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]
|
I can think of all manner of intriguing discussions could be sparked off by this report in the UK Sunday Times:
MORE than 14,000 white Britons have converted to Islam after becoming disillusioned with western values, according to the first authoritative study of the phenomenon.
Some of Britain’s top landowners, celebrities and the offspring of senior Establishment figures have embraced the strict tenets of the Muslim faith.
The trend is being encouraged by Muslim leaders who are convinced that the conversion of prominent society figures will help protect a community stigmatised by terrorism and fundamentalism.
The new study by Yahya (formerly Jonathan) Birt, son of Lord Birt, former director-general of the BBC, provides the first reliable data on the sensitive subject of the movement of Christians into Islam. He uses a breakdown of the latest census figures to conclude that there are now 14,200 white converts in Britain.
Speaking publicly for the first time about his faith this weekend, Birt, whose doctorate at Oxford University is on young British Muslims, argued that an inspirational figure, similar to the American convert Malcolm X for Afro-Caribbeans, would first have to emerge if the next stage, a mass conversion among white Britons, were to happen.
The faith has made inroads into the Establishment. It emerged this weekend that the great-granddaughter of a British prime minister has converted. Emma Clark, whose ancestor, the Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith, took Britain into the first world war, said: “We’re all the rage, I hope it’s not a passing fashion.”
I rather hope it is but my ambitions are irrelevant. The question is whether this is just a conversion du jour among people with a God-shaped hole in them or whether this is the start of Islam making serious inroads into native British society. If it is the latter then it certainly has some way to go. Out of a population of some 59 million or so, I don’t think a mere 14,200 could be called statistically significant.
The more interesting question for me is not in the number of conversions but the type and class of the converts. Assuming the article is accurate, the overwhelming majority of the converts are among (for want of a better term) the ‘rich and famous’. Now why is that, I wonder?
And just how different from the history of Christianity in these Islands which took hold in Roman Britain as very much a working-class movement and which filtered up to the ruling elites.
The article contains a tantalising clue:
Many converts have been inspired by the writings of Charles Le Gai Eaton, a former Foreign Office diplomat. Eaton, author of Islam and the Destiny of Man, said: “I have received letters from people who are put off by the wishy-washy standards of contemporary Christianity and they are looking for a religion which does not compromise too much with the modern world.”
This makes it sound as if these people are seeking a refuge. Perhaps this growing interest in the Islamic faith is more a variation on the post-modern/anti-progress/green politics which appear to be popular among the the very same people. Who knows?
Having said all that, I think it reasonable to at least postulate that the collpase of the Church of England has got something to do with this. From being the bedrock of national faith and the morally certain religion of empire, the CofE has shrivelled into a comically ludicrous NGO presided over by an Arch-Hippy. In other words, it has gone and shot all its own credibility in the head and is no longer in any position to offer anything to people for whom DVD players and all-night shopping are not enough.
Because of this decline, a lot of people rather assume that Britain is a post-religious country that has abandoned faith and embraced secularism as the national doctrine. But maybe that is not so. Maybe the ruination of the Church of England has simply left a vacuum waiting to be filled and a great spiritual thirst needing to be slaked.
There is nothing as heartwarming as a tax revolt. Yet, there are few governments in history that have to be taught the same lesson twice. Of course, the incompetence and vicious hatred that the transnational socialists who hold sway in Britain have for private wealth blinds them to the lesson that they will have to learn yet again. Tax people too much and they will stop paying, especially when they are old age pensioners on a fixed income, willing to go to prison at the age of 83, in order to publicise this injustice.
