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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The excellent “swearblogger” at Devil’s Kitchen, recently suffered a nasty car accident. He’s okay, although his car was damaged. I could not help notice in the associated comments that some character called Neil Harding chose to make a cheap political crack about how this proved that we “individualists” who like cars should take the train instead. It was not a friendly word of sympathy for someone involved in a potentially fatal accident.
Maybe I am in a grumpy mood today, but please, would these car-haters, these collectivist train fans, please, please just go off to North Korea. Not everyone can rely on public transport, Mr Harding.
The Times (of London) has a sobering editorial today about the level of crime in the Caribbean, following the recent murder involving a married couple on their honeymoon in Antigua. Jamaica has already developed a fearesome reputation for violence – Kingston is a particularly unpleasant place – and the problem is spreading. In its history, the area has been touched by violence, stretching back before the dark stain of Western-imposed slavery, of course. The pirate gangs who raped and pillaged their way across the area were not lovable rogues with parrots on their shoulders but brutes.
Of course, when it comes to recent times, experiences vary. I went to Barbados with friends several years ago and had a wonderful time and was struck by how friendly people were. Barbados is a great place, although I am rather saddened that the youngsters are not as keen on cricket as they used to be, but perhaps that is inevitable as sporting fashions change.
The Times argues that some folk have blamed the problems on tourism as something that has widened the gap between rich and poor. This seems a bit of a strange argument. Surely, without tourism, the region – assuming there was no other source of wealth – would be even poorer, making for an ever more desperate situation that there is now. More pertinently, the editorial argues that a major cause of violence are drug gangs. The Caribbean is a crossing point for the drugs that are exported by gangs out of South America, such as Columbia, and then on to the US and elsewhere. At no point does the Times address the issue of whether the illegality of drugs might be fuelling the criminal gangster culture that is allied to it.
And there is something else to consider. Since Britain joined the-then EEC, now European Union, the old British connections to the trading interests of the UK’s former colonies have been weakened. Imports of sugar and other produce were placed at a competitive disadvantage because of Britain’s membership of the absurd Common Agricultural Policy.
Finally, one of the latest issues to rear its head is the ongoing attempt by Western governments, such as the US, to crack down on tax havens such as The Cayman Islands. If a left-leaning, high-taxing Democrat administration gets into power with Mr Obama in the White House, life for such havens could get much tougher, with attendant impact on their business activities.
You may remember I reported earlier this month that the launch window for the 3rd flight of the Falcon 1 opened around July 30 or thereabouts. We are now into that period and it looks like we might get a launch before the five day window closes: Falcon 1 is on the pad at Kwajalein.
There has been very little information floating around on the launch schedule this time so I will have to keep watching closely to make sure I do not miss a last minute announcement.
I will keep you informed.
I came across this statistic here, stating that there will be 22,000 journalists at the Beijing Olympics next week.
The local bars will be doing a roaring trade, one hopes.
Jesus.
It is unfair to expect writers to be consistent in their views from week to week. Consistency is the “hobgoblin of little minds” and all that. I am sure that if I wanted to, I could trawl back through this site and find something that jarred with what I write today, and I would not be at all surprised if that were to happen in the future. Even so, it does make me wonder when you read a comment like this, about a recent environmentalist doomongering film. The piece is by AA Gill, who is not exactly my favourite news columnist. The review is actually pretty good, to be fair. But then I remember that he writes that the only main benefit of the space race was to kindle interest in Green issues. So what gives?
It might be nice to think that he is learning that the Green movement, or at least its more militant parts, is in fact a menace. Maybe what is happening is that for a part of the London chattering classes, even that bit that likes to be thought of as “hip” and trendy, bashing Greenery is now socially acceptable, or at least no longer an activity that gets one sent into social oblivion. Maybe, just maybe Gill and his friends have picked this up during their dinner parties. “Oh, what about global warming darling?” is simply not clever any more. I bet he has poked fun at all those folk driving around in their Priuses and laughed himself hoarse at the motoring antics of popular TV shows like Top Gear and its merciless mockery of Green prudery.
