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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Lagwolf does not think much of the ideology underpinning the EU.
The EU has decided in all its brilliance in order to make sure to avoid facism in Europe it has to be have like the Nazis in the 1930s. It yet another gross breach of liberty and individual rights the EU is trying to bring in legislation to ban “racism and xenophobia”. Neither is illegal in the UK. To add to this outrage, it will be possible to be prosecuted by other EU countries for offences committed in another EU country.
So some nosy German know-it-all (yes, I know that is a tautology) (mis)hears me making some derogatory comment or joke about the Germans. He then goes home and reports me to his local black shirt (er, sorry, policeman). This policeman can then issue a warrant for my arrest in the UK and I can be dragged to Germany for a trial. This law could pretty much cause the arrest of every comedian in Britain as well as most of my friends.
I am sure we can expect the French to use this to prosecute any Briton who dares question French behaviour towards the Jews during Vichy. There are also worries that this will be used to quiet criticism of the EU in Britain. For years there have been attempts made to paint any Eurosceptic/Realist/Phobe as a racist and a xenophobe.
In short, this law is outrage on everything that is right and true in the Anglosphere. One hopes, this is yet another nail in the coffin of Britain’s membership is the 4th Reich/2nd Holy Roman Empire/EU.
Lagwolf
Thanks to Natalija for the use of her ‘interesting’ graphic
I suppose it was predictable that I would get a wide range of e-mails regarding my article about Israel called The Palestinian Götterdämmerung. One reader seems to feel I am a “crypto-authoritarian supporter of Jewish racism” whilst another accuses me of regarding Israel as ‘evil’ and yet another claims that by holding Israel in any way responsible I am “indifferent to the possible annihilation of all Jews in the Middle East”. Still others have written to me in such a manner that I can only speculate they read some different article altogether. Although this is actually one of my least favourite subjects, I will clarify and expend a few of my views seeing as so many people seem to take exception to them or want clarifications on what my views are.
I do not think Israel is ‘evil’ just because I feel there is a section of Israeli society that is far from blameless. Neither am I a crypto-authoritarian because I believe that Israel is entitled to defend itself. I think the state of Israel has been led by a series of people who have pursued disastrous policies derived from their collectivist mind sets rooted in the complex reasons and events that lead to Israel’s founding, the consequences of which are all too obvious today. The conflict within Israel between socialist collectivism, religious collectivism and capitalist (and sometimes even religious) individualism has, as in so many other western societies (for that is what Israel really is), resulted in a schizophrenic mess.
However I think Israeli society does indeed have the right, in fact the moral duty, to do what it has to do to defend itself. However that fact does not absolve the leaders of Israel who allowed this situation to come about of guilt, any more than any Israeli provocations absolve the morally deranged Palestinian extremists from what they have done and are still doing. I do not make any moral equivalence, far from it in fact, for a damnable litany of mistakes on one side may explain a torrent of evil on the other without at the same time justifying and excusing it. My sympathies are with Israelis for whom a visit to a pizza parlor can end in being blown to bits by the young girl standing next to them… and also with ordinary Palestinians who cannot build on their own property for fear of Israeli soldiers with bulldozers enforcing discriminatory ‘planning regulations’… and yet if they sell that property to an Israeli, houses will spring up there like mushrooms.
Yet my big problem with Israeli policies is not so much settlement, which if handled differently might not have been so provocative, but that regardless of the letter of the law and claims to the contrary, it has been made clear that there is no genuine wish to treat non-Jews as equals economically or judicially. Policies should have been aimed at fragmenting, factionalising and de-collectivising the Palestinians, co-opting them economically and culturally and pointing out that Western style Israeli institutions are vastly superior to their corrupt counterparts in surrounding Arab countries, rather than ghettoising the Palestinians and then using them as a nice source of cheap wetbacks. Every time the state of Israel made life harder and harder for entire communities of Palestinians with heavy handed policing, every time entire communities found themselves unable to travel to work in Israel or even the next town in the occupied territories because of the actions of a few, in fact every time they came in contact with the official face of the Israeli state, individual Palestinians discovered that they are not being discriminated against because they supported Fatah, Hamas or Hezbollah personally, but because they are Palestinians. Not surprisingly more and more of them started to see no reason not to support Fatah, Hamas or Hezbollah.
