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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Well if the boys can have Inter-blog Gun Wars, why not Inter-blog Porn Wars? And contrary to what one e-mail said, I do not write these things just to wind people up…
 …well, I must confess I do rather enjoy seeing Kevin leap up and down every time the subject comes up again.
But in truth I do think the issue lies on the edge of some very fundamental questions about human society and what makes it work, or not. Kathy Kinsley has joined the battle, giving William Sulik a forceful handbagging. I agree with Kathy and digging out my Oxford dictionary find a much more straightforward definition of pornography:
pornography n. 1 the explicit description or exhibition of sexual activity in literature, films, etc., intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings. 2 literature etc. characterised by this. [Gk pornographos writing of harlots f. porne prostitute + graphos write]
As Kathy also mentions, it is interesting to find that women seem to be the ones who tend to the ‘pro-porn’ side of this argument. Last time I wrote about this issue and, as has also been the case this time, generated a big spike in e-mails, women overwhelmingly agreed with me whereas men were more evenly divided.
Also I do address the matter of the more extreme forms of porn in my latest pro-porn frolic. Like many others I have poked around the Internet and seen some of the more alarming stuff but I cannot help thinking that it is much less significant that many seem to insist. It is a fact that people are capable of astonishing brutality and cruelty, but having seen that first hand on a large scale, I cannot see how people can then conclude when the same things happen on a small scale elsewhere, it must be due to pornography. Why not vodka or anything else you care to think up?
I will try to make some time later to answer more of the e-mails and bloggings on the subject that have sprung up overnight. I have a feeling these issues are going to have a long shelf life.
The music industry is a wonderful example of how established players in any market often feel they have a vested interest in stasis rather than dynamic change. Rather than see new technical innovations as potential boons, the industry has spent a fortune trying to use the state to defend its existing business models with an army of lobbyists and lawyers, attempting to un-invent the technologies that they (rightly) see as shattering the current structure of its multi-billion dollar industry. Steven Den Beste has a good article on the subject and makes an excellent point regarding the self-defeating culture in the boardrooms of the music industry majors:
As long as the industry doesn’t see it from that point of view, they will continue to try to fight the future. No industry can ultimately survive if it thinks of its customers as enemies; ultimately the industry has to adopt the point of view of its customers and cater to their desires. You cannot sell someone what you want them to have. You have to sell them what they want to buy.
A classic case of this syndrome of ‘customer-as-enemy’ was provided by Steve Heckler a VP from Sony Pictures Entertainment in August 2000 who said:
The [music] industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams,” Heckler said. “It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what. […] Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source – we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your [ISP]. We will firewall it at your PC.
Although Sony tried to apply some damage limitation spin to Heckler’s remarks soon afterwards, this is clearly delusions of grandeur on a spectacular scale and is exactly the mentality to which Den Beste has alluded. The major players think they can translate their wealth into political muscle and use the state to crush would-be new entrants that seek to undermine their businesses. taking out Napster has only encouraged this flawed thinking. Additionally yet more money is being spent on technological fixes which are also doomed to fail due to the ‘Swiss Watch Effect’ (it is cheaper and easier to smash a Swiss Watch than it is to make one): they spend millions on copy protection that will be broken within months or weeks by the worldwide army of Internet linked 15 year old crackers who work for free.
Another indication of the scale of ‘wrong-think’ going on in boardrooms is that they do not seem to realise that many people’s CD player is their computer. I might have purchase the new Natalie Imbruglia CD White Lilies Island but I have read that most computers gag on some of the tracks due to copy protection and I do tend to play a CD in my computer whilst I surf the Net. As a result I have not bought the CD. Well I suppose if the company strategy is to make it hard for me to rip any tracks into MP3s, one way of doing that is to discourage me from buying their products all together. Somehow I don’t think that was quite the effect they were hoping for but that is the one they have got.
[Update: article amended with Steve Heckler of Sony’s exact remarks thanks to the excellent input of readers Tino D’Amico and Joachim Klehe]
Patrick Crozier is happy to see the old lags of British terrestrial television being given a run for their money
UK Channel 5 has been dismissed by the elite as being a non-stop orgy of sex and violence. Such statements in themselves lay bare the warped priorities of our ‘leaders’ but there is one other problem: it isn’t true. Channel 5 is simply the most dynamic and innovative British terrestrial channel around.
