside I’ve taken the whole of the month off from blogging. And now, my Internet Connection willing, I am back. It was not so much that I was fed up with blogging, more that there were other things that needed doing, seriously, with the kind of concentrated attention that daily blogging was making impossible. My home needed new shelves for books and for classical CDs, and it needed old shelves, laden with Libertarian Alliance pamphlets that nobody now needs, to be emptied and taken down. Mounds of papers needed to be sorted and classified, and space had to be created for them then to be stored in such a way that they didn’t just get muddled together again. Two notorious no-go areas (the big cupboard and the space under the desk in my bedroom) were … gone into, and cleansed. I did do one radio spot about … oh, something or other, and at the end of the month I hosted my usual Last Friday meeting (thank you Paul Marks – excellent talk and an excellent evening). Oh yes, and I did a talk about Classical Music for Tim Evans’s Putney Debate on the Second Friday. But basically I took a holiday from pontification more profound than I can ever remember having enjoyed since I got started as a politificator at the beginning of the nineteen eighties. I did carpentry, sorted through papers, and in between times I socialised with friends (including some of my fellow Samizdatistas), undistracted by the self-imposed duty to tell the world what it should be thinking, or even to think about it. It was a blessed relief suddenly to find myself in a world where the only problems that mattered were my own, and my own to grapple with and to solve. Yes, I have had Internet Connection problems, but I can deal with them, provided only that I get seriously stuck into them. And yes, carpentry can be exhausting. As was taking out about three dozen black plastic bags of rubbish, with about another two dozen still to go. But what a joy to be obsessing only about things that I could personally do something about. My kind of politics is very anti-political, as is a lot of the politics here. But it is still politics. And there is a world of difference between sneering and jeering at the buffoons who rule the world, or who think they do, or who pretend that they do, and truly not giving these people the time of day, for day, after day, after day. It really was very refreshing, and not, I believe, an experience I will soon forget. I even stopped reading Samizdata. Now that I have resumed reading it, I am glad to see that I was not essential to its continuing success. (I would not want to be writing for a group blog that depended on me.) I did read a book or two during August, and I did inevitably do the odd spot of abstract thinking, about this and that. So I return to blogging action with a mind that is not completely blank. Meanwhile, my deepest thanks to the Samizdata editorial team for not nagging me, and for letting me rest in peace. September 1st, 2004 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Advice Goddess Amy Alkon, whose writing is always good for a laugh, has a disturbing piece on her site about how useless the police were when her car was stolen. On one occasion, a friend spotted her car and, when she rang the police to tell them exactly where they could find it, she was fobbed off by a disinterested operator who read from a script and did not send officers to retrieve it. Later, when the man she knew (and the cops strongly suspected) had stolen her car was known to be at home, Alkon called the LAPD and told them exactly where they could pick him up. The police receptionist told her that no detectives were around, and that she’d have to call back the next day to speak to anyone who could help her. In the end, Alkon had to get her car back from the thief herself, using good old fashioned shame and hostility. She even enlisted her mother in trying to guilt him into returning items that were in the car when he stole it. But few will be surprised at what the real consequences were for the thief.
Of course this state of affairs is not confined to Los Angeles. Everyone seems to know someone who has been similarly screwed over by police bureaucracy and incompetence. I know some good cops. But pieces like these make it all the more puzzling to me that so many people trust the police so unquestioningly, both to serve and to protect. Do they genuinely believe that the system is stacked in their favour, or is it something people tell themselves in order to feel secure? August 21st, 2004 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Some time in June I was contacted by the production company responsible for making a radio programme called ‘Straw Poll’ for BBC Radio 4. They asked me to join the panel for a forthcoming debate on the proposition that ‘We Should Not Legislate Against Obesity’. I agreed. The format of the show is a panel which consists of four speakers, two of whom are in favour of the proposition and two of whom are against. The debate is thrashed out for about 30 minutes or so before the studio audience is given a chance to put questions to the panellists. The studio audience then vote on the proposition. The programme was recorded last July 19th at a Central London location. My opponents were two doctors representing Orwellian-sounding NGO’s whose names I have not forgotten because I never bothered committing them to memory in the first place. On my side was a very polished and very professional PR spokesman for the food industry. → Continue reading: Taking the fight to the enemy August 5th, 2004 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
I think I have settled on my nomination for Most Frightening Story of the Year. Given the current political climate, the competition for this prestigious title is ferocious but, having carefully assessed the many excellent candidates, I have to put this one forward as the front-runner:
What they mean is that it will be shuffled in under the same ‘health’ rubrics.
Note the use of the word ‘protection’. As if emotions are an affliction from which we need to be spared. I wonder what else can be neutralised? Hate? Love? Anger? Curiosity? Rebelliousness? Will this herald the age of ‘Stepford’ kids?