That is the ‘forcible collectivisation’ process of which I wrote, driven by the collectivist strain of thought that was present at the very foundation of Israel and which has been in conflict with the more rational individualist/capitalist ethos also present in Israeli society ever since… and then to make it so very much worse, Israel makes sure that the psychopathic Arafat ends up the uncontested leader, rather than bending over backwards to encourage rational economically oriented moderates to oppose him. I think that absorption and co-option of a significant chunk of the Palestinian population, giving them a genuine stake in Israel’s secular capitalist future, rather than leaving them with (on the West Bank) a GDP per capita of $1,500 per year, was the way to undercut the toxic forces represented by the ghastly Arafat. I realise that many within Israel understood that but for every rational Nathan Sharansky, there was a bigot like Rehavam Zeevi working to very different ends. A visible measure of the utter failure of Israeli policy is that Palestinian Christians, surely a natural factional ally of Israel and once a marginalised and often despised Arab minority, are now united with their Muslim confreres by their collective loathing of Israel. Likewise the stark example of the fate of pro-Israeli Lebanese Arab militias inside the former buffer zone showed what can happen when the going gets tough to those who throw their lot in with Israel.
Now people who do believe that these are all grossly unfair characterisations of the reality of the state of Israel’s policies will never be convinced otherwise and I do not propose to even try to change that. I do not purport to have my own unimpeachable sources of news from the region but I have known many Israelis and a few Palestinians and feel my grasp on what has gone on is reasonably sound. But at least I hope some people who feel the need to write long strident e-mails will try to see that my dismay at Israel’s policies over the last few decades springs not from hostility to Israel so much as dismay that things could have gone so terribly terribly wrong for what is clearly in many ways an admirable western society with which I share much in the way of meta-context and values.
But of course now, none of the sort of policies I wanted to see over the last 30 years are even an option any more and I realise that. That is why I wrote ‘Israel must do terrible things to survive’. The errors have been made, compounded and have now come due. To quote Talleyrand (or Joseph Fouché, I have seen it attributed to both), it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake. That is why I want the people responsible for those compounded mistakes ‘to be damned’ when the time to tally up the final toll comes.
However if I was an Israeli right now, I would be more concerned about personal survival but eventually the inevitable consequences of the influence in Israel of those with a profoundly collectivist ethos are going to have to be faced by every single person in Israel. Israeli society is going to have to decide just what living within ‘The Jewish State’ actually means and what it should mean in the future. I wish them luck for I do not envy them that task.
As I write, Britain’s Parliament is speechifying about the recently deceased Queen Mother. It occurs to me that her death may in time come to symbolise a change in the style of British public life, and in particular an end to the extraordinary episode of generational/emotional warfare initiated by the death of Princess Diana. This untimely event, together with the memory of the unhappy life that preceded it and with the lamentations that followed it, provoked praise of a more theatrical style of public emotional deportment. Stoicism, dignity and emotional reticence in the face of loss was held up to bitter and strident ridicule, most especially in connection with the public demeanour of the Queen.
Emotionally I am a true son of my late father, or at any rate I try to be. In his capacity as a Posh Lawyer he met the Queen Mother a few times, and, in common with most men and women of his time and type, he adored her. Like the Queen Mum, my father was a stoic. Life was a pleasure to be enjoyed, if necessary an ordeal to be endured, and a duty to be done. Pains and pleasures were both keenly felt, but both to be kept in proportion, at arm’s length so to speak.
Being my father’s son, I miss the days when footballers would score goals and then nod in modestly happy acknowledgement, instead of (as now) being mobbed like victorious streetfighters. When Halle Berry embarked upon her emotionally incontinent Oscar acceptance speech not long ago (made all the more repulsive to me by the suspicion that she may have been deliberately exaggerating the emotional incontinence of it all) I switched off my television as if killing a nasty insect. Many of Princess Diana’s performances were like that, both in their emotional revelation and in the sense you got that it was all rather calculated.
Emotional style matters. Style provokes, constrains and conditions actions. Devotees of the Emotional Incontinence school of public deportment are liable to make rasher, more impulsive decisions. My father and the Queen Mum lived to be ninety and a hundred respectively, and made themselves thoroughly useful and appreciated throughout their lives. When their contemporaries and emotional confreres died young or otherwise came to grief, they mostly did this while winning a world war. Princess Di got herself killed, pointlessly, in her thirties, in a car crash.
The current worrying increase in crime in Britain, with its spate of shootings, muggings, burglaries, as well as the continued rise in general boorishness and incivility, is one of the main topics of public debate in this country. Predictably, our political masters have reacted to this by proposing such illiberal and largely useless “solutions” as restricting the right to trial by jury, state ID cards, and so forth. So it is encouraging to know that an earlier generation was able to tackle what was by then a relatively unruly society withouth raining all over civil liberties. It has been done before and it can be done again.