It has the best reality TV programme: The Mole
It has the best two animations: The Powerpuff Girls and Tintin
And it has some of the best history documentaries around. My favourite has to be Hitler’s Henchmen. Not least because an inspired piece of scheduling led to biographies of Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler being interspersed with shows covering the life and works of John Prescott and Pete Waterman.
In fact, Channel 5’s documentaries seem to be giving BBC2 and Channel 4 something of a headache. For many years these stuck up elito-vision channels have been pumping out nothing but revisionist pap. You know, ‘Churchill was a drunken child molestor’, that sort of thing. But then Channel 5 started broadcasting things like “British Heroes of World War 2” (the title says it all). And then “Secrets of World War 2”. In the hands of the elite this would have been all about how Churchill contributed to the slaughter of Russians on the Eastern Front but from Channel 5 it a set of stories about the daring exploits of our ancestors.
I do not know if Channel 5’s documentaries are particularly popular. But the reaction (especially from Channel 4) has been revealing. To “Secrets of WW2” Channel 4 countered with “Battle Stations”. To “Heroes” they countered with “Commando”. And to a fine 3-parter on the Falklands they dusted off a 10-year old documentary of their own and put it out as a spoiler.
But the really interesting thing about this is the way the content has changed. Quite simply, Channel 4 has sobered up, smelt the coffee and dumped the revisionism. Commando was an hour long show but contained little more than half an hour’s actual information. Could it be that the missing half an hour was the revisionism they had to axe to get the ratings?
Patrick Crozier
The British International Development Secretary Clare Short did a bit of off-message, and hence truthful, commentary by pointing out that the French state is one of the primary obstacles to Africa’s economic development due to their insistence on Europe-wide protectionist trade policies.
Now whilst I usually regard Short as a subjectivist economic ignoramus and thus part of the problem, not the solution, she is quite right in her remarks in this subject. The fact is that French policy in African being aimed at maintaining French control rather than fostering African development. My family has had quite a lot of first hand experience of doing business in Africa and I know this to be true on many levels.
Socialists have the gall to claim to be the people who care about the impoverished Third World and yet put duty on African goods which can run as high as 300% in order to protect the EU’s grotesque Common Agricultural Policy. The EU are in truth the architects of misery, poverty and starvation if Africa and France is the ring leaders of this ignominious association of the statist, regarding their preposterous concepts of Francophone prestige in Africa as being more important that African prosperity.
Clare Short is just another statist clod but she is quite right that France’s strong presence in Africa is a truly malign influence. I could have told her that 20 years ago. Who cares of people are living in abject poverty in Chad just so long as things are status quo on the Quai d’Orsay.
In a recent interview General Norman Schwarzkopf was asked if he thought there was room for forgiveness – towards the people who has aided and abetted the terrorists who had perpetrated the September 11th attacks on the United States.
He said: “I believe that forgiving them is God’s function. Our job is simply to arrange the meeting.”
“Blog this, you Bounder!” “Bloggin’ ‘ell!
A veritable verisimilitude of Bloggers from Blighty Samuel Johnson Only a very few spaces left. E-mail for details if you are a blogger in the British Isles.
Adil, all messages to your e-mail address are bouncing. I need to get in contact with you a.s.a.p!
It is the month of black history in the good old USA, and the month that white/Hispanic/Asian students must be committed to black history. Now that is a separate issue from what is underpinning a sub debate of black history month: the nature of confederacy.
This issue was raised by my history teacher, when he said, slavery in America was a result of the south’s political system and that had it not been for the Civil War, the issue of slavery would have never been resolved. I asked the teacher if he truly meant confederacy was a system that inevitably led to slavery. Let me try and put the same case I made to him to you:
1. Confederacy is a system of government that gives more power to the states or local government and less power to the federal or higher levels of government. America is a federalist society, whereas, Switzerland is an example of a confederacy.
1a. Non-confederacy type governments have adopted the system of slavery, meaning that slavery is not unique to confederacy.