Politics and culture can often shift in subtle ways. What is, and what is not, thought acceptable to mock often sets the tone for a few years. I get the impression, partly because of the darkening economic climate, that the Green movement has lost a little headway or may even be retreating in some respects.
Or perhaps I am reading too much into a few scraps of writings.
Janet Daley writes what I think is a wrong-headed article on how, if the Labour government gets rid of Gordon Brown and elects some younger, more “Blairite” leader claiming to support reform of public services, that this will put pressure on the Tories and may even convince enough gullible UK voters to stick with Labour.
I am sorry, but the problem with this thesis, which alas reflects how even an astute observer like Janet Daley has become a solid member of the Westminster Village, has little connection to reality. The UK public has had 11 years of New Labour. It remembers how, in the late 1990s, we were told that Labour could reform the Welfare state in the same way that only Richard Nixon could fix relations with the Chinese in the 1970s. Since then, the Welfare State has mushroomed, with its vast increase in the number of officials, a hideously complex system of tax and welfare credits; the education system becomes ever more bureacratic and despite a few improvements, falls way short of what one would expect, given the increase in spending. The NHS remains a mess: I have met quite a few NHS users who have, for instance, suffered from the MRSA bacterium. The public knows this. They just do not trust the Labour Party any more.
Of course, they are scarcely more trusting of David Cameron and the Tories. The problem for them is that their leading political figures are – with a few exceptions like William Hague – inexperienced in the world of business or life outside politics generally. Cameron gives me grave cause for concern; he is cast from the same, suffocating centrist mould as Blair. But there is just the remotest chance that some of the statist juggernaut might be arrested if the Tories were to win with a sufficiently large majority. It is a slim hope, but I do not see much else on the table.
This week end I got caught up in re-reading a book which I come back to at intervals: L. Neil Smith’s, ‘The Probability Broach’. Even if you have read the full novel and the numerous sequels about that parallel universe where there is real freedom, I strongly recommend you try the graphic novel treatment by Scott Bieser. It is great fun and a pleasant read and re-read and re-re-read.
Smith explains libertarianism by showing you what sort of world it would be if America had truly gone down the path of liberty instead of bureaucratic state control. His alternate universe is an educational one… and enticing. Bieser’s rendering of it in classic comic book format draws you in and injects our memes directly into your lower brain stem. Read this book and all your bases are belong to LP!
I always have it sitting in view, ready for me to thumb through at the odd moment.
My comment the other day about a rather imperfect – if interesting – article about the late F.A. Hayek suddenly turned into a comment thread argument about whether religious parents have the right to have the genitalia of their children adjusted (as in the Jewish, Muslim, Christian, etc cultures). Now, I am not all that interested in the specific health or medical arguments here, although I would be interested if those with actual medical knowledge could give some ideas on the value or otherwise of said. What interests me, as a defender of liberty, is what should be the boundaries on what parents should observe when it comes to raising their children when it comes to actions that actually affect the bodies of their kids. For example, suppose a parent of religion/ideology X decided that he or she really wanted to put a small tattoo on the forehead of their son with the symbol of their family faith? Suppose the operation to do this was painless. Would it be justified? (In my view, no).
I put this point because in the comment thread attached to my post about Hayek, one commenter called Gabriel argues that banning such operations on children done for religious reasons constitutes discrimination against his faith. Such an argument is, I think, an example of multiculturalism gone mad.
On a related theme of protecting kids, David Friedman – son of the great Milton Friedman – has thoughts.
When I made my last post about the small piece of incompetence I had encountered from the Home Office upon attempting to apply for a passport immediately upon becoming a naturalised British citizen, I wrote the sentence
Theoretically, when I became a citizen, one thing I gained was the right not to suffer the petty humiliations and bureaucratic hassles and incompetence from the Home Office that a non-citizen goes through just to live here.
One commenter left a response that more or less translated as “You poor deluded fool”. I concluded the post on a surprisingly upbeat note, however
My passport will hopefully still come in a couple of weeks…
It is now two and a half weeks later, and all I can conclude is that yes, I was a poor deluded fool. However, the situation is somewhat more sinister than this.