I refer to that much misunderstood and maligned period – The Victorian age. They brought about a substantial drop in the crime rate without raining all over civil liberties. And one interesting feature of that period was that the school-leaving age was lower than it is now. Of course this is a complex subject, but I cannot help thinking that some of the current bout of delinquency among youngsters is that many of them are bored out of their minds at school and could be spending their lives more usefully elsewhere.
It was not so much ‘love at first sight’ as ‘love at first philosophical exchange’
– Perry de Havilland
An article in Computerworld responds to the fears for privacy as a trade-off to security after September 11th. Jay Cline lists a number of scenarios that would signal that privacy and American’s civil liberties are in danger and actually being reduced.
If a nationwide loss of privacy has occurred, we should be seeing at least one of the following scenarios: a widespread expansion in the scope of the government’s collection of personal data, courts setting dangerous legal precedents or a surge in the number of people harmed by abuses of government-collected data. These are the speed bumps on the road from liberty to tyranny, and none has been crossed.
So far in the war on terrorism, there has been no widespread increase in the government’s collection of Americans’ personal data….and there is no pattern of government abuses of personal data stemming from Sept. 11. The congressional oversight committees have certainly been busier, but so far, we haven’t seen any members seeking hearings on privacy abuses.
The Patriot Act, passed in October last year giving the FBI new powers to monitor the e-mail of suspected terrorists, is mentioned in a relaxed manner:
The Patriot Act also enables government agencies to share more law-enforcement information. Many Americans think the federal government already has a huge big brother computer file on each person. But the reality is that big brother is a hodgepodge of little cousins — the same sort of motley collection of stovepiped and uncoordinated databases that most large corporations have..and…the FBI certainly hasn’t taken upon itself to conduct random keyword searches of all the e-mail coursing through the servers of U.S. ISPs.
There are two reasons for drawing attention to this article. First, I have blogged about privacy and security before where I applauded an article in the same magazine for pointing out the dangers of the drive for security at the cost of privacy. To balance that concern, the inefficiency inherent in governments and their bureaucracies often seems more tangible to me than extensive and elaborate conspiracies. Secondly, I would welcome any information about measures that do pose a definite threat to privacy as a result of September 11th and indeed any comments regarding privacy versus security issue. As they say, the truth is out there.
When the state watches you,
dare to stare back
Famed smoker of Communist cigars and cunning blogger Brian Linse of Ain’t no bad dude fame has finally ‘got with the programme’ and posted some pictures of the delectable British Actress Laura Fraser at the Den of Lions blog.
In case you do not know, Brian Linse moonlights as a film producer when he is not blogging and is currently in the midst of shooting an action thriller in Budapest called Den of Lions, staring Stephen Dorff, Bob Hoskins, Laura Fraser, Ian Hart, Laura Fraser, David O’Hara, Laura Fraser.
Laura Fraser prepares for a scene in the movie Den of Lions Did I mention that Laura Fraser was in the movie?
Check out Brian’s Den of Lions film blog. It is yet another fascinating way in which blogs can be used, providing interesting information and insights as the project develops on-site in Hungary, with updates to follow when the film enters its post-production phase.
There’s an old joke about a camel being a horse designed by a committee. Well, what do you call a Navigational Positioning Satellite designed by a committee? Galileo.
“At a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, EU ministers reached a deal to provide funding for the launch of Galileo, the multi-billion Euro navigation satellite system intended to rival the US Global Positioning System (GPS), thereby removing the last obstacle in the way of the project.”
Ah yes, the ‘last obstacle’ being a blank cheque for the mind-boggling amount of taxpayers money that they are going to throw at this thing. The report estimates the cost at a laughable 3.6 billion €uros but who are they trying to kid? It’ll cost more than that to supply the EU ministers with a set of custom-made luxury ‘space slippers’ for when they attend the ceremonial launch.
Or, rather, when they don’t because if this thing ever actually makes it into space then my name is Buzz Lightyear. Just like that other grand EU project the Eurofighter the damned thing will be lucky if it ever emerges from the assembly line. The Eurofighter has had public money hosed it at for lord knows how long, it was obsolete 2 years ago and it hasn’t even been built yet!