1b. Confederacy is not about slavery; it is about state’s rights and devolving rather than centralizing power.
2. The Articles of Confederation, which created a system of pure confederacy, were overturned in 1789 by the current US Constitution…nearly a century the US Civil War.
3. Slavery began in Colonial America before the USA even existed. Slavery in Colonial America started in Virginia in 1619 because of the need to find cheap labor to produce cotton, tobacco, and other such goods.
4. The northern states industrialized faster than the southern agricultural states, resulting in no need for slaves in the North, as slaves were needed for agricultural work, but not industrial work, in which paid workers were cheaper.
5. After Lincoln’s nearly 50/50 election there was a great tension between the North and the South about the role of the federal government (Lincoln wanted more federal government, which the Southerners opposed).
6. The US Civil War started over the role of the state versus the role of the federal government – not slavery.
Needless to say that when I said this in class…well, let me just say this: I am lucky to be alive. I have presented the facts not a politically popular statement. The fact of the matter is, saying stuff like this does not fly with PC lefties that run the school.
This is one opinion (fact based though it be) of the issue, but it is one (fact based) opinion that is never offered in school, and is instantly struck down if a student dares to offer it.
To emphasize how large the problem is: The four student collective that consists of Johnny Student worked on this post jointly – all four of us are currently dealing with this in our classes at four different universities throughout the country
Peace!
Stay off my back
Or I will attack
And you don’t want that!
– Snap (from I’ve got the Power)
…and Snap really was the lyrical Jessie James.
Matt Welch makes some excellent points about the reality of world trade but the following bit suggests he does not read the Samizdata very often.
If free traders spent as much time railing against rich-country protectionism as they do making fun of the anti-globalization kids, the pig-puppet audience would dwindle to a core of fog-headed Maoists, and more importantly, destitute people around the world could vault out of poverty much faster.
We are wounded Matt! You mean we are not your default page when you boot up the ol’ box every morning? We often go though periods of railing against the immorality and stupidity of protectionism. Such as:
Stupidity beyond the measure of language by Natalija Radic on February 1st:
Jospin is a man who is responsible more than any other political figure in the EU (and that is saying something) for people like me being fined and harassed by EU states for trying to do business within the EU because I am an outsider, just another Slavic white nigger girl. Naturally he takes much the same view of Africans and Asians who try to do business in the EU.
Comments worth repeating by Perry de Havilland on January 30th:
To be “strongly against world trade” is to be in favour of poverty and against free association. It is to favour force over choice. It is to favour death and famine in the third world. Anyone who actually wants for the peoples of South America, Africa and Asia to prosper should be demanding not an end to world trade but the removal of all barriers to entry to the US and EU markets. At a stroke that would result in cheaper products for common working western people as cheaper African, South American and Asian goods become available. Immediately the economies of third world nations would improve as they could sell their products without immoral grotesque discriminatory tariff barriers.
What free trade actually means by Natalie Solent on December 18th 2001:
So the European Union, having stopped Africans making a respectable living as producers and traders by denying them access to us, then bestows a lesser largesse via ‘Third World Aid’. Adding insult to injury, the EU then expects gratitude from the very people they have discriminated against. Of course what happens is that Africans, now being dependent on largesse rather than their own efforts, take on the character of beggars, whiny when desperate and sullen when temporarily a little better fed. We in our turn take on the character of patronising social workers-cum-lords of the manor. What a pity, when we could be interacting as equals and fellow human beings.
… and those are just the ones I can be bothered to find. So you see, Matt, here on Samizdata this particular group of free traders really really doesn’t like protectionism and we attack it on both economic and moral grounds quite often.
The idea pornography is responsible for rape is just plain silly. Of more interest is the very strong case that arming women decreases rape by a huge factor (see Multiple Victim Public Shootings, Bombings And Right To Carry Concealed Handgun Laws: Contrasting Private And Public Law Enforcement“ by Lott and Landes).
The gist of this seminal (no pun intended) study is hidden carry laws substantially decrease crimes against persons and decrease rapes by an even larger amount. Even a small number of woman with concealed weapons is enough to cause a significant drop in the rape statistics.