The council tax is a local tax based on property values that is used to pay for the local constabulary, the borough and the county council, or whatever local governance is in place in England. It funds a small part of their budget, the majority of which is funded by central government through a block grant. The Blair administration has passed responsibilities on to the local authorities without increasing their block grant. As a consequence, the increase in local authority budgets has a multiplier effect on the increase in council tax, leading to rises of ten to twenty percent, especially in the south of the country. The group most vulnerable to these increases are old age pensioners, who own their homes, and whose pensions rise in line with the retail price index rather than earnings. → Continue reading: The Squeaking Pips
Reading Dennis O’Keeffe’s recently published translation of Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments by Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) – the IEA launch of which I reported on here – is like reading Samizdata.net on a really, really good day. Good in the sense that the writing and the ideas are good, I mean. Not in the sense that the story told is always a happy one. So I thought, why not turn that observation into reality, and recruit Benjamin Constant as a guest blogger? There was no editorial objection to the plan, so, here is the whole of Book IV Chapter Two, “The Idea Which Usually Develops about the Effects Which the Proliferation of the Laws Has and the Falsity of That Idea”:
People normally think that when the government allows itself to multiply prohibitive and coercive laws at will, provided that the intention of the legislator is clearly expressed, provided that the laws are not in any way retroactive, provided that citizens are told in time of the rule of behavior they must follow, the [84] proliferation of laws has no drawback other than cramping individual freedoms a little. This is not the case. The proliferation of laws, even in the most ordinary of circumstances, has the bad effect of falsifying individual morality. The actions which fall within the competence of government, according to its primary purpose, are of two kinds: those intrinsically harmful which government must punish; and arrangements contracted between individuals which government must uphold. As long as government stays within these limits, it does not establish any contradiction, any difference, between legislative morality and natural morality. But when it prohibits actions which are not criminal or demands the completion of those which have not become obligatory owing to prior contract and which consequently are based only on its will, there are brought into society two kinds of crimes and two kinds of duties: those which are intrinsically such and those government says are such. Whether individuals make their judgment subservient to government or maintain it in its original independence, this produces equally disastrous effects. In the first hypothetical case, moral behavior becomes hesitant and fickle. Acts are no longer good or bad by reason of their good or bad outcomes, but according to whether law commands or forbids them, much as theology used to represent them as good because they pleased God, rather than as pleasing to God because they were good. The rule of the just and the unjust is no longer in the consciousness of man but in the will of the legislator. Morality and inner feeling undergo an unfathomable degradation through this dependence on an alien thing, a mere accessory—artificial, unstable, and liable to error and perversion. In the contrary case, in which a man—by supposition—opposes the law, the result is first of all many individual troubles for him and those whose fates depend on his. But in the second place, will he bother for very long disputing the law’s competence in matters he considers outside it? If he violates prohibitions and orders which seem to him arbitrary, he runs the same dangers as he would infringing the rules of eternal morality. Will not this unjust equality of consequences bring about a confusion in all his ideas? Will not his doubts, without distinction, touch on all the actions the law forbids or requires, and in the heat of his dangerous struggle with the institutions menacing him, do we not have to fear that he will soon not be able to tell good from bad any longer, nor law from the state of nature?
Most men are kept from crime by the feeling of never having crossed the line of innocence. The more restrictedly that line is drawn, the more are men put at risk of transgressing it, however light the infraction. Just by overcoming their first scruples, they have lost their most reliable safeguard. To get around restrictions which seem to them pointless, they use means which they could use against the most sanctified of laws. They acquire thereby the habit of disobedience, and even when they want some end which is still innocent, they go astray because of the means they are forced to follow to achieve it. Forcing men to refrain from things which are not forbidden morally or imposing on them duties which morality does not require of them, is therefore not only to make them suffer, but to deprave them.
Wired reports that Russia has successfully tested a hypersonic anti-Star Wars weapon capable of penetrating any prospective missile shield, a senior general said Thursday. The prototype weapon proved it could maneuver so quickly as to make “any missile defense useless,” Col.-Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, the first deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, told a news conference.
This exchange of statements has an air of nostalgia about it:
Putin said that the development of new weapons was not directed against the United States, and Baluyevsky reaffirmed the statement, saying that the experiment shouldn’t be seen as Russia’s response to U.S. missile defense plans. “The experiment conducted by us must not be interpreted as a warning to the Americans not to build their missile defense because we designed this thing.”
In Washington, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked by reporters about the Putin statement. “If you’re in that business — intercontinental ballistic missiles and warheads — you want them to be survivable, and maneuverability is one way to increase their survivability against any potential defenses.”
I suppose the signs of new era are the following bits:
Putin said that Russia has no intention of immediately deploying new weapons based on the experimental vehicle. “We have demonstrated our capability, but we have no intention of building this craft tomorrow.”
Baluyevsky said that Russia had informed the United States about its intention to conduct the experiment and added that U.S. officials issued no objections.
We shall see.
CNetnews.com has an article about radio frequency identification that has become a hot concept, promising to streamline how businesses track and stock inventory, warning that companies may need to rethink their software infrastructures in order to make RFID work as advertised, say analysts and technology makers.
