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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It has been noted before by bloggers such as Rand Simberg that liberty-loving folk are often fascinated by space exploration and science fiction. There are various reasons for this. Folk who are interested in entrepreneurship and enterprise can relate to those interested in discovering new worlds and ways of doing things. And moving into space offers the opportunity of leaving statist, stagnant societies behind.
So, if you are depressed by the current wrangles over what to do about Iraq or outbreaks of mass idiocy in the South African Earth Summit, then may I recommend a book written just over two years ago by top-notch space scientist and pro-Mars exploration advocate Robert Zubrin. Although some of the science is quite tough for the layman, he convincingly lays out how space exploration is both doable and necessary. If we want to continue advancing as a civilisation, we cannot afford to assume that Earth will be our only habitat. He is a bit too dismissive, in my opinion, of how commerce could be a driver of exploration, but overall this is one of the best books on the subject I have come across in years.
Well worth the money.
Dr. Robert Zubrin
1999 NSS Conference, Houston TX
(photo D.Amon)
For a number of months I’ve had it in the back of my mind September 11th would be a really good day to begin the take down of Saddam & Co. I think I’d still put a small wager on it.
I would guess the DOD re-arming has progressed sufficiently by now; troops are certainly in place or at least near at hand. The deployment of a major medical unit is indicative a serious ground offensive is due about now. The recent news from Kuwait (all thanks be to Instapundit for the link) reveals there are friendly places from which to launch an attack. We’ve long known preparations were under way in Turkey.
I’d expect we have serious forces already across the Turkish border working with the Kurds in Northern Iraq and either in Kuwait or perhaps already into the the Southern no-fly zone. Airfields were purportedly under-construction in Northern Iraq and are probably in service now. Special Forces will be in-country and ready to move on their objectives: the early capture of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons and the extremely prejudicial termination of Mr Hussein. It would not surprise me in the least if contacts have been made and entire Iraqi divisions are ready to turn coat when the shooting starts.
It is difficult to read the Saudi situation: they could actually be supporting us behind the scenes. There is a lot of very empty desert out there in which to hide a US division or two. Logistical support flights could come from Kuwait or the Emirates so long as the Saudi Air Force is in on the deal, and they know where their spares come from. Out of sight, out of mind as far as Saud internal problems go. You just can’t be sure, particularly when masters are doing their best to maximize the fog of war. That is comforting: it also means Saddam doesn’t know from whence the hammer will fall.
I’ll bet on an armoured nutcracker from north and south backed up by airborne troops delivered to key objectives. Blitzkreig American Style. Our pieces are in place on the battlefield and the initiative is all ours. The eleventh would be a good day symbolically but the attack will come when the commander decides it will come. If Saddam were to attempt a pre-emptive strike to seize the initiative, we’d just chew up his best forces and spit them out. A classical offense takes a much larger force than a classical defense. The force tables are only turned when one side has near total battlefield information, absolute air superiority and the ability to place a bomb in a bunghole from ten miles away.
Saddam had better be taking care of the “eat, drink and be merry” part… his tomorrow is not long to come.
Today in Johannesburg, the delegates at the Earth Conference moved onto the next important phase in the proceedings: water sports.
Having accepted the monumental challenge of solving the problems of poverty and environmental degradation, the delegates have maintained their unanimous opening day resolution, that they were all having far too much fun to worry about that sort of thing and that the world would be far better off if they all did as little as humanly possible during the ten-day Conference.
So, this morning, the Conference moved en masse to the Lakeside Pavilion where they will have a choice of jet-skiing, windsurfing, snorkelling or simply soaking up that radiant South African sunshine with a selection of cocktails and a trashy novel. All eyes, though, will be on the Head of the Brazilian Rainforest Foundation who is rumoured to be something of a dab-hand at Beach Volleyball.
