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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“Where are they?” is a question I would rather had remained unanswered, Mbotu mused. The stone-like bench, lost in the giant and austere entry hall, was cold and uncomfortable. It grew more so as time passed. He had been punctual. One does not keep ones God King waiting. The reverse, however, is a given. Mbotu had once done so himself. Was it only a year? Just one year since he had held the highest office there was: Secretary General of the United Nations of Earth. It might as well have been a millennium ago. The now redundant world government had succeeded beyond the wildest imaginings of its 20th century founders. After three centuries, war and everything associated with it had been abolished. No one was hungry; there were no rich, no poor; the environment had been saved and the excesses of unfettered capitalism had been reined in by the gentle power of the institution to which he had given over his life. Mbotu’s thoughts were interrupted by the echoing footfalls of an approaching functionary.
“You will be seen now.”
By the time the elderly Mbotu rose aching from the bench, the figure was already in motion. Instant and unquestioning obedience was simply assumed. No further words were exchanged and he followed as quickly as he could.
A lift took them to the top of the five kilometre ‘palace’, if that was the right term for the new seat of government. When the door opened it was as if he had crossed light-years to another world and in effect he had. This was the private residence of the alien warlord who now claimed the once peaceful and unarmed Earth for his own.
“Sit”, said an imposing alien figure. “Be comfortable”. As if realizing Mbotu’s thoughts, he added “There is no need for formality here. You are fully aware of your place and it is time to integrate you into the Imperial Government. You will be assigned quarters here. You will be restored to your former position and will retain it for so long as you are obedient and successful in carrying out our wishes. Earth must begin to pay its own way in the Empire and repay our investment in it. Our requirements are simple enough. You have advanced technology and global infrastructure. You will convert it to production to support our fleet and invasion forces. If all goes well, in a century or so you will supply troops as well.”
“But… we have no knowledge of arms and war”, interjected an appalled Mbotu, “We have expunged even the basics of dangerous technologies from our libraries and archives. They have been outlawed for generations!”
“We know. That is in fact why I am here and you are there.” After a pause he continued. “Perhaps I should explain the realities of the wider universe. Most civilizations travel a path similar to yours. They go from warlike tribes to larger and larger conglomerates hacking and beating at each other with primitive weapons. Then comes the first technological transition and wars which become more and more terrible. Those who survive become a single global state by one path or another. Since there is no longer a threat to be met, defences atrophy. There is no need for advanced arms, nuclear weapons or standing armies. Most societies degenerate to the point where they have only small special units for solving problems for the supreme ruler of the planet.”
He continued. “A few, like you, are more extreme. You have eliminated your military entirely. You have destroyed traditions which reached far into your past and once allowed the training of effective soldiers. Even if we had allowed you ten years warning you could not have fielded a fighting force worthy of respect. You blocked the development of nanotechnology, advanced spaceships, nuclear power, directed energy weapons, force fields and a hundred other things you deemed too dangerous. Your population became coddled and addicted to a safe and easy, if somewhat impoverished, life. The concept of self-defence, even if you still allowed so much as a sharp blade to be manufactured or kept, have become as alien to your population as invaders from another planet.”
“You believe you had a golden age, but soon enough your population will be taught the lie and will support our rule. By our standards you accomplished a global and equal poverty for all but the ruling class like yourself. We will return adventure to your decadent and risk averse populace. We will give you the option of thousand year lifespans and travel to the stars. Your children will be will be our willing adventurers and soldiers.”
Mbotu, steeled by life as a bureaucrat, diplomat and politician, stayed calm. “You say most. Obviously you are an exception.”
“Yes. A very small number of civilizations follow the path to Empire. From time to time we fight each other at the edges of our vast catchments, but for the most part we take the easier path. There are so many like you that it would be a waste of resources to spend our time locked in bloody combat and destroy the very planets and populations we seek.”
Mbotu changed the subject. “How long have you known of us?”