Early resistance to RFID adoption has come from civil liberties groups, which fear that the technology could lead to unprecedented surveillance of consumers. But industry watchers and technology vendors have identified a more mundane potential problem for RFID adopters. They warn that in the rush to launch RFID projects, businesses may be overlooking a crucial element necessary to allow the technology to work smoothly: Making sure back-end databases and business applications can handle the massive amounts of information generated by RFID-enabled systems. Kara Romanow, an analyst at AMR Research in Boston said:
Companies are going to have problems when they drop RFID on top of shaky infrastructures. In order to do RFID right, to see a true return, the first thing (a company) needs to do is finish a data synchronization initiative, and do it right.
Romanow believes that there are two popular scenarios among businesses working to develop RFID capabilities today: those doing just enough to keep demanding companies like Wal-Mart as a customer, and those with real long-term vision. According to the analyst, the first group will garner few returns other than short-term bragging rights to getting RFID up and running, while the second group will see true return on investment down the road.
The ballot boxes are the coffins of freedom. We will not take part in the funeral of freedom.
– A text message circulating on Iranian mobile1 phones yesterday
1 = US: cell phone
Madonna was wrong. We are not living in a ‘material world’, we are living in a ‘managerial world’:
A planned children’s pancake race has been dropped because of spiralling insurance costs.
Children at Okehampton Primary School in Devon had been looking forward to the annual event on Shrove Tuesday next week.
But the 80-yard run in the town’s Red Lion Yard has had to be cancelled because a risk assessment had revealed that 25 marshalls would have to line the race route to ensure public safety.
What good are marshalls? Ban this kind of thing altogether I say. What if a six year-old with a pancake, hurtling around the track at mind-numbing speeds, spins out of control and veers off into a crowd of helpless onlookers, leaving a trail of carnage and devastation in his wake?
No, no, no. Too terrible to even contemplate.
Arnold Kling makes an excellent point about Doc Searl’s ‘statement of geekonomics’ dating back to 2000.
There is a classic line attributed to John Gilmore that “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” Economists might say that markets try to route around the damage caused by monopolists or government regulators. I view Searls as saying that with the Internet and markets, consumers do not need their paternalistic advocate so much.
To me, Searlsian Geekonomics sounds more like Hayekian libertarianism than Deanian re-regulationism. I don’t think that the Dean campaign deserved such a strong Geekbone. To me, the logic of Geekonomics is to lead one to be skeptical of the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.
I find Doc Searls very sound on almost all issues other than his support for Dean’s campaign. I am glad that someone pointed out the contradiction in his position.
Infoworld’s Ephraim Schwartz paints a picture:
Picture this: You’re sitting in the food court at your favorite mall with the family, munching on greasy kung pao chicken from Panda Express, followed by a warm, sweet Cinnabon, when a cordon of mall police surround your table, guns drawn, screaming at you to “Drop the bun and put your hands up!”
Reluctant as you are to give it up, you comply.
What went wrong? Your wife is wondering if you’ve been leading a secret life, but it’s nothing so exotic. Rather, the clerk at the Gap forgot to deactivate the RFID (radio frequency identification) tag in the sweater you just bought. When you passed an RFID reader, connected to the Wi-Fi enabled network, it sent a message to the security desk, and as you passed each RFID reader along the way, they tracked you down in the food court.
There is no doubt that RFID tags will be sewn into the lining of every item of clothing manufactured. Current RFID prices are about 16 cents each on orders of 10 million tags, with the price expected to reach a nickel a tag in a year or two.
By using RFID in clothing, not only will companies be able to discourage shoplifting, they’ll also be able to spot other frauds, such as counterfeit brand names or buyers who purchase an item at a discount outlet and then try to return it for the retail price at a regular store. Warranties can now also be easily tracked to date of purchase.
With those benefits to the supply chain, the question is, will the store really want to turn off the tag after the item is purchased, and how can you, as a consumer, tell? “What if you have some strange hobbies you’d like kept private?” Etterman asks.
It is certainly a small step from deploying RFID tags, which have a reach of only about three feet, to putting the readers in public places that already have hot spots. The combination is potent. Suddenly, the information in the tag can be transmitted over the Wi-Fi network and associated with all kinds of other data by all kinds of organizations, such as insurance companies. Or, you may be on the Most Wanted list at your local public library. Why shouldn’t they have a piece of you, too?
While these scenarios are not possible today, there is no technological barrier preventing them from becoming reality. Who can really say what’s next?
Nick Forte has some good news in the struggle for ideas in the USA
The advocates for smaller government appear to be winning the war of ideas on this side of the pond if the following Rasmussen poll is accurate. For a long time I believed this to be the case, but I was surprised by the margin shown in the poll.