To add to all the carnage already caused by the psychotic Conservative drug war, it has now provided a legitimising ideology for these fantasies of chemical zombification. July 25th, 2004 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Journalist Nancy Rommelmann writes, after a surprisingly (to me, anyway) pleasant evening spent with feminist writer Susan Faludi, of sitting on the back steps of her home with her husband and a glass of wine:
So true, so simple, and yet anathema to so many. Read the rest of Nancy’s post for some unsurprising-but-fun gossip that she and Faludi exchanged about a certain tiresome feminist whinger extraordinaire. May 4th, 2004 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Today I bought a great book in a remainder shop. It is a year by year history of London, strong on strange and intriguing events, not heavy with the theorising. Lovely. It is a blogger’s delight. I have already culled three postings from it – two for here and a ‘how very odd’ posting here. Here is another fascinatingly odd factoid, entry number six for the year 1729:
A salutary reminder that ‘Christian’ men could be fairly primitive to Christian women, not so long ago. Many Muslims still are, of course. But if we Christians can mend our ways, they surely can too. April 24th, 2004 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
But then I suppose you already knew that. After all, state’s often think it is justified to outlaw consensual sex-for-sale (unless it is part of a package involving marriage, of course). Now however, it seems even what you do with your private bits in a non-sexual way is the business of a bunch of priggish regulators. You think not? Well that is what Georgia’s political masters reckon (that is Georgia in the USA not the one in the former USSR). It is now illegal for an adult woman to get a genital piercing. Now I realise that the USA already claims de facto ownership of its subjects (a much more realistic term than ‘citizens’) even when they wander off to foreign lands, but I though that these notions of owning folks only applied to the fruits of their labour, not their actual bodies (yes, I realise this may be wandering into a touchy area given the USA’s interesting history of intrapersonal economic relations, particularly in places like Georgia). Now if some woman is subjected to non-consensual genital mutilations, I have no problem regarding that as criminal, but will someone tell me how a bunch of legislators can think they have the right to tell a woman what she can do to her own labia and clitoris for her own private aesthetic reasons? To me the law itself is an affront, but far more shocking is that every single one of the members of the Georgia legislature feel they have the right to tell a woman what she may do with her own body for her own private ends. (via Jessica Lyons: Naturalis) March 31st, 2004 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
The other day I came across this article during some random Web surfing, which contained a fairly familiar conservative hammering of what is loosely defined as the Baby Boomer Generation, that portion of the mostly Western population now on the verge of hitting the age of retirement. In essentials, the argument runs like this: baby boomers are self-obsessed, adopted some mind-bindingly dumb (mostly left) political views; undermined respect for any kind of authority; addled their brains with drugs during the infamous Sixties and now expect we younger folk to shoulder the burgeoning cost of keeping them in retirement. Blah, bloody blah-blah. Yes, you may have guessed it – this writer (born in that greatest of years, 1966, about a month before England won the soccer World Cup) is not entirely sold on the conservative critique, even though I share some distaste at the dumb political and cultural stances that were taken by said generation. But one thing which I frequently note is this – the BB generation is often attacked for being self-interested and focussed on acquiring self-esteem. But wait a minute. As a libertarian and unashamed individualist, I have to ask: what is wrong with wishing to improve one’s life, exactly? After all, one of the most widely books in that stiff-necked era, that of the Victorians, was Samuel Smiles’ hymn to self-improvement. Surely, anyone who believes their life is their own, and not that of the State, Volk, proletariat, God, Allah, or the Great Green whatever, will embrace the notion of self-improvement. After all, much of the libertarian movement we know today, with all its different strains, acquired a considerable amount of energy during the 1950s and 60s. David Friedman, for example, who is the son of Milton Friedman and a leading exponent of anarcho-capitalism, might be regarded as a baby boomer. A good number of those who were inspired by the ideas of author and philosopher Ayn Rand were baby boomers. The Libertarian Alliance’s own director, Dr Chris R. Tame, and LA editorial boss and Samizdata.net scribe, Brian Micklethwait, were of the boomer generation. To put it another way, let us avoid the groupthink mentality that would bracket a whole generation under one heading. The BB generation contain a fair share of boobies, charlatans and fools. It also contains folk I greatly admire and am proud to call my friends. March 9th, 2004 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
That’s it, I’ve had enough. I just could not believe my ears, last night, listening to some po-voiced BBC reporter agreeing with some equally pompous do-gooding UK doctor that British people simply cannot be trusted to look after their own health. They also agreed that Wanless Chinder’s HM Treasury proposal, to introduce yet more tax-funded social engineering into British health care, was a desperately needed breath of fresh air. Jesus H. Christ. Just when will you people get it? When will you get it into your thick skulls that it is your damned social engineering policies, over the last sixty years, which have created all of your alleged problems in the first place? When you take away people’s responsibilities for their own health care, by providing them with an MRSA-infested paid-for-by-everybody-else National Health Service, the obvious response is for many of them to start abusing their own bodies, or at the very least to start taking less care of themselves. Why? Because someone else will be forced to pick up the pieces afterwards, that’s why. So what the hell, let’s eat another cream cake, let’s drink another bottle of whisky. Because the NHS will pay for any liposuction I may need, afterwards, and the NHS will always supply me with a new liver, should I need one. And if they refuse to, then I’ll sue them for a loss of human dignity. → Continue reading: Death to the chocolate smugglers February 26th, 2004 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
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