The exhausted European taxpayer would have had to have forked out far less money if the EU had simply ordered a squadron of F-16s (as HM Government was advised to do by the Ministry of Defence). But, oh no, we don’t want that. We have to have a ‘European’ combat aircraft to express our distinct ‘European’ identity. Looks like they got it.
So, cue another round of horse-trading, bickering and monumental waste as each part of the Galileo project is apportioned out according to who makes the most noise. The French will build the electrics, the Italians will build the housing, the Belgians will make the navigation system, the Germans will make the rocket boosters, the Spanish will make the launch platform, the Austrians will make the sandwiches and Sweden will provide the environmental protestors.
And you can guess, I mean you just know that none of the bits will fit together, the rest of the bits won’t work and all the bits will be behind schedule, ludicrously over-budget and held up by strike action. And, naturally, nobody will wish to complain because to do will cause a diplomatic incident and the launch site will be located in the country that agrees not to vote against French agricultural subsidies (and guaranteed to be the one furthest away from the Equator – Finland probably).
The Galileo project will, again, graphically illustrate everything that is wrong with the EU. The Soviets managed to get into space because they had a command economy where a Kommisar for Space simply ordered that a satellite be built and it was duly built. Mind you, they had to work with a wooden crate, a leaky old battery and a tube of glue but, by golly, they did it. But there will no such bullish positivity for Galileo, proving that the EU is riven with all the drawbacks of a totalitarian state and none of the advantages.
This whole debacle could have been avoided if they’d simply taken up the American offer of buying bandwidth on America’s own GPS system. It would certainly have saved a mint. But, no, the EU has to have its own satellite system so it can cock a snoot at those imperialist ‘Yanquees’ and get on with doing lots of, er, ‘European’ things in space. Besides, the European taxpayers have got far more money than they need.
There is some small chink of light at the end of this particular worm-hole, though. The US government has expressed concern that should Galileo become operational it could be used by terrorist cells to plan attacks on the US. Now, personally, I think that the Americans, the Russians, the Indians, the Israelis, the Australians, the Japanese and just about everybody else will have functioning colonies on Mars before that happens, but, in the event that it does, the US just might find itself in a position where they have to shoot the bloody thing out of the sky (chortle, snigger, stuff handkerchief in mouth). What a tragedy!!
As I once mentioned before in an earlier blog article, I am not one of those people who thinks the term ‘modern art’ is an oxymoron. That said, I am somewhat in sympathy with the Stuckists and regard much (or even most) ‘installation art’ as not so much bad art as not art at all.
This picture of the late Queen Mother, whilst clearly a piece of classical portraiture, is also quite modern in its lightness and style. It does not attempt either soulless photographic hyper-realism or remote abstraction but instead captures the rather charming essence of the subject’s mixture of formality and accessibility.
It is a reminder that we do not have to look very far back to avoid “British art disappearing up its own arse” as Ivan Massow put it. I do not think art should just be formal portraits but I do think it must have meaning that rational observers can actually divine.
Gosh, what a lot of e-mails I had waiting for me asking why I have not posted for a while. Unfortunately I have been too involved with unexpected business travel and family matters to be able to blog. To make matters worse my portable is sick and so I can only post from my office, which is a bit difficult.
I hope to do a few postings this week if my crazy schedule permits!
In the small hours of Monday morning I went to visit A Coyote at the Dog Show, on account of it being the first on the blog list on the Samizdata sidebar links. The Coyote man quoted (on Thursday March 28) an interesting opinion from Bill Quick:
Tens of thousands of folks are getting a charge out of creating and maintaining blogs, with absolutely no financial rewards – except for a handful of bloggers so tiny their numbers are statistically meaningless noise. The charge is enough for now, but it won’t last, and the blogosphere, currently in full expansion, will shrink like a popped balloon in another year or so, as hundreds of thousands of blogs go dark and dead.
The problem is simple: it requires too much work and talent to maintain a good blog, work and talent that brings in nothing tangible for the creator.
A similar thought had been occurring to me. Patrick Crozier tells me that keeping UK Transport in full flow is already an effort. Natalie Solent is off at the seaside. Will they go dark and dead? I do hope not.
I don’t think Samizdata will expire soon. Perry seems like a stayer to me, and is not arrogant enough to assume that he can keep Samizdata going indefinitely all by himself. Maybe he could, but why take the chance? There’s a team of us, and Perry is always on the lookout for more. (Libertarian, supermodel, good sense of humour, advanced philosophy degree, is the kind of CV he seems to like best, if you’re thinking of applying.)
