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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While media attention is still on the Schiavo case, another legislature has been passing laws for specific individuals. In this case, the Icelandic Parliament has voted to grant citizenship to Bobby Fischer, the bizzare and deranged former Chess champion.
This act was done at the behest of supporters of Fischer, who has been imprisoned by Japanese immigration officials since July 2004 for trying to leave Japan without a valid passport. Since then, the US has been trying to extradite Fischer over his 1992 match with Boris Spassky, which, by being held in Yugoslavia, violated US sanctions.
I suspect that even if this new move is successful, the Icelandic authorities will come to regret their generosity. Fischer has a long habit of biting the hand that feeds, and Iceland may come to realise that there really is such a thing as bad publicity.
Today I heavily undermined my Samizdatista credentials by hanging around the political types. I attended a lunch for Boris Johnson’s, MP, supporters and activists from his constituency. Now, you may ask what I was doing there… well, blogosphere works in mysterious ways…
The lunch was rather pleasant and I found those I had a chance to talk to refreshingly switched on and open-minded. The shock was made bearable by copious food and wine.
The politicians’ lair Now, to the heart of the matter, Mr Boris Johnson, MP. I was most intrigued, after many months of Tory bashing on this blog, to find myself on the inside and on the receiving end, so to speak. Although the House of Commons is not an unknown territory, this occasion was different as I went curious to meet the one Tory that seems to break the ranks and is not afraid to mention the notion that dare not speak its name in current politics – freedom.
Boris, the Strangely Illuminated Statesman The speech Mr Johnson gave at the end of the lunch, before he had to dash off to his statesmanly duties, was… excellent. This is what he had to say (reconstituted from my, by now largely unreadable notes, so please give the man a break and challenge me on the detail):
There were three points to note. The first was that freedom is important and needs to be seen as an end in itself, to stop its erosion for other political ends. The Labour government has been spending an increasing amount of taxpayers’ money while reducing their freedom. This is bad for the society. The result is an even more intrusive state under Labour. [So far, so good.]
Boris called for a new style of government, which would get that freedom back. He mentioned a rather scary statistic, the size of the public sector is now at the same level as in the 1979 – when Thatcher came in, ending an era of rampant and shameless socialism in Britain – and is 739,000 people working for the central government (excluding local government and other public bodies). By the time Labour came in the number had shrunk to 430,000. The Tories’ agenda is to shrink the size of the state again.
The second point was democracy. Democracy means that the Tories get rid of unelected regional authorities and the whole tier of government that has not been approved by the democratic processes. The term constitutional non-sense was mentioned in the context of the health secretary having no say about health.
The third issue was taxpayer value. Huge quantities of taxpayer money have been lavished on the public sector and on socially useless projects. New approach to government is needed. [I especially like this one – it was mentioned twice.] Mr Johnson got rather animated when he called for a stop of the ongoing transfer of wealth from the productive sector of the economy to the non-productive. I hope this was a go at wealth redistribution, as his moved on to recommend that the Tories should the party of lower taxation.
Mr Johnson understands that the size of the cake is more important that the equal size of the cake portions
There was the usual pep talk before the elections, which did not come out too badly as it was based on realistic expectations and the belief that Tony Blair should be expelled from the office, which is impossible to disagree with.
More issues were discussed, which are either too local or related to the constituency and as such would probably bore the pants off our ‘global’ readership. All in all, talking to Mr Johnson, one could almost believe that politics can be a way forward. They must have put something in the wine…
Due to sheer coincidence of seating arrangements I had a chance to exchange a few words with our Honourable Friend and mentioned the distinction between the state and the society that dictates so much of our ‘editorial policy’ on political engagement. It seemed to resonate and I could not help but wonder to what extent the Tory party message could coalesce around such a notion. For the record, I am not holding my breath.
I am not the world’s leading authority on what Young People Are Getting Up To These Days. Nevertheless, today I spotted what looked to me like a new hairstyle, in Charing Cross Road in central London. And, on the off chance that it really is rather new, I photographed it from the top deck of the London bus I was in at the time, for Samizdata readers to wonder or sneer at. They were a group of five Asian boys, of whom three had their hair done thus:
At least two things may be wrong with this post. First, this hairstyle may already be old hat, and Asian boys have been swanning around for years with their hair done thus. Second, so what anyway? As to the first, well, I will take that chance. But re the second question, I think that human inventiveness and individuality is always worth a respectful nod. And yes, I daresay these were indeed juvenile delinquents, but that is always where these things seem to start.