But not all the delegates have been this proactive. Back at the hotel, Indian Development Minister Laxmi Ennerjee spent the entire day languishing in the Tropical Hothouse Spa Jacuzzi, together with his, erm, ‘Research Assistant’ Trudi. While the sparkly Trudi toyed with his greying chest hairs, the Minister lay motionless in the warm, herb-infused bubbles; his head occasionally lolling to one side in order to lick a dollop of tangerine-flavoured yoghurt from between Trudi’s quivering breasts. In an attempt to explain away this apparent lack of wordly concern, he said:
“Look, it’s really very simple. We were charged with the responsibility of ending poverty, saving the planet and maintaining an economic equilibrium between all nations and people of the entire world. But when we got right down to it”, he sighed heavily, “it was all too much like hard work and we decided that we just couldn’t be bothered”
Despite what some would regard as a refreshing candour, the delegates have, nevertheless, come under fierce criticism from Inactivists who accuse the delegates of being a part of the problem not a part of the solution. Daniel Le Thargy spokesperson for the Coalition Against Movement said:
“You just have to observe the furious vigour with which these guys play Canasta around the poolside to realise they are actually heating up our atmosphere. They should learn to do something much less productive, like sleeping. Sleeping is fun and involves no carbon emissions whatsoever.”
Denying accusations that he was simply a luddite, Mr.Le Thargy went onto to explain:
“Our aim is get Third World farmers off of their knees, and put them flat on their backs.”
But the Conference has brushed aside these protests and, following the afternoon’s recreation by the waterside, the delegates then went into a delicate round of complex negotiations, wrangling and horse-trading before a resolution was passed calling for tonight’s dinner to consist of an open barbecue with a Thai & Vietnamese theme. Speaking to a Dutch correspondent, British Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed confidence that agreed targets for at least 80% attendance at tomorrow’s Bingo & Billiards party would be met.
There is a splendid reference to Samizdata.net on NewsMax.com, quoting sections of a short article by David Carr in which he introduced the term ‘Tranzi’ for ‘Transnational Progressives’.
The much reported contretemps between occasionally hilarious Jewish-American comedian Jackie Mason and largely unknown Palestinian-American comedian Ray Hanania has also received several mentions in the blogosphere.
However to my knowledge only blogger Al Barger on the Culpepper Log has followed up this with some investigative reporting of his own. After Googling previous remarks by Ray Hanania and coming up with some controversial views in a Lebanese newspaper, Barger e-mailed Hanania to get his side of the story and he did indeed reply. The exchange of e-mails can be seen on the Culpepper Log.
Well done, Al… this sort of thing reflects very well on the entire concept of blogging.
Dale’s posts certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons on the issue of racism. In the comments section, the delighfully named ‘Godless Capitalist’ from the blog Gene Expression has put forward several views that I must take issue with.
Intermarriage amongst races requires no ‘campaign’, it is a spontaneous social fact. The streets of London suggest that anyone who thinks a ‘campaign’ to encourage it is required is not just wrong but profoundly so. Miscegenation is a natural consequence of close proximity unless institutional racism prevents it.
Many years living in the USA (about 1/3rd of my life) proved to me that significant sections of US society tend to be profoundly racist in ways that have to be experienced by an outsider to be believed. The number of times a black male acquaintance of mine who was attending University in New Jersey was insulted and even assaulted because his girlfriend was white showed me an aspect to US society not many US bloggers like to contemplate.
I do not doubt the factual veracity of the crime figures that Gene Expressions loves to bandy about: I have lived and worked in urban America enough to know the reality. But whilst crime figures prove there are serious problems in Black America, they tell us nothing whatsoever about the causes of those problem. Why look for genetic excuses for what is so obviously a man-made social problem? The historical legacy of slavery, followed by Jim Crow, followed by decades of American socialist 1 and right-statist distortion of American society, all in ways that could not have been better crafted to produce an unassimilated underclass if they had actually set out to ruin as many people as possible, does not ‘prove’ anything at all about African or Afro-European genes.