February 16, 2004–Sixty-four percent (64%) of American voters say that they prefer smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes. A Rasmussen Reports survey finds that just 22% would rather see a more active government with more services and higher taxes.
What is even more amazing is that even a majority of Democrats hold this view. Only the extreme left prefer more government over less government, and even then by not as large of a margin as one might have guessed.
Support for smaller government cuts across just about all demographic lines . It is the preference for 67% of men and 62% of…
[…]
… group, 49% say they want a more active government with more services and higher taxes. Just 40% prefer smaller government
It will be interesting to see how this will affect US politics. So far, President Bush has not been able to capitalize on what should be a Republican issue because he has been seen (accurately) as big spender despite his tax cuts. Somewhat counter-intuitively, an earlier Rasmussen poll shows that more Americans voters view the front running liberal New England Democratic presidential candidate as better able to control spending than the purportedly conservative Texan Republican candidate (42% to 33%).
There is indeed growing discontent among conservatives over Bush’s spending record. Last week, House Republicans held a ‘mandatory’ conference to come up with ideas to curtail runaway government spending. Among the more radical initiatives under discussion are measures to curb the power of House authorizers and appropriators who have routinely ignored budget limits, giving the budget resolution the force of law, and requiring two-thirds supermajorities in both the House and the Senate to pass spending provisions which exceed the budget.
Although some Republican members of Congress are true believers in the need to reduce the size of government, many more are probably reacting to concerns that Americans are turning to the Democrats as the party of fiscal responsibility, undercutting a traditional GOP advantage. Could it be that political pressures for lower spending has finally overtaken the normal election year drive by politicians to buy more votes through higher government spending? Recent actions by Congress suggest not, but I remain cautiously optimistic.
Nick Forte
Falls Church, Virginia
Back in November 2003, I predicted that the end result of the anti-junk-food campaign would be ‘sin taxes’:
Then on to Step 5: the levying of ‘sin taxes’ on hamburgers to ‘encourage a change of behaviour’. The money raised then pays for a lot more Food Standards Agents.
I hope I will be forgiven for this brief episode of smugness because, not only has my prediction come to pass, but it has come to pass rather more rapidly than even I had anticipated:
A Downing Street-based policy unit has proposed a plan to place a “fat tax” on junk food in an attempt to tackle the rising incidence of heart disease.
According to The Times, the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit raised the prospect of extra duty or VAT being imposed on some of the nation’s favourite foods after heart disease overtook cancer as Britain’s biggest killer, and more young people started developing diabetes.
That is what it was really all about. All the media-hype, all the hand-wringing, all the brow-furrowing and all the phoney ‘caring’. It was all an elaborate ploy by the public sector classes to get their hands on more of your hard-earned. It really is all about revenue.
I heartily recommend pessimism. It enables you to amaze your friends with your powers of prediction and bask in the satisfaction of being borne out by events.
I rarely write articles about ongoing discussions in the comment sections of Samizdata.net, but I think this is an appropriate continuation of the discourse.
Whilst I find being referred to as ‘dear leader’ a bit disconcerting, Frank McGahon does ask the questions which have vexed me for quite a long time. I refer to myself as a ‘social individualist’, as does Gabriel Syme. I also have no problem with ‘minarchist’. Others tend to call me a ‘libertarian’. Whatever… the general thrust of what I think is no secret to any regular reader of this blog. I see the state as at best a necessary evil and generally just an evil; I see constrained democracy as a tool to secure liberty, not an end in and of itself; I am all for free markets and ‘Austrian’ economics; I regard several property as the key underpinning of any civilization worth having; I see individual liberty as first amongst many virtues. Label all that as you wish.
So how does a person with such views, i.e. someone who is profoundly at odds with the system of regulatory democratic governance that prevails in the First World, and who regards so much of underpins everyday life in a legal sense as essentially illegitimate, act to advance his or her objectives? Or more particularly, how does one take action without legitimising what they regard as nothing less than threat-backed theft? How does one act without either fatally compromising one’s beliefs or alternatively retreating into intellectually pure ineffectiveness?
This is a question I keep kicking around… over and over again. The problem with voting Tory (or in many states in the USA, voting Republican) is that it rewards both outright lying when they describe themselves as ‘the party of free trade’ and does little more than slow the rot of regulatory statism rather than reverse it. If they know you will just hold your nose and vote for them regardless just to keep Labour out (or the Democrats out), what possible motivation do they have to actually pander to your views in any meaningful way? → Continue reading: Going for the zeitgest
|
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.
|
Recent Comments