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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Björn Lomborg:
This is especially interesting since it [the IPCC report] fundamentally rejects one of the most harrowing scenes from Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. In graphic detail, Mr Gore demonstrated how a 20-foot rise in the sea level would inundate much of Florida, Shanghai, and the Netherlands. The IPCC report makes it clear that exaggerations of this magnitude have no basis in science – though clearly they frightened people and perhaps will win Mr Gore an Oscar.
All credit to the Guardian for risking accusations of heresy for publishing such impious sanity.
A law firm I use sends out a regular newsletter to their business clients. This arrived in my mailbox some time back. At first I just read it and thought ‘interesting’. But reading it again, I think it may be of interest to some Samizdatistas.
Sections 1 and 2 seem reasonable enough. Section 3 is iffy. But, starting with section 4, some things definitely look like, if actually enforced, they will have a substantial effect on business in China and its overall economic trends. Things like this are what may provide concern for China’s continued economic growth:
Company Rules
Current Law – With no guidance or requirements in the current law, employers often draft their own employee handbooks, manuals and work rules. Enforcement is very similar to that in the United States, with fairness and degree of conduct weighed.
Draft Law – Essentially, every employer policy, rule and procedure that governs its employees must be discussed and approved by the union or employee representative. Rules unilaterally imposed by the employer will be void. The term “employee representative” is new and remains undefined in the draft law. There are also unique challenges for employers posed by this new provision. This provision fails to recognize the fluid nature of employer policies and rules. As stated, every change must be approved by the trade union or employee representative, which will inevitably lead to delay in timely implementation. And, despite the trade union’s power to effect employee policies and rules, an employer is ultimately on the hook for what is implemented. Finally, it is worth noting that this provision does not contain any incentive for the trade unions and/or employee representative to negotiate with employers.
We have a lot of commenters and contributors who travel to China; presumably some of them have business there. I would be interested in knowing what they think of these proposed labor market reforms. Will China actually try to enforce all of these parts of the law, or is it just for show? And if they do enforce it, what will the repercussions be?
Richard North has a terrific review of the book “Affluenza” by Oliver James. Even reading the cover of this book while browsing through a Waterstone’s shop the other day, I could tell that a book called “Affluenza” was bound to trot out the argument that we comfortably-off westerners were being ruined by too much of a good thing. Flumoxxed by thousands of choices of toothpaste, CDs, breakfast cereals, cars, wallpapers, books, foreign holidays and designer clothes, we just cannot cope. All this stuff, all this wealth, is crippling us.
North will have none of it:
The book’s macro case – the case it makes about society and economics – is that “selfish capitalism” is bad for the middle class (it makes them greedy and nasty). It insists that there is a powerful correlation between a nation’s mental distress and the selfishness of its capitalism. James seeks to substantiate this case by asserting that a “definitive WHO study” and “14 national studies” rank mental ill health in just the way he’d like, and that they prove the more orientated toward affluence people are, the more miserable they are. That is: the Anglosphere is sickest and everywhere else is healthier.
Well, since “selfishness” is often a pejorative way of saying that people wish to be happy and prefer to breathe and have a good time rather than be miserable, I usually automatically tune out criticisms of capitalism on the grounds that it fosters selfishness. Even if one is not a great admirer of the late novelist Ayn Rand, I think it is fair to credit her with re-connecting with the old Aristotelian tradition in pointing out that happiness, enjoyment of the material things of life can and do go hand in hand with virtue and goodness. Well all is said and done, when a collectivist/socialist/fascist/some other bully attacks liberalism for “selfishness”, what they are really demanding is that we live our lives according to their – selfish – desires for a particular utopia. → Continue reading: A great demolition of a very, very silly book
This morning, when I read Guy’s post about his and the public’s responses to the letter bombing, I felt a thrill of excitement. I have been expecting and looking for signs that this time is finally coming. I actually have found some comfort in the acceleration of the recent decline of liberty and privacy in the UK. It is slow declines that go undetected and unchallenged. Generations may forget, but individuals remember. When good intentions run amok, individuals remember what the original justification was. James Madison in Federalist 51, said “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.” Recognition of this danger seems to be unique to English cultures.
Being farther removed from the UK, I have a different and wider perspective. My expectations come from reading more Tolkien than Times. And from reading history, not histrionics. English literary and political history is one of awakenings. In the past millennium, freedom has been won in sweeping victories, and is only lost through neglect. For two of my favorite authors, Lewis and Tolkien, awakening was the sole plot line of virtually their entire life’s work. Dickens’s best known character is Ebenezer Scrooge, and his story is the essence of an awakening.
This struggle against obsessive domination by a big brother state will be difficult with many wobbles and diversions. There will be times when backward steps out number the forward ones. But my confident expectation is that the history of Britain and of English speaking cultures everywhere is on our side. Liberty “lost in the pursuit,” will be reclaimed. It always has been.