I am sure if genetic science existed in immediate aftermath of the Imperial Roman withdrawal from Briton, Roman scientists would have shook their heads and written off the ancient Britons as just genetically inferior to the Romans at sight of social chaos, decaying roads and aqueducts falling into disrepair.
Mexico and Brazil are held up as examples of the fallacy of expecting miscegenation to improve racist attitudes, yet that actually proves nothing universal about anything. A ‘white’ ruling class clinging to the top of a social pyramid, presiding over societies structured to maximize class differences proves… that the people at the top like to stay on the top. This is not exactly a stunning revelation. That attitudes towards race, a visible characteristic, would conflate with the socioeconomic ‘markers’ of a power elite who have a vested interest in differentiation tell us even less about some imagined genetic predisposition of the have-nots.
1= I refuse to use the term ‘liberal’ regardless of its popularity in the United States, when the actual meaning of the word indicates ‘illiberal’.
Continental intellectuals see analytical thinking as something to be endured, but certainly not courted!
– Adriana Cronin
It’s time to take the gloves off. Libertarians do not give a damn about “groups” in whatever guise they come or for whatever reason they are posited. I will later join the academic debate on races as defined by clusters of genetic features and the drift of those clusters over time… but not right now. I think it is more important to establish the political and philosophical stand which we as libertarians take.
Individuals matter. Groups do not. Group politics in whatever form it appears is the Tranzi philosophy. If you could absolutely and scientifically prove one group genetically inferior to another you would accomplish nothing except establish that group for eternal victimhood under their philosophy. You succeed in making entire “racial” groups into “the genetically challenged” who then “obviously” must be protected and helped by – you guessed it – government!
The libertarian sees a person, not a member of a group, however scientific that grouping is purported to be. If that individual is a good person and successful at life and acts morally and ethically, then they are praiseworthy. If they do evil things and throw their life away, we don’t excuse them for their past, their origin, race, religion, sex or genetic makeup. Perhaps genetic feature clustering gives an individual a propensity for some particular behavior. Genes are not destiny however, as I’m sure Dr. Richard Dawkins would say.
Personally I find “genetic feature cluster” a much better term than the ill-defined “race”. Race in modern usage is synonymous with skin-colour, which is quite an inaccurate biological definition. Skin colour is merely an outward sign of the expression – or suppression – of one particular set of genes. The classical definition is probably truer to reality. I live amidst the Celtic Race for example. Celts have a unique history and certainly have identifiable genetic differences from the Rus for example. I personally am somewhat mixed but predominately Celt. Not a white (a rather useless term): a Celt.
Someday there will be enough genetic data from sequencing to calculate the true clusterings in gene space. We may at that time find humanity is broken into separate point clouds (races) or is a continuum in which there is no particular boundary, merely a space filling random fuzz. The fact that some features such as skin colour are apparent to our visual apparatus is not of great utility in actually defining the reality of human subspecies.
I believe we will one day find there are indeed definable feature clusters, but in an intermediate between the two extremes; they will be denser knots which either interconnect at their fuzzy outer boundaries or are bridged by weak cluster lines. If we were to find a cluster that is completely isolated, I would consider that strong evidence for a lineage on the way to speciating. Since all humans are mobile and interfertile, I do not believe we will find such a case.
Feature clusters (“races”) are not fixed. They drift, mix, merge and mutate over time. They are not necessarily tied to external features such as skin colour. One cannot possibly declare an Australian Aborigine and a Masai to be of the same race. They are possibly more genetically distant from each other than the Masai is from the Celt. If one wishes to look at genetic diversity within the human gene pool, the largest part of it is in Africa, so it stands to reason a scientific measure of race will find more races on that continent than on all the others put together.