Plus: We’re ideologically motivated. We have something big to say, and to keep on saying. We don’t get money, but we do get prestige within the libertarian movement. The Libertarian Alliance has chuntered along for two decades fuelled by little else, inspired by the mere dream of readership numbers per year of the sort that Samizdata now gets in a week. Samizdatans will come and go, but Samizdata itself could well continue into the 2020s.
Nor will Samizdata be the only survivor. Blogging won’t go away, any more than insects will merely because so many of them die per hour. Bill Quick thinking that it will sounds to me like the wishful thinking of a professional writer (which the talented Bill Quick is), wanting to believe that these damned amateurs will vanish and restore the status quo ante. Many will, true. Blogging, like the internet as a whole, will have downs as well as ups, but enough blogs will stick around to prove Bill wrong. Even if blogging is for many only a brief shining moment, millions will want that moment, and then millions more, until some even better way of writing your mind comes along.
And some of the blogs that do stick around will become much bigger than any blog is now.
With so much in the world to write about, comment upon, illuminate, satirise and analyse, I can no longer remain oblivious to the elephant that has rudely bashed down my door and lumbered into my room.
He’s been loitering outside for a good while now, occasionally catching my eye with a baleful and accusatory glance. Thus far, I have succeeded in shutting him out but I still catch a glimpse of him through the crack in my curtains; I lie in bed at night and hear his tail swishing to-and-fro and feel the bump as his ample haunches scrape against my walls.
My efforts at exclusion have availed me nought for he has abandoned his patient vigil and simply barged his way in. He is standing next to me now, snorting and bellowing and commanding my every regard.
I write this not because I want to but because I feel I have to.
We have all watched while events in the Middle East have rapidly escalated to the point where Israel has, now, formally declared itself to be at war. It is a conflict that we all regard with a deep sense of foreboding because we all instinctively realise the implications not just for the parties concerned but beyond. Having read the posting from Perry de Havilland, it is with a heavy heart that I concur with both his analysis and his prognosis.
But it does not end there and it would be bad enough even if it did. As evidence mounts that both Syria and Iraq are preparing to enjoin a wider war and given the intention of both the USA and the UK to go after Saddam and America’s broader war against Al-Qaeda, the mind begins to boggle at just how bad all this could get. Will Islamic radicals take this war to the USA mainland again? And what happens if they do?
In a way that if the most frightening element of this mess; the fact that Arab radicals really seem to think they can push the Israelis into the sea and bring the West to its knees. Not wishing to be pejorative, but they are, quite simply, deranged. That’s what makes this so different from the Cold War. The Russians had chained themselves to a warped and bankrupt philosophy but they could always be relied upon to act in their own best interests.
Not so here, sadly. Too many Arabic radicals believe their own rhetoric and are suicidal enough to act upon it. They simply do not seem to appreciate that whatever force the Israelis can unleash it is not but a gnat’s bite compared to that which can be visited upon them by Uncle Sam.
I can see the confluence of forces beginning to take shape and time-honoured dark clouds brooding on the horizon. Maybe this is my sordid and pessimistic imagination at work but there are too many red lights flashing to dismiss them all as herrings.
Did it feel like this in 1913? Could anyone see then where that Great Power rivalry was going to lead? Did anyone imagine the scale of carnage that lay ahead? If they did, would history have been any different? Or is there something deep within the epistemology of our species that impels us inexorably towards these periodic bloodlettings, regardless of the steps we take to avoid them? Is that really what all our searching and truth-seeking is all about? A desire to know the truth about ourselves when the real truth hides in plain sight all around us. Libertarianism, Conservatism, Socialism, Marxism and all other ‘isms’ seem nothing more than ephemeral and foppish casuistry in times like these; parlour games for the effete, the safe and the well-fed.
The kind of parlour games they probably played with each other in that last, dappled Edwardian summer before Europe became a charnel-house.
I don’t know if Europe, or anywhere else, will become a charnel-house again. I certainly hope not. But if things go as badly as they could go, then a lot of consequences will follow and expect none of them to be very agreeable. Synagogues are already ablaze in France.
None of us may be touched, but all of us will be tested.
The elephant is still here. I suppose I will have to learn to live round him somehow. He tells me that he once appeared in the background in Out of Africa and he keeps quoting a line from the film; a resignation used by the African farm workers when they were facing a catastrophe or force majeure that they could neither avoid nor prevent.
“Mem’sahib” they would say ”God is coming”
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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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