This event inspires a feeling that confuses a lot of people. They cannot quite put their finger on it. Some have mentioned schadenfreude. No. That’s not it. In fact, that particular viciousness is so alien to English speakers that we need to borrow a European word for it. I am confident that no person here takes any sick pleasure from that clerk’s suffering. The trail of English history is a search for justice, not redistribution of suffering. The feeling this event inspires is deeper than that and it is a just and justified one. This feeling is coming from our recognition of possibility, of alliance, of purpose; the first perceptions of a change in the direction of history. Since this feeling is one we have felt seldom and mentioned even less, it does not surprise me that it should go unrecognized. But when I read Guy’s post this morning, I felt it.
Joy.
I just picked up Tuesday’s Guardian to do my clippings (everything is behind), and found an article by George Monbiot, an attack on loony-toon ‘documentary’ Loose Change, almost all of which I agree with. Even when he says:
People believe Loose Change because it proposes a closed world: comprehensible, controllable, small. Despite the great evil that runs it, it is more companionable than the chaos that really governs our lives, a world without destination or purpose. This neat story draws campaigners away from real issues – global warming, the Iraq war, nuclear weapons, privatisation, inequality – while permanently wrecking their credibility. Bush did capitalise on the attacks, and he did follow a pre-existing agenda, spelt out, as Loose Change says, by the Project for the New American Century. But by drowning this truth in an ocean of nonsense, the conspiracists ensure that it can never again be taken seriously.
He is right. Those are the real issues. He is on the wrong side of them mostly, but they are worth arguing about. When he suggests that the delusional state of politics is caused insufficient democracy, he is wrong about that too as there is actually too much, the principal form of governance in the English-speaking world being imbecility howlback. But at least he has identified the problem.
Shock of recognition: Monbiot and I are brothers under the skin. We belong to recognisably the same impersonal, evolving, rationalist civilization in which there are real contentions, even though we have extremely different takes on it. The screw-Loose-Changers, bin-Laden-ists, the creationists, all live in a personified universe where humans are ants: someone is permanently in charge of everything, and anyone who disagrees is not just wrong but marked for destruction.
On occasion over the last 20 years I have met an animal-rights hysteric who sobbingly insisted the ALF “are not terrorists”, and that their campaigns of persecution were justified – though never someone who would say scientists should be murdered. Equally I have only rarely come across Irish republican sympathisers who passively supported the IRA in fighting ‘British colonialism’ – though never anyone who thought bombing civilians was a good idea. But yesterday alone I spoke to three people, respectable middle-class people in politics and business, who volunteered remarks on our latest letter-bombings that very much suggested they were pleased, and they expected me to be too.
That is surprising enough. But the trouble is, dear reader, I was.
I certainly do not want more bombings. I hope it is stopped before anyone is hurt. I would not countenance doing something myself that by deliberate action might injure some unknown other person. But nonetheless there is something in me that exults in this violence in way I – a person revolted by boxing and war-footage – have never felt. Someone, somewhere, is fighting back!
There is no excuse for this. I am fighting back myself in a peaceful liberal way, through the legitimate means of political campaigning within the law. The persistent fantasy about long-handled bolt-cutters that springs out of the back of my mind 100 times a day, every time I see the snakey armoured cables of a CCTV camera, remains a fantasy. No need for violence. Not even against things, let alone people. And the spreading conception, that resort to violence is a right if people do not do what you want is a recipe for bloody anarchy. Violence is counter-productive.
But my emotions, and those of my interlocutors, hint that just beneath the surface parts of Britain are boiling. A lot of people have had enough of the surveillance state, though they are bonded, compliant, cowed by the suggestion that to oppose it makes them “a friend of terrorists,” an enemy of Helfansafey, or even of Skoolzanospitalz. The people who spoke to me believed that whoever is doing it is doing it as a protest against the tracking of motorists, and that my public position as an uncowed opponent of the securocrats made me someone it was safe to say such things to.
I hope that this is not as bad as it seems. I am sure that we are not so desperate, yet, in Britain that liberty requires insurrection. But I also hope that the bomber is not an isolated madman. I hope he is an extreme outlier of a general public anger at being constantly watched and continually chivvied by officialdom. If is, then a peaceful counter-revolution does require people to speak out against the inspectorate, not just to those they think might share their views, but publicly.
A U.S. politician wants to pass a law that would make it a crime to cross the road while listening to an MP3 player or some other device that presumably screens out the noise of approaching traffic. For one’s own safety, naturally. People who wear iPods while walking around are a menace to themselves and this sort of bad behaviour should be banned immediately, naturally (sarcasm alert).
Alas, the story I have linked to does not give any examples of where a pedestrian was run over by a car because the person happened to be daydreaming while listening to Mozart or for that matter rocking to ACDC.
Music, it’s the new menace.
Don’t worry, I’m not gonna start any sword fights. I’m over that phase.
– Captain Malcolm Reynolds, one of the many fine characters in the television series, Firefly.
Here is the latest Papal Bull from the European Union:
A series of “green crimes”, enforceable across the EU and punishable by prison sentences and hefty fines, are to be proposed under a contentious push by the European Commission into the sensitive area of criminal lawmaking.