How soon before David Beckham is to be seen thus adorned? Or maybe he has already sported such a hairdo and I missed that also.
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.
Anti-liberal NGOs like War on Want and the World Development Movement are using World Water Day (today) to campaign against private investment in water infrastructure. The World Development Movement says that water privatization is: “making it less likely that clean water will ever get to the poorest people.”
Unfortunately the World Development Movement is mistaken. As Global Growth’s development economist, Paul Staines, says (pdf file):
Practical and technological requirements for huge sanitation projects on a metropolis-wide scale require the resources of big enterprises to implement them, the private sector can not only provide the capability but also the capital required. 2 billion people thirst for clean water, Western antiglobalisation NGOs who arrogantly put their ideological interest ahead of the interests of the developing world are full of **it, and if they succeed in their campaign the fast growing cities of the developing world will be as well.
Private investment in water is expanding access to clean, running water. It contrasts strongly with nationalized water systems where politically-favoured groups receive below-cost water, starving off future investment so that unfavoured groups go without. Private investment offers the best plan for increasing access to water.
Crossposted from the Globalisation Institute Blog.
I often do not see eye to eye with James Taranto but he does point out some good stories in his “Best of the Web” email newsletter. He highlighted this Drudge Report today. Drudge reports Michelle Zipp, editor of Playgirl magazine, was fired for being a Republican. It contains an e-mail from Ms. Zipp:
After your coverage of my article about coming out and voting Republican, I did receive many letters of support from fellow Republican voters, but it was not without repercussions. Criticism from the liberal left ensued. A few days after the onslaught of liberal backlash, I was released from my duties at Playgirl magazine.
After underlings expressed their disinterest of working for an outed Republican editor, I have a strong suspicion that my position was no longer valued by Playgirl executives. I also received a phone call from a leading official from Playgirl magazine, in which he stated with a laugh, “I wouldn’t have hired you if I knew you were a Republican.”
I just wanted to let you know of the fear the liberal left has about a woman with power possessing Republican views.
I would go further. The currently constituted Democratic Party is based on victimology. ‘Minorities’ must be victims. Victims must be helped. The only way to help victims is through regulation, law and massive Federal spending. If a member of a Democratically important minority breaks ranks, they are endangering the core beliefs which bind the party together. Thus that individual must be silenced or put in their proper place as a victim.
Minorities contain intelligent, hardworking and resourceful people. You can not keep them ‘down on the farm’. You can not pretend to speak for all of ‘them’ because they are not really a ‘them’. As any libertarian will tell you, there is no such thing as a Class. There are only individuals with temporarily aligned self-interests.
This is a problem for the Democrats. As soon as the underlying self-interests of their pet victim classes were met, those classes began to dissolve. The Democrats do not have an acceptance of this, let alone a plan to understand and deal with new alignments. All they can do is individually lash out against ‘class’ defectors. It solves nothing, it wins them no friends… but perhaps it makes them feel better.
Post a review of a book or other product on Amazon.com, and the information may find its way into the company’s file on you. CNET has more on Amazon having been granted a patent for a system that gathers clues from reviews about customers’ gift-giving habits in order to suggest future gifts and reminders.
Consumer advocates worry that the company’s profiling practices may have gone too far and could exploit the giving of gifts and the sense of community that customer reviews were designed to engender.
Here’s how the proposed system works, according to Amazon’s patent claim: Amazon would gather information about gift recipients, including their names, addresses and items customers send them. The system would then try to guess their gender, age and the gift-giving occasion based on the type of present, messages written in gift cards, dates gifts are ordered, items on wish lists, and commentary in related consumer reviews.
The system appears particularly geared toward people buying gifts for children, with its ability to recommend “age appropriate” gifts.
Jason Catlett, founder of Junkbusters, a consumer watchdog, said:
They are building a speculative profile on you before you even know you’re dealing with them, because someone sends you a gift.
He’s particularly dismayed by the prospect of Amazon monitoring customer reviews for marketing purposes.
Well, so am I. But I think Catlett is onto something when he says:
People will hesitate to publish reviews if they know the result is to enlarge their profile in some secret marketing database.
I have just got back from a trip to the Tate Britain art gallery at which such wonders as the works of Turner, Monet and Whistler were on display. The Turner pictures of Venice, London and the Seine Valley of northern France bowled me over, as they do every time. One stray observation: many of the pictures brought out the effect on light of heavy air pollution. Monet was a master at this, particularly in his paintings of the Houses of Parliament. Some of the Monets and Whistlers were painted in the late 19th century when London’s smog levels were notoriously bad. As an adopted Londoner I am of course delighted that the chronic air pollution which once ravaged the lungs of our forbears has been reduced. I wish our modern artists could produce something as great as Turner, though.