“Space is vast and the stars are like dust. Occasionally we stumble upon a pre-technological species, but for the most part we just listen. By the time we hear the first radio broadcast your sort are already into the endgame of the nation state. When we first arrived your Europeans were nearly ready for harvesting but there were still many capable of causing us annoyance. Your United States had the technology and fight to give us big problems. A deadly challenge to their supremacy might well have pushed them into developing some of the now proscribed technologies and made invasion too costly for us. Others like China and India had populations whom we would have had to mostly wipe out to stop them from fighting.”
“Over the millennia we have learned the virtue of patience. A few centuries is usually enough. Once you are decadent, disarmed and centralized…” the alien did what could pass for a shrug, “We arrive with a show of overwhelming force and you surrender without a shot. There are usually a few hold outs, but they are easily dealt with and turned into object lessons without wrecking what we want: a developed planetary civilization that will supply us the tools for the next conquest. You were not able or willing to fight for your freedom.” He paused for effect. “And now you are ours.”
[Copyright 20090712 Dale Amon, all rights reserved]
Whatever you believe about race these days in the privacy of your own head is pretty irrelevant. Having the wrong opinions about these issues is professional and social suicide so broadly speaking people with a stake in society don’t.
People higher up the socioeconomic pyramid aren’t less racist than those lower down because of any greater enlightenment on their part. They are because they have far more to lose by refuting the orthodoxy.
The defeat of racism in this manner has given the current cultural establishment the idea hat such authoritarianism is a fundamentally legitimate means by which to stamp their political and moral assumptions upon the populace.
The elite’s ideas about the evils of racism at least had the virtue of being essentially correct. Most of the other opinions they want to violently foist upon us are not.
– Commenter Jay Thomas, of the Thoughtful Ape.
It is revealing in the coverage of the conviction of two racists for expressing their views, that there is a near complete lack of any debate over the profound civil liberties issues involved. It is being flatly reported, but not debated.
The mainstream media are always telling us how ‘essential’ they are for ‘our democracy’. But I have yet to see anyone raise the point that just because the people stating their opinions are crackpots, maybe crackpots should also be allowed to say what they think? I was waiting for the papers to surprise me today…
But no. This is ‘ground breaking‘ we are told, and indeed it is, but that is as far as the reports go. Does the Guardian or Telegraph not have anything to say about the broader implications?
State commissars like Adil Khan in Humberside, who is in charge of making us diverse but cohesive (or face prison if we demur) tells us:
“This case is groundbreaking. The fact is now that we’ve been able to demonstrate that you’ve got nowhere to hide; people have been hiding on [sic] the fact that this server was in the US. Inciting racial hatred is a crime and one which seems to occur too regularly. This kind of material will not be tolerated as this lengthy investigation shows.”
Which is actually quite a misleading statement. The state only regards people stating their extreme opinions as “incitement” if they belong to ritually abominated groups like white racists, whose extreme views must be punished because there is no political cost to doing so. For groups who actually throw bricks when the cops come calling, well, stating their extreme views is treated rather differently.
This is hardly new of course. Incite violence with words, but be unlikely to actually do anything, well you might well go to jail… actually kill people over many years, ah, that eventually gets you invited to help govern. No? I have two words for you: Sinn Fein.
Last time I called Britain a police state, I was dismissed as overheated because, after all, I can run this blog and state my contrary opinions, so this is hardly a police state.
Yet were Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle not just jailed for running a website on a US server (just as Samizdata is on a US server)? If you cast your eyes back through our archives, you will find we have on many occasions called for this or that group to have fairly violent things done to them (Ba’athists for example… and certain Wahhabi folk on occasion too… and certain Serbian nationalists)… and I suspect trawling through the archives of the Daily Telegraph would turn up articles ‘inciting’ not just ‘violence’ but calling for full blown wars.
Well it is now clear that we can say what we think, not by right as ‘freeborn Englishmen’ (hah!) but rather at the sufferance of the likes of Adil Khan and the whole apparatus of thought control that people like him represent. They do not feel the urge to come after us because we are not unpopular enough, although I doubt they like folks like us suggesting they prose a vastly greater threat to liberty and, gasp, “social cohesion” than a couple comically wacko racists.
