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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Andrew Ian Dodge has feelings of déjà vu when he reads Johnny Student’s Samizdata article.
Johnny Student‘s latest post (Thursday, Jan 24th 2002) is no surprise to me, having been on the front-line of the PC wars in the 80s. I was at Colby College in Waterville, ME at political correctness’ flowering.
It does amaze me now, to see how much Republicans in the US complain about political correctness in higher education. They were given the chance to help fight it in the 80s and they ran away. Those of us on the front line were left by ourselves to face the onslaught.
Just like Johnny Student, I routinely got in trouble with the administrators and professors for expressing my right-of-centre opinions, both verbally and in written word. Let us hope that JS does not suffer the academic abuse I endured. I fear his anonymous postings may not fully protect him. In a bizarre episode, I managed to get called to the Dean’s office for smoking a cigar in a designated area. I was let off, and the next year they changed the rules to exclude cigars and pipes, but not cigarettes (of any kind).
For even more depressing reading on the subject, I recommend The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses by Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate. You can read more about my experiences in my book Statism Sucks! Ver 2.0
From each as they chose, to each as they are chosen.
As one of the most influential libertarian thinkers of the 20th century, Robert Nozick certainly deserves a tip of the hat from Libertarian Samizdata. His book Anarchy, State and Utopia is an excellent debunking of coercive statism generally and John Rawls’ book Theory of Justice in particular. Although I must confess I have never been a fan of Nozick’s essentially intuitive approach to rights theory, it would nevertheless be churlish not to recognize his enormous influence in stemming the intellectual tide of statism. He had a key role in widely propagating libertarian memes and adding hugely to the developing libertarian meta-context.
Robert Nozick, philosopher, born November 16 1938; died January 23 2002
Pat Buchanan is making a stir again. In his new book he claims homosexuality is addictive – apparently, so are intolerance and stupidity.
– Jay Leno
Johnny Student’s post has left me stunned. Let me just restate the facts as I understand them.
Johnny was in a college, the place you go to be exposed to different ideas and thereby expand your horizons. Specifically, he was in a philosophy class, the quintessential place to discuss varying points of view. Instead of debating a philosophical issue, the “instructor” sent him to the Dean to explain his actions before calling the police.
Johnny’s supposed crime was not parroting the “all guns are bad” line.
What can you say? That’s not a college. It’s a farce.
Three cheers and hats off to Johnny for sticking to his guns. It’s gonna be a long semester. I’d say invite the professor along on your next range session, but he would doubtless be convinced you were planning his demise. Pathetic scared little man.
As for your classmates; yeah, the second amendment supports terrorism like the first amendment supports hate groups and the fourth amendment supports perversion. (sigh).
As John Stuart Mill, a real philosopher once said:
One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.
Maybe that’s the trouble. Today’s professors can’t bear the thought of people with belief expressing themselves. It might make other people think, and then where would we be?
Interesting story in the January 25th 2002 Times, front page and rightly so in my opinion. It begins:
“The Office for National Statistics announced yesterday that it would stop collating data on the number of days lost to industrial action, as further strikes loomed in the already hard-hit rail industry.”
Something big may now be happening in British politics. The New Labour dictat against big increases in government spending may now be expiring. Perhaps they think their reputation for financial rectitude is now fireproof. In reality, if they abandon financial rectitude, their political supremacy – their public support is “wide but shallow”, as many a commentator has noted – could vanish like the morning dew.
Strikes are caused by, among other things, financial uncertainty, and the biggest creator of such uncertainty is the State. By hinting that blank cheques may be available for keeping “public services” going (on account of them being essential, too important to be left to the private sector, etc. etc.) but by explicitly claiming (e.g. to railway managements) that, actually, State funding is strictly limited, each side is primed for a fight. Management insists it can pay only so much. The workers now think they smell a different atmosphere. The feeling in the country is now: time for something to be “done” about “public services”, and to many “done” sounds like “spent”.
It doesn’t have to mean this, which is what privatisation is all about. The government should now “re-privatise” the railways, probably on the basis of the old regional companies, with track and trains being combined again.
Will they be smart enough to do this? If they do, will the new Conservative leadership finally have the sense to split Labour by agreeing with the policy? Only if the answers are Yes and No can New Labour sail on unmolested.