For an excellent overview of the Schiavo case, written by someone with a better work ethic than me (she links to her sources, I just kind of remember their gist), go to Majikthise.
Out of the morass of purely case-specific issues in this case, perhaps the most legitimate policy argument raised by the Schiavo trainwreck has to do with the withdrawal of food and water.
Let’s be clear on Schiavo’s condition and treatment here: she is being fed and hydrated through a tube in her stomach. She is not feeding herself, and is presumably not capable of taking food and water orally, or the tube would never have been inserted. This kind of feeding and hydration is just as much a medical treatment as having a glucose or saline IV inserted into your arm.
No one attempts to deny that Terri (or anyone else) would be permitted to refuse this treatment for themselves; a law mandating that you receive a given medical treatment against your will would be widely regarded as an abomination.
Similarly, no one seems to be seriously arguing that if Terri were on a ventilator or some other form of artificial “life support”, that her guardian should be permitted to withdraw the life support, even though there is no written evidence of what Terri’s wishes were in that regard.
This leaves many of the folks who are now arguing for federal intervention into Terri Schiavo’s medical treatment in the rather uncomfortable position admitting that (a) she could refuse to consent to being fed through a tube in her stomach, and (b) that her guardian could withdraw other forms of life support, but nonetheless that (c) her guardian cannot refuse consent to her being fed through a tube in her stomach.
Thus, the policy question being posed by this case seems to be whether a surrogate decisionmaker should be compelled by law to “consent” to their ward being fed through a tube in her stomach, unless he can produce written evidence that is what the patient would have wanted.
The case against such a legal mandate boils down to the argument that denying the right to consent or refuse consent to the surrogate is the same as denying it to the patient herself. Of course, the surrogate is not, in fact, the patient, and there may be legitimate boundaries placed on the decisions the guardian can make on behalf of their ward. The question is whether withdrawal of nutrition and hydration is outside of those boundaries, and if so why.
The case for a legal mandate that nutrition and hydration be given over the objections of the legal guardian rests comes down to the argument that, where there is any doubt as to what the patient would want, we should err on the side of keeping them alive. This argument, however, founders on a couple of points. Logically, it cannot be limited to nutrition and hydration, and thus requires that we keep all life support, no matter how extraordinary, in place. Further, it begs the question of how much certainty is enough. Even where a written living will exists, the question can be raised about whether the patient changed her mind.
Because we cold-hearted libertarians care about such things, Terri Schiavo’s care is being paid for by taxpayer money through the Medicaid program. Even though her parents have noisily pledged to take all financial responsibility for her care, they have not yet done so, even though the trust fund established out of the proceeds of her malpractice case to pay for her care is nearly exhausted. The annual cost is probably around $80,000 per year.
A few weeks ago parts of the libertarian intellectual scene marked what would have been Ayn Rand’s 100th birthday. Among a number of articles reflecting on her life and novels was this surprisingly conservative article by Reason magazine regular Cathy Young. Young is determined to present both Rand’s great virtues alongside her not-so agreeable side, particularly her intolerance of anyone, who, however constructively, criticised her.
But the article contains a number of charges about Rand and her system of ideas which I think are unfair. I want to address them not as some sort of defence of Rand – a writer who had some serious faults, in my view – but because the points Young makes can be applied to classical liberal/libertarian views more broadly.
Young claims that Rand had no time for family life of any kind and that her main characters appeared to have no enjoyable family life at all. As a result, her value system is held to be seriously deficient, in that Young claims that a viable human society requires us to feel obligations towards our fellow family members even though a person has not chosen the family he or she is in. (The same sort of argument is used by conservatives to justify loyalty to a country). This surely overlooks the point that for Rand, the relationships in life that matter are the ones people choose to enter into, not those born of historical accident. I am lucky enough to have been raised by two loving and smart parents. Very lucky, in fact. But it is obviously not so great for many other people and I have no doubt that a few of my friends and acquaintances have been drawn to libertarian ideas as a way of rebelling against the sort of unpleasant experiences that many children can have. So I certainly don’t condemn Rand because her heroes and heroines did not take out time from their adventures to change the kiddies’ diapers. After all, many great works of fiction contain characters with no reference to family issues at all. Young does not address it, but for Rand, and indeed many others, there can be no such thing as unconditional love. The sense of obligation I feel towards my parents cannot, in my view, be divorced from my sense of gratitude towards them. If they had been monsters, I would feel quite differently.