Many of the e-mails I got as a result of my last remarks about pornography raise the same points, some politely and some very rudely. As all the objections came from conservatives, I will address them. One of these objections to pornography is that it is ‘harmful to family life’ or ‘is responsible for causing divorces’. I in turn have several objections to this approach.
Firstly it is impossible to know if that is true with any certainty. Regardless of anecdotal evidence that I am sure I can match to the contrary, the truth is relationships break up for many and varied reasons. I very much doubt pornography is the actual source of those sort of problems. They are just pictures for goodness sake and to blame such things is usually going to be a gross simplification.
Secondly, even if it were true, so what? Whilst socialists might not have a problem with the idea of the state interposing itself between the most personal of relationships, is that really what conservatives want? If the state can restrict what a person reads or watches on their video player because it might damage the institution of marriage, then I would suggest banning all televised football, both American and Soccer, as that has probably caused more marital tension than 1000 copies of Playboy. And if you accept the principle that the state has a role in family matters, why stop there? I hope it is clear where this leads. It is not a slippery slope, it is a cliff.
Not all the letters to me were advocating legal suppression of pornography however. Many just wanted to discourage it socially and in that I have no problem. I personally would tend to ignore those sort of pressures but that does not mean I regard the social norm I may be ignoring as being an inherently bad thing. One person said that ‘no one would read a Playboy in public and that was a good thing’. Well maybe not where he comes from but that is not the case everywhere, even within a single country. In America I have only ever been to New York City yet I suspect what is fine socially in some parts of New York might not be fine in Utah. But in truth I do not think that social customs are a bad thing as most enduring customs have an objective, even if fuzzy, basis for their existence. I will touch again on that point at the end of my article.
Another point made by several people was that pornography leads to sexual violence, by which I assume they all mean the non-consensual kind. Once more I think that this is a simplification. I think that people who rape have what we all have, a sex drive, but lack any objective moral capacity and empathy. They do not really require a motivation beyond the physical urge, just an opportunity. On that basis it occurs to me pornography, particularly violent pornography might actually be a useful outlet rather than a cause, though that is just a logical supposition on my part. I have seen what large numbers of people do when a state has partially or completely collapsed and taken the values of a state centred society down with it. When that happens young men kill helpless civilians and they rape even more of them. It does not require pornography to make that possible but rather a collectivised view of the world and a subjective sense of morality. Nothing more and nothing less is required.
Even the few with latent sexually violent urges who might be somehow triggered by violent pornographic images do not provide any justification for banning these things however. Look at a bottle of vodka: most people can drink from it, enjoy the drink and then get on with their lives. Yet a few will drink it and then start a fight or drive a car and kill someone or rape a woman afterwards while drunk. Would you therefore ban all alcohol?
If you would ban violent images, quite apart from the impossibility of doing so in the Internet era, where do you draw the line? How about pictures that are just suggestive of sexual violence? Well you can find those even in women’s magazines occasionally. For example there was a photo shoot of lovely Dutch model Karen Mulder in the French edition of Glamour that was clearly playing on sexually threatening and potentially violent themes. But guess what? I think those are quite exciting pictures. That does not mean I personally want to be chased for real through the Paris Metro but the pictures ‘work’ for me with their frisson of sexual danger.
My whole point here is that I think when people worry about pornography, they are worrying about the wrong things. Pornography is just an expression of what goes on in people’s heads and the vast majority of people who look at it are no more harmed by it than by a glass of red wine. War movies do not cause wars either. The things that cause violence against women and relationships to break up are complex and inter-relative. Social pressures to not do things are just fine by me. I like the idea that attacking me when I am walking down the street is frowned on by society.
But when we start involving the state, rather than society and reason, then we enter a realm of downward spiralling consequences. If the only reason a man does not attack and rape me is that he fears the state and its laws, then if he encounters me alone in a remote place, what is to stop him now? So I think that societies which encourage reason in people rather than just fear of the law, are surely going to be safer. To try and legislate away all the possible influences that cause perceived ills is not only going to fail, soon we are back heading in the direction all state-centered orders eventually end up going, which is the replacement of society itself by the state. Trust me when I tell you that does not turn out to be the better route to a safer society. It is in fact the end of society all together.
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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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