The general layout of passport application forms has not changed particularly since the Home Office started setting up its apparatus for ID cards and databases. Essentially you are asked to prove that you are a British citizen and also prove your identity. If your claim to citizenship is based upon being born to parents of particular nationality and/or in particular places at particular times, the combination of supporting documents required can be very complex, as the unravelling of the British Empire and the creation of many different kinds of citizenship in the former empire when there used to be only one has led to British nationality law being extremely complex. However, if your claim to citizenship is a simple one, the supporting documents requested are quite simple. There are (at least so I thought) fewer simpler and less controversial proofs of citizenship than an obviously genuine naturalisation certificate dated the previous Wednesday. In addition to this, I was also requested to send my Australian passport as proof of identity. The Home Office probably at least partly wants this to record its details and index them with my British passport in its database so that my movements and actions become clearer to then, but this is a reasonable thing to ask for. Checking that my place of birth and date of birth on my Australian passport are the same as those on my naturalisation certificate, and that the photograph and signature in my Australian passport and the new British one are obviously of the same person.
In any event, these documents were all that the form and its supporting notes asked me to send. They proved pretty unambiguously that I was a British citizen and that the new passport was being issued to the same person who had been naturalised. I was not expecting any problems. The form had sated that people applying for their first British passport might be required to attend an interview, so I thought this was a possibility. Although the Home Office have set up “passport interview offices” as part of the infrastructure for issuing ID cards in the future, this is again something I don’t find inherently wrong. Asking the person who is applying for a passport to appear in person to confirm that he is indeed the person in the photograph doesn’t strike me as particularly unreasonable, and when I had to replace a stolen Australian passport the Australian officials did precisely this.
However this is not what happened. Instead, a few days after I had sorted out the payment issue (and after I had passed that “Your application cannot be processed further until….” roadblock, I received another letter. This one rather sadly needs fisking.
→ Continue reading: More action from the Home Office
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and D. H. Lawrence’s own explanation, the “Propos”, do reveal how the consumptive both embraced and escaped his country. Lawrence encapsulated a rootless contempt for his background and his people, the coalmining communities of the midlands. His last novel, rewritten three times, rails against the perceived deadened inauthenticity of English life; the mannered abstraction of a scientific worldview denying the consummate union of man and wife in a real marriage. Thus, science, technology, capitalism and money are unified into a system that saps and destroys what it means to be human.
This is not a particularly old or unusual message. Nevertheless, Lawrence weaves and reinterprets conservative themes in modernist frames. Authenticity will invigorate marriage and the nation of England. To view this focus as a conservative strand within Lawrence’s writing is to surrender to political constraints, when the author restructured his sense of alienation against his country. The consumptive’s exile pours out through the novel, as he tries to explain why using obscenities as norms becomes a marker for an honest world of sexual union, recreating an England worth living in for the author (though it does lend the novel an air of pomposity and ambitious challenges for bad sex writers to the present day).
How sad that exile and censorship obliterated our understanding of a state of the nation novel that set out an ideal of England, standing foursquare in a wider artistic tradition that speaks with more urgency today.
Following Brian’s lead, I predict a legislative scorched earth as well as a financial one, when the UK parliament returns. It is not just that the present administration realises its days are numbered and will try to get more of The Project through, and to construct extra-parliamentary power structures as bunkers to occupy in opposition. All over Whitehall, departmental pet projects will be being dusted-off (e.g) and presented to weak ministers, the hope being to get them through before a new, critically-minded, Government takes office and crowds them out with plans of its own.
The question I have for Samizdata readers is this: what will the neo-puritans set out to regulate… suppress… ban next? Smoking is nearly fully suppressed. The work on alcohol has truly begun. Government intervention into our personal lives: what’s next?
* [This is an allusion, so I pray our editorial pantheon will let the contraction stand. I’m I am not about to write anyone an email like this one, however funny it might be. And I suspect they’d they would take my login away if I did]
I definitely want to see the new Batman film (it pays to book well in advance, Ed). Here is an interesting take on some of the politics of the film. Another useful review – without spoilers – is over at Bob Bidinotto’s blog. In a nutshell, he says he liked the film a great deal but felt the film tried to cram too many themes and plotlines into it.
Mind you, I am looking forward even more to the film based on the Watchmen story series. Bring it on!
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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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