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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Paul Marks takes a rather more jaundiced view of Dubya than David Carr
I agree that the enemies of President Bush tend to be rather evil. However, that does not mean that the Bush Administration is very good.
As far as I know they have not even tried to cut (let alone abolish) any Welfare State program or get rid of any major regulation – they seem to be just marking time before the Democrats take control of the White House again.
Still this better than the first Bush Administration (the Bush with the “Herbert” in his name). That Administration increased taxes and added lots of new regulations (such as the infamous Americans with a Disability Act).
Paul Marks
Paul Marks read David Carr‘s article and points out that one can regard the remarks being made by the leaders of the EU…rather differently!
The honesty of Mr Prodi and Mr Chris Patten should be welcomed.
It saves a lot of time if, instead of going through a big debate on whether the E.U. is aiming at setting up a superstate and crushing as much liberty as it can, leaders of this organization stand up and boast of their ambitions.
If the only the Chancellor in the latest Star Wars film and been so honest. Picture the scene – he stands before the Senate and says “I am a Lord of the Dark Side of the Force – I am behind both sides in this new war. I plan to use the war to place the whole galaxy under my heel and grind it into the dirt”.
Real life is often odder than fantasy.
Paul Marks
According to the BBC website, 11,990 people have voted on whether Roy Keane, the captain of the Republic of Ireland team at the soccer world cup in Japan (who can’t play England unless both sides win or lose in the semi-finals) should have been dropped by his manager or not.
Last week about 3,000 voted on whether Britain is ready to join the euro and 55 per cent said yes. If England are knocked out playing badly, by a EU country, I predict a swing to the euro. If England win, then Mr Blair can bamboozle us in during the celebrations (he’ll have about three years if the last time is anything to go by). Go the Eurosceptic should hope for dignified defeat at the hands of Brazil in the semi-final.
I don’t like “Yes you did” “No I didn’t” conversations in newsgroups so I’m wary of doing so here. Brian refers to the horrors faced by mixed-married couples in Yugoslavia. I think we’ll find that these are precisely the people who didn’t start looking for an ethnic or religious war with their neighbours. Oscar Wilde would no doubt have suggested that matrimonial strife was amply sufficient. Alexander the Great tried to solve racial problems by ordering his officers to marry Persians. Napoleon suggested that if the French all married blacks then the issue would be ended once and for all. Both were poisoned for their pains. Next time someone compares these tyrants to Hitler I’ll dig out the reference.
As for my awkward posts: suck eggs Brian! and let’s look forward to Zinedine Zidane (a Moslem who’s idea of terror is firing footballs into a goal full of terrified innocent defenders) versus Nicky Butt in the second round, assuming Cameroon don’t cripple half the England team in the ‘friendly’.
Anglosphere writer Jim Bennett weighs in with another fine salvo against EU Commissioner Chris (oh no, not him again!) Patten. Rather than repeat my earlier comments last week about the wretched Commissioner, just take a look at what Mr Bennett has to say. What impresses me so much about Bennett’s writing is that he manages to maintain a civil, pleasant tone even when trashing ideas he regards as dumb.
Oh, and changing the subject, another excellent article, if one has the time, is Andrew Sullivan‘s Sunday Times column on the vast wealth of what he calls the Western world’s “overclass”. Sullivan makes the point – obvious to we libertarians if not to collectivists – that the tremendous wealth of Bill Gates and the like is not made at the expense of we humbler mortals, but is part of an ever-increasing pie. However, Sullivan frets that the growth of such an overclass” is a problem, since society can become fragmented if the very rich are seen as detached from the mores and concerns of the middle class. A sort of mirror-problem of the “underclass”. I am not entirely sure he is right, but agree this is worth thinking about. It is also instructive to look at what Sullivan says about the proportion of tax paid by rich Americans. Completely undermines the idea that supply-side tax cuts are unfair. If anything, the rich were entitled to a bigger cut than that which Bush gave them last year.
However, Sullivan backs away from the obvious conclusion – the moral tax rate is Nil!