Maybe the government will get a grip on things. But then I thought they’d get a grip on the Dome and they never did. The Conservative opposition under its new leader is showing distinct glimmerings of adequacy and the media are finally getting nasty with New Labour, hence the above story, among many others. (There’s also a huge ruckus now going on in our newspapers about just how bad the National Health Service is and whose fault it is.)
There’s lots more one could say about this. I will content myself with noting that the phrase “the honeymoon is finally over” is being much used in Britain nowadays.
News that elegant Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has appointed the leader of the ‘post-fascist’ National Alliance party Gianfranco Fini as his representative to the Convention on the future of Europe has me grinning from ear to ear.
This is not because I am really any fan of the numbskull statism favoured by Gianfranco Fini but rather because it will make the superstatist collectivists that will have to deal with him apoplectic. As several articles on Samizdata have pointed out, the essential difference between fascist and socialist economics is that fascists believe that what matters is control rather than ownership of the means of production. Fini is a classic advocate of that approach, wanting to regulate economic matters in order to further ‘Italian national objectives’. Of course this approach is in no way different in methodology to that practiced by most social democratic regimes with their ‘national industrial champions’ and acronymed French conglomerates.
And of course that is exactly why a man with overtly fascist links like Fini is hated so much by the ‘social democrats’ across Europe. I am sure if he wore a black shirt and called prime minister Berlusconi ‘Duce’ they would actually not mind so much, but that is not the case. They do not want to be seen standing next to him because people might start to realise that there really is no difference between any of them.
Or should I say higher tax future. Head of the European Central Bank, Dutchman Wim Duisenberg has said that the new Euro currency will lead to tax harmonisation in the long run. Of course I don’t think anyone thinks that means taxes will move down to the lowest common denominator given the French and German remarks about ‘unfair tax competition’. No, we are talking about the whole EU moving up to the confiscatory levels of the highest.
This is of course a 100% political, rather than economic, matter. Taxes are the amount of money confiscated by the state and that is decided by political, not economic, processes. Yet still people maintain the fiction that the European Central Bank is not a politically motivated entity. What economic factors are going to drive taxes to the same levels because the EU now has a common currency?
Now correct me if I am wrong but I thought the entire USA used the US Dollar. Tell me, are the total taxes in New Mexico, Carolina and New York all ‘harmonised’? No, I didn’t think so.
Our ISP e-mail problems have been sorted out and we are receiving all e-mails properly once more.
Anyone one who did not receive a reply to an e-mail sent to us in the last 24 hours or so might want to send their e-mail again as it does seem that the dircon server ate a few incoming mails. Yummy.
I have been fuming about this for a while. A few days ago, Wolfgang Petritsch, the euro-gauleiter in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), announced he thinks Croatia needs to structure its democratic system on multi-ethnic lines. In short, he wants ethnic groups to be encouraged to see themselves as politically different rather than as members of a common civil society. He has of course be informally invited to take his views, write them on sheets of stiff paper, roll them up tightly and stick them somewhere warm and dark. We have already lived through the aftermath of the Yugoslav experiment in tribal collectivism. I for one have no desire to do that sort of thing again, thank you very much.
Unlike hapless BiH, Petritsch would do well to remember that his views do not have a large NATO army to impose them in Croatia. Someone once asked me why I was so glad that NATO does not ‘guarantee’ Croatian security in the same manner as in BiH. Simple. What was the point of the war if we are going to trade taking orders from Belgrade for taking orders from Brussels via some petty Austrian politician like Petritsch? Security of the sort on offer from Petritsch and his Euro-collectivist kind is the security of the cage.
The captured Taliban that are now in Cuba are getting one bath towel, they are getting shampoo and toothpaste. The people there are seeing this and asking Castro, “Can we get this stuff?”
– David Letterman
As Glenn Reynolds on Instapundit points out, it is nice to see National Review On-line deciding to copy Samizdata’s format of multi-contributor blogging. I am sure we were foremost in their minds the whole time 
Update: Cal Ulmann over on Where HipHop and Libertarianism meet has a rather entertaining take on NRO Corner<. Cal wrote:
The Corner on National Review Online is National Review’s attempt at a blog. They don’t want to call it a blog though. I guess that would mean their opinions are no better than anybody elses opinions.
Samizdata seems to be having e-mail problems (or rather the ISP through whom the e-mail routes is having problems), so we may not be getting all incoming mail at the moment (as of 23:15 GMT). It is unclear how long this problem has been going on. I shall report when we are back in touch with the blogosphere.
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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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