The rates of interracial marriage in America, if extended over a reasonable time frame, say a thousand years, will lead to a unique “American race”. It will not sit at any of the current points in gene space of any of the current “races” It will reside at a unique new spot in that genetic n-space. All now living americans will find some of their genes in that future American gene pool; however some alleles will have outcompeted others and will be dominant. Due to climate, one would expect light skin to have a competitive advantage; other genes from other races will win the top spot for other features.
Of course if we do get a severe climate change, then the dark skin adaptation will win and a completely different set of winning alleles will define the new race.
Please recognize this is a thought experiment. It assumes a stable population more or less cut off from the outside. I believe there will be more, not less, movement of individuals over the next thousand years. I am a technological optimist. I expect us to continue the upwards trend in knowledge and the consequent upward trend in human welfare, income and mobility.
If I were to bet on any long term trend, it is that in ten thousand years the ease of travel will have made earth’s gene pool rather homogeneous and the far colonies in the Oort Cloud will be not only racially different but well down the road to full speciation.
Gene Expression takes exception to my earlier posting:
Of course, I beg to disagree. Let me give you an example of how race does matter, ripped off from Steve Sailer: “You’re a 5’0″ tall female walking down the street. Coming down the street on your side are four black men loudly talking to each other. On the other side of the street you see four Chinese men, again, talking loudly to each other. What do you do?”
To which I answer: “In which year?” Just to have a bit of fun with this, I’ll posit the thoughts running through our midget blonde’s matrilineal side heads:
1930: “Don’t they know their place? If one of them touches me daddy’ll have them all lynched!”
1950: “What is this world coming to? I’ll have to tell daddy so the police can arrest them.”
1970: “They’re probably angry over white hegemony. I’d better cross the street for safety.”
1990: “The one in the middle is kind of cute.”
2010: “Didn’t I go out with him once?”
2030: “I’d swear that was cousin Lonnie!”
No matter how one measures welfare, there’s more of it where governments refrain from causing poverty by curtailing markets
– Leon Louw
Alex Singleton of Liberty Log links to a Sunday Telegraph piece by Leon Louw of the South African Free Market Foundation. Louw is an actual live delegate at the Johannesburg eco-imperialist fest (eco-imperialism being Louw’s verbal coinage, not mine), and supplies first hand reportage from that deeply dangerous event. Recommended. (By the way, the above link to the FMF will now get you to another Johannesburg piece by Roger Bate.)
Louw has been one of my favourite libertarians every since he spoke at the 1984 Libertarian International gathering held here in London (far outskirts of). I loved the talk he gave then, which the Libertarian Alliance published.
I especially treasure his insight that all legal principles without exception have potential grey areas associated with them in certain cases. Property rights are often hard to clarify in particular cases, “reasonable” self defence can often be hard to agree about, when is pollution pollution?, and so on. Hence the ubiquitous need for law courts to settle hard cases.
So, never disagree with your opponent’s principles merely because it can sometimes be hard to apply them, for that will be true of your principles also. Disagree with them because they are bad principles, all the more dangerous when easily applied.
David Farrer of Freedom and Whisky responds briefly to my unbrief piece about John Gray.
As Brian Micklethwait suggests, John Gray is an incorrigible pessimist. That I can understand but it’s no reason to give up the fight for liberty.
First, I don’t suggest that John Gray is a pessimist, I bloody well say it in seventeen foot high flaming capital letters. There’s no suggesting about it.
And second, to repeat the point being made in those seventeen foot high letters, Gray’s pessimism applies to whatever is the dominant optimism. And that’s now us. We used to be pessimistic about Marxism and he agreed with us about that. But he never agreed with us about the wonders of liberty, because he doesn’t believe in the wonders of anything. He’s not giving up the fight for liberty, because he never fought for it in the first place. He merely fought with us, against Marxism. Now, there’s no need for that, because that fight is over. Now we are the enemy, with our absurd enthusiasm for the wonderful things that liberty might do, in a possible wonderful libertarian future. He is, I repeat, being completely consistent.
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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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