Have you seen this being hotly debated in the media? Even a little? Pah. So much for the fearless and ‘essential’ media guardians of our liberal western order.
The sooner the old media are driven out of business by the internet, the better… ten years tops… except they will of course just rent seek tax money to keep themselves alive (or more accurately undead as no one will actually read them/watch them any more) due to their ‘essential role’ and the ‘public interest’ of having newspapers and TV channels no one really needs and do who not actually do anything essential or even particularly useful.
Two men have been convicted of thought crimes by the state for daring to express what they think. I very much doubt the Human Right Industry will rally to the defence of Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle because the two men in question are a couple deeply unappealing white racist scumbags.
Had they merely been scumbag imams preaching in a mosque rather than scumbag white males handing out leaflets and publishing a website, I wonder if the ‘head of diversity and community cohesion’ in Humberside would be crowing about the latest demonstration of the British police state’s ability to tell people what they can and cannot say? Just askin’.
“Suppose that we were all starting completely from scratch, and that millions of us had been dropped down upon the Earth, fully grown and developed, from some other planet. Debate begins as to how protection (police and judicial services) will be provided. Someone says: “Let’s give all of our weapons to Joe Jones over there, and to his relatives. And let Jones and his family decide all disputes among us. In that way, the Jones will be able to protect all of us from any aggression or fraud that anyone else may commit. With all the power and all the ability to make ultimate decisions in the hand of Jones, we will be protected from one another. And then let us allow the Joneses to obtain their income from this great service by using their weapons, and by exacting as much revenue by coercion as they shall desire.” Surely in that sort of situation, no one would treat this proposal with anything but ridicule…..it is only because we have become accustomed over thousands of years to the existence of the State that we now give precisely this kind of absurd answer to the problem of social protection and defense.”
Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, page 68, quoted on pages 380-381 of Radicals for Capitalism, by Brian Doherty. The paperback copy contains a rather barbed piece of blurb by the publisher. The book is far from “hagiographic”, but is clearly sympathetic.
Doherty’s book is great. It is a bit of a shame that it does not say all that much about what happened in the libertarian scene in the UK, but that is a sort of British bleat from yours truly.
In response to a US article that talks about David Cameron, Conservative Party leader, and some other prominent figures, such as Iain Duncan-Smith and his own brand of Toryism, I left this comment:
“I am not sure what is so libertarian about Mr Cameron’s brand of soft-paternalist Toryism. For sure, they are tolerant on certain social issues, but as we found a year ago on issues like Green taxes on cheap airlines, the instincts of this lot are to regulate, to tax, to “nudge” us unwashed masses in the direction they want us to go.”
“IDS may moan that Mrs Thatcher and others were unduly focused on economics; what these critics miss is that the underlying problem in the UK right now is, still, about the relationship between the individual and the state. The state takes about half of our wealth, and regulates a good deal of the rest of it. How anyone with a claim to be called conservative can defend this state of affairs, or criticise those who would push the state back to a more modest role in our lives, is a total mystery.”
While the Tories may have pledged to shut down the odd quango and scrap ID cards (but not, as far as I know, the underlying database), anyone expecting the Tories to lead us to the sunlit uplands of freedom is a fool.
I am not quite sure how robust this report is in terms of its data sample, but it does rather undermine the standard complaint that the British are the worst tourists. I am still not entirely convinced, but still:
PARIS (Reuters Life!) – French tourists are the worst in the world, coming across as bad at foreign languages, tight-fisted and arrogant, according to a survey of 4,500 hotel owners across the world.
They finish in last place in the survey carried out for internet travel agency Expedia by polling company TNS Infratest, which said French holidaymakers don’t speak local languages and are seen as impolite.
Blimey.
“It’s mainly the fact that they speak little or no English when they’re abroad, and they don’t speak much of the local language,” Expedia Marketing Director Timothee de Roux told radio station France Info. “The French don’t go abroad very much. We’re lucky enough to have a country which is magnificent in terms of its landscape and culture,” he said, adding that 90 per cent of French people did their traveling at home.