Another charge that Young makes is that Rand (and presumably many libertarians) had no interest in charity and therefore a society created by rational egoists would have no base of voluntary organisations able to help others in times of distress. That seems odd. As David Kelley points out in this marvellous book, “Unrugged Individualism”, rational self interested people have a direct vested interest in cultivating a benevolent, friendly disposition towards their fellow humans. In fact many people become firefighters, nurses, paramedic rescuers and the like precisely because it is an important value to them to do such things. In short, charity is not in conflict with enlightened self interest at all. What counts is that the actions concerned are voluntary rather than something that is imposed by coercive force.
Such drawbacks aside, Young’s piece is well worth reading. I discovered, for example, that Rand did not have much interest in evolution, which seems a bit strange for a declared atheist and enthusiast for science. I would have thought that evolution is something that fits quite snugly into a pro-reason, pro-freedom political phiolosphy, as Daniel Dennett has shown.
Harry Hutton mostly does sarky, misanthropic humour, so this on the spot reportage from Colombia might very well get missed by a lot of more earnest types than him who would appreciate reading it.
Here is John Pilger arguing that American military aid has caused a humanitarian disaster in Colombia. The trouble with this is that, since the really huge flows of US arms and money began, the level of violence has plunged.
Kidnapping fell 42% last year, and 26% the year before that; the number of massacres was down 53% in 2004, and murder fell 17.7%; street crime, the number of displaced persons, crime against taxi drivers… all down. And every single Colombian I have spoken to, without a single exception, has told me that the situation has improved. I had dinner with some foreign human rights workers, who told me that this was also their strong impression.
Harry’s commenters have mostly concentrated not on whether the above reportage is true, but rather about the rights and wrongs of legalising the drugs, the proceeds of which are so much a part of the problems of Colombia. Or maybe not, because Colombia has always been a violent place. I favour total drug legalisation for all the usual libertarian reasons, but whatever you think about that, this is an interesting piece of reportage.
A few other commenters have also pointed out what a lying twat Pilger is. It is good that such drivel as his can now be challenged quickly by bloggers who, unlike Pilger, actually know what Pilger is talking about. Had I come across it by some other route, I would have dismissed Pilger’s piece as almost certainly being made-up rubbish, purely because of who it is by, but it is nice to be sure.
The Economist (the link, alas, leads to their premium content) has an interesting little article about fake news – ‘news’ broadcasts put out by the government via local television networks. Bogus reporting (or, more kindly, a video equivalent of issuing a press release) they call it:
The televised interview with John Walters, the White House drug tsar, ran on hundreeds of local stations before the 2004 Super Bowl. “Many parents admit they’re still not taking the drug [marijuana] seriously,” explained the news anchor. “Mike Morris has more.” It ended with the usual sign-off: “This is Mke Morris reporting.” It looked like a new report, and quaked like a news report. but it was not one. The segment had been produced by Mr Walters’s Office of National Drug Control Policy. The apparently independent Mr Morris was on contract to the government.
As the Economist points out the government should not be in the business of advocacy, but it may use public money to provide information. The question is which is which? Regardless of the formality of the decision and which watchdog or arm of the administration has the final say about the legality of such “news management”, the issue here is transparency. Both the government agency and the news programmes should identify the originator of the material they are running.
The most interesting point of the article is not even that – it is highlighting that this administration does not think that the press has “a check-and-balance function” and that this is a fundamental change of attitude compared with previous administrations and makes this one’s use of fake news different.
If there is nothing special about the press, then there is nothing special about what it does. News can be anything – including dress-up government video footage. And anyone can provide it, including the White House, which through local networks, can become a news distributor in its own right. Given the proliferation of media outlets and the eroding of boundaries between news, comment and punditry, someone will use government provided information as news. In short, the traditional notion that the media play a special role in informing people is breaking down.
The conclusion is one that many bloggers have been trying to break to the traditional media and journalists.
Behind all this lies a shift in the balance of power in the new business. Power is moving away from old-fashioned networks and newspapers; it is swinging towards, on the one hand, smaller news providers (in the case of blogs, towards individuals) and, on the other, to the institutions of government, which have got into the business of providing news more or less directly. Eventually, perhaps, the new world of blogs will provide as much public scrutiny as newspapers and broadcasters once did.
For myself, I am not too worried about “covert propaganda” in government broadcasts provided there is an individual somewhere in the process who will simply blog about it on his blog…
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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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