Nice profile of UK scientist Dr Terence Kealey in the latest online edition of U.S. technology and venture capital magazine Red Herring, which draws out Kealey’s claim that it is wrong to suppose science will die without generous funding from the taxpayer. The man knows what he is talking about, having worked as a research scientist at a number of British institutions.
The profile is refreshingly fair-minded. In fact, this edition of Red Herring is excellent, with lots of good stuff on biotech, nanotechnology, telecoms and much besides. It is generally pro-free enterprise without being tiresomely ideological and is often a good way to pitch capitalism to the neutral observer. I once met its main editor and founder, Anthony Perkins, in his Californian home about five years ago and am impressed to see how his publication has surged over the years. More power to Red Herring’s elbow.
Harold Wilson said Labour was a crusade or it was nothing. I try not to think about his assertion. The logical implications are too painful.
-Roy Hattersley, 1997
Romano Prodi wants tax harmonisation in the EU and a single foreign policy. Does it mean we will all have to surrender simultaneously?
Meanwhile Chris Petain calls for all Europeans to discard their national identities and learn to love the EU and the Blair government is busying itself with it’s plans to ‘regionalise’ England (both matters liberally linked to in the ‘sphere).
All of a sudden, the EU looks like a project in a big hurry; sort of like campers desperately trying to get their tent erected in double-quick time ‘neath brooding storm clouds.
Perhaps, with one big puff, we can blow their house down.
The world is a complex and confusing place oftentimes. It can be so hard to know for sure whether or not one is doing the right thing. There are, though, some yardsticks and one of them is the ‘European street’ which has risen up in protest at a visit to Germany by George Bush.
I’m not entirely sure what track Mr.Bush is on, but when he induces rent-a-mob to take to the streets with slogans like ‘Nature Before Profits’ we can all be pretty sure that he’s on the right one.
Personally, I’d like to see him rub some salt into the wounds while he’s about it. Perhaps he could play up the ‘cowboy’ image? (Is this Germany? Where are all them folks wearing them leather pants?). Better still he could echo Reagan in the 80’s but instead of calling for the end of the Berlin Wall, he could call for the end of the Welfare State. Then he could fly back to the US, chuckling to himself, while watching Berlin explode in his rear-view mirror.
As you can probably tell, Samizdata is undergoing a phase of collective preoccupation with Other Things just now, not least the difficulties associated with the programme Perry uses to run the thing. And to adapt Groucho Marx, any enterprise that relies on me might as well give up now and save itself the bother. The point being, I’m busy too, even if it may not look it. I’ll tell you all about it in due course, but not until I’ve done it thank you. A man’s got to know his limitations, failing to stick to public promises being one of my worst.
So let guest writer P.G. Wodehouse take up the slack. I swear on a stack of Jeeves paperbacks that I picked this paragraph, which is from The Code of the Woosters, completely at random. The only qualification I looked for was that it lacked inverted commas, because I especially like Wodehouse when he alone is doing the talking. Here is the random paragraph:
The whole situation recalled irresistibly to my mind something that had happened to me once up at Oxford, when the heart was young. It was during Eights Week, and I was sauntering on the river-bank with a girl named something that has slipped my mind, when there was a sound of barking – and a large, hefty dog came galloping up, full of beans and buck and obviously intent on mayhem. And I was just commending my soul to God and feeling that this was where the old flannel trousers got about thirty bobs’ worth of value bitten out of them, when the girl, waiting till she saw the whites of its eyes, with extraordinary presence of mind suddenly opened a coloured Japanese umbrella in the animal’s face. Upon which, it did three back somersaults and retired into private life.
Now I know what you’re thinking. What is this whole situation? Well to echo Clint Eastwood just once more, this time from the closing moments of Two Mules For Sister Sarah: I haven’t got time for that.
Bloody Antoine. You spend half your life trying to get him to do things, and then he does something just when you don’t want him to (see below), and makes nonsense of everything in this post so far, which you might as well have anyway.