Yet we Anglos are not that great at speaking foreign languages either. I mean, I speak passable French, German and a few phrases in Italian, but most French folk I have met abroad do speak English of varying degrees. To a certain extent, such a finding might depend on the type of tourist and the places they go to: most French tourists or expats living in London will tend, I find, to be pretty keen to find out about where they are and so will learn the language a bit.
The report concludes:
“But French tourists received some consolation for their poor performance, finishing third after the Italians and British for dress sense while on holiday.”
Touche!
… Aussie style, from ‘GetUp!’.
It is a pity that ‘GetUp!’ are a profoundly statist bunch who just love state coercion just as long as it is democratically popular and ‘progressive’… but one has to make short term tactical alliances where one finds them (such as on the issue of censorship). The enemy of my enemy is my friend, at least for a (very short) while.
“It’s not lack of choice that stops people getting a good education – it’s lack of schools and teachers. To say otherwise is pure ideology… Diverting scarce resources into providing voucher systems in a world where 18 million more teachers have to be trained if all children are to get the education they need is simply the wrong answer to the problems that poor people face.”
– Claire Melamed, Head of Policy, ActionAid
I was not able to make it to last weekend’s extravaganza of classic cars, racers and glorious carbon-emitting beauties of Formula 1, but I certainly wish I was there. The Goodwood Festival of Speed, held in west Sussex in July, is always a great event.
Here’s the sort of vehicle that will be running. Serious petrol-head eye candy.
Distance can lend enchantment, and I fondly remember my holiday trips out west to California, trekking in Yosemite, drinking wines in Napa, gorging on seafood in San Francisco and Monterrey, firing handguns in Santa Clara, and wandering around Getty’s art museum in Malibu. Wonderful stuff. I started going there in the early 1990s to visit an old US buddy of mine who lived in Cupertino, in the San Jose area, at the time, working in the software business, as almost everyone else there seemed to do at the time. It seemed bright, shiny and incredibly affluent. IThe locals were very friendly. It is easy to see why the area can appeal to an outsider who has become fed up with crusty old Blighty.
But, and it is one hell of a big but, California has serious problems. The state government is about to go bust. The locals seem unable to stomach voting for less spending to curb runaway debt. Thousands of firms are relocating to cheaper places to do business where the regulations are less stifling, such as Nevada or Texas. California is, in many respects, a harbinger of what could happen to the rest of the US if Mr Obama gets his way with ideas such as carbon cap and trade, socialised medicine, heavier taxes on the middle and upper classes and more regulation of business. California is as near as it gets to a European-style social democracy. Well, the results are in, ladies and gentlemen, from this experiment, and it has been a disaster.
And for that reason alone, it is hardly very reassuring that David Cameron, or iDave, as he is sometimes called for his enthusiasm for all things trendily tecchy, is looking to California as a model. Of course, there was once a part of California – Orange County – that was a hotbed of libertarian-style conservatism in the heyday of Barry Goldwater and to a certain extent, under Ronald Reagan. But unless I have missed something, that Goldwaterite spirit of rugged individualism has gone on the wane in the Golden State.
It pays to watch California. In many ways, it has been a place that has set the tone not just for politics in the US, but by extension, in other English-speaking nations. So it pays to learn the right lessons.
Needs must and the Romans acted. We can add one last item to the list of what ever did the Romans do for us. Although we are more civilised (measured by less blood!), we can gainfully deploy their policy of decimation, on an annualised basis.
Forget wishy-washy arguments about repeals or sunset clauses. Every year, cut one in ten who receive a payment from the state: one in ten able bodied citizens who idle their lives away and receive a pay as you go pension afterwards (an idea that only ever worked on mobile phones!); one in ten quangos (or just abolish them all in go); one in ten departments of state; and one in ten Members of Parliament, either from the Lords or Commons. Ringfence defence personnel for nightwatchmen status and we have a blueprint for a downsizing classic.
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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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