I know that individual Muslims can be the salt of the earth. I too regret the passing of the kebab shop in Tachbrook Street. Some of my best friends are Muslims. The trouble is that when one of these Islam-versus-the-rest horrors erupts, it swallows up individual salt-of-the-earth Muslims along with everyone else. In Yugoslavia for example, happily married city folks who hardly even realised that their marriage was “mixed” suddenly got shot to hell.
Plus, I’m not in favour of a war for heaven’s sakes. I’m just frightened there might be one.
An “individualist” approach doesn’t cut it, because individuals ain’t the problem. But I’ll supply a more thoughtful response when I’ve more time. (Damn, another public promise.)
Brian Micklethwait should try applying an individualist approach to the problem of Islamic fundamentalism. Is Mohammed Al Fayed a viper in the nest of free-market(ish) Europe? Perhaps, but he’s not a threat to Western Civilization because of his religious beliefs. The Turkish kebab shop in Tachbrook Street (now demolished by predatory developers  ) with the Galatasaray and Arsenal football fan may be included on census forms as a “non-white European” to terrify drawing room society, but I was less frightened of his political opinions than I am by some of Sean Gabb’s, and his cooking was a lot less threatening than Brian’s.
Go to an Italian restaurant in central London. Many of the raven haired waitresses are no more Italian than I am, and no more Catholic than Osama bin Laden. They’re wine drinking economic migrants from Kosovo whose parents had “Moslem” on their communist era identity cards. Sure, add them up and you get 40 per cent of the population of a grotty flat in Finchley or Norwood. The other 60 per cent are as likely to be Serbs, Croats or Slovaks all with their nominal ethnic or religious hatreds. How come they aren’t slaughtering each other in Ballards Lane or West Norwood High Street? As individuals, Moslems are no worse than Glaswegians. It’s when a mob looking for a fight at a football match run into you that they’re a nuisance.
The problem isn’t immigration… Its immigration and a welfare state. We have to choose one or the other. I make no bones in saying that the NHS, comprehensive education, state benefits, council housing, free abortions (no charge to the user) all have to go. All that immigration has done is accelarate the process of creating an underclass. If we’d had the welfare state in the seventeenth century the Jews and Dutch would have a reputation in Britain for being alcoholics, single mothers, violent etc. No doubt Jewish fundamentalist groups attacking the decadence of the West would be scaring Gabb and Micklethwait with demands for shop closures on Saturday, modest clothing for women and demands for apologies for anti-semitic persecutions. Instead some of them went into banking.
Launching an air strikes on Harrods and rounding up all Moslem males over the age of five for an unstated purpose is not the answer, it seems more likely to worsen matters and destroy the moral meaning of the West. Actually the libertarians got it right who said that the best way to prevent another Oklahoma bombing would be to get Clinton out of the White House, and a relatively non-interventionist government in her place.
The best way to improve race relations in the UK is for the state to get out of welfare and stop appearing to spend white taxpayers money on layabouts who happen to be black. The state should however either get out of policing, or vigourously enforce laws against violent crime and crimes against property. Islamic sentences for property crimes would seem to me preferable to the present lunacy in Western Europe.
Fundamentalist terrorism is not uniquely Islamic. The shopkeeping Moslems are as afraid of a nuke in London as anyone, they are also pretty worried that they might become scapegoats for Brian’s fears. War on Moslems because of Bin Laden is like having a war on Californian hippies because of Charles Manson.
Between the two rounds of voting in France the presence of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the run-off had a curious effect. David Carr asked if this had reduced attacks on synagogues. I don’t know, because the French media don’t report these attacks and I haven’t got round to checking.
However a French police officer did comment how wonderful it was: all the no-go areas saw a massive drop in crime, as if the underclass figured that a Le Pen presidency might not be the best place to be a petty criminal. This incidentally suggests that free-will is not entirely absent, even from compulsive criminals and supposedly rabid Islamic fundamentalists. The logical conclusion is that the president should face re-election every month, with a really nasty opponent guaranteed a chance of winning.
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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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