The drive by Brussels to apply penalties for ecological crime reflects concerns that some countries treat offences such as pollution and illegal dumping of waste more seriously than others, allowing criminals to exploit loopholes.
It used to be the dream of socialists and utopians of varying degrees of malevolence or stupidity to want a world state. In a world state, pesky local regulatory differences would be obliterated and replaced by a rational grid of laws from which no escape was possible. In true ‘watermelon’ fashion – green on the outside, red in the core – the Greens are embracing the instruments of a pan-national state to enforce their ideas.
There is a superficial plausibility to this. Pollution knows no barriers. If a German coal-fired power station emits carbon dioxide and other things, that will not just affect the Germans living near to the station but other nations. If a Swiss chemicals firm accidentally spills toxic material in to the Rhine – this has happened – then people in Holland get affected, and so on.
But what these sort of cases do is not to suggest that we need to give a centralised, international body coercive powers over people living across a whole continent. Rather, we should keep reminding people that rigorous enforcement of existing property rights, and creation of such rights in hitherto unowned resources, allied to the incentive structures of markets, provide the best route for tackling real environmental problems such as pollution. In any case, with certain emissions, it pays to remember that a pollutant for one person might be a positive benefit – or “externality” – for someone else.
The global warming/pollution/generally-we-are-all-doomed agenda is a significant threat to our liberties at the moment, so I make no apologies for going on about it.
I am fed up with Western companies collaborating with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, helping them restrict the internet and monitor communications by those who disagree and oppose them. Julien Pain of Reporters without Borders writes in Dictatorships catching up with Web 2.0.
These days, “subversive” or “counter-revolutionary” material goes on the Internet and political dissidents and journalists have become “cyberdissidents” and “online journalists.” … The Web makes networking much easier, for political activists as well as teenagers. Unfortunately, this progress and use of new tools by activists is now being matched by the efforts of dictatorships to fight them. Dictators, too, have entered the world of Web 2.0.
He expands:
The predators of free expression are not all the same. China keeps a tight grip on what is written and downloaded by users, spends an enormous amount on Internet surveillance equipment, and hires armies of informants and cyberpolice. It also has the political weight to force the companies in the sector–such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems–to do what it wants them to; all have agreed to censor their search engines to filter out Web sites overcritical of the authorities.
Long-time readers of Samizdata.net will know that one of the bees in our bonnet is collaboration of Western corporations with totalitarian and authoritarian regimes anywhere, in any way but especially when it comes to limiting the technology that could help dissidents to communicate among themselves and with the outside world – the first step to any meaningful resistance. Both Perry and I and others have blogged about it when Yahoo, Cisco, Microsoft or Google put their foot among the oppressors’ jackboots.
I have often said, although have not blogged it anywhere in detail yet, that had the internet existed in the days of the Cold War, its end would have come much sooner and possibly in a different manner. I say this on the basis of my own experience of the power of communication and information dissemination within an oppressed society. Not just the serious political information. I remember the first 15 minutes of any clandestine meeting was spent sharing new jokes. All of them political, of course. And then there were western adverts that caused considerable damage to the communist propaganda. Soft-focus commercials for washing powder, chocolates, electrical appliances that we did not know even existed. The images of a world beyond got through thanks to the clear reception of the few TV channels near the borders with the Western countries. Speed that up, add scale and the rips the internet could have made in the Iron Curtain are beyond measure… imagine all the YouTube videos testifying to the ubiquitous presence of technology (cameras, computers and connectivity, not to mention homes, past-times and the luxury of being able to post inane clips online) for the exploited workers in the corrupt and decaying capitalist countries. Hmmm.
Even without quaint anecdotes from dissident days, most people can appreciate the importance of free flow of information and see what the internet has done for freedom of speech. What I see is a shift in the balance of power between systems (political and corporate) and the individual (citizen or consumer). That is why I do what I do (crusade against advertising and for individual empowerment) and why I am a big fan of technology like blogs, wikis, tagging, VoIP etc, and especially of applications such as Skype that is P2P, encrypted and distributed by individuals. Since its beginnings a few years ago, it has spread like wildfire precisely because it is secure and decentralised and, most importantly, unmonitored.
The Web phone service Skype, for example, has made it much easier for journalists – and Reporters Without Borders – to communicate with their sources. It works especially well because it is encrypted, so conversations are hard to tap.
Apparently, not any longer, which is the source of my anger and disappointment:
But China has already signed an agreement with Skype to block key words, so how can we be sure our conversations are not being listened to? How do we know if Skype will not also allow (or already has allowed) the Chinese police to spy on its customers?
After Googling “Skype” and “Chinese government”, I found more about the story which broke some time ago. Shame on me for missing it:
In September 2005 Skype and TOM formed a joint venture company to “develop, customize and distribute a simplified Chinese version of the Skype software and premium services to Internet users and service providers in China.” The Chinese client distributed by TOM Online employs a filtering mechanism that prevents users from sending text messages with banned phrases such as “Falungong” and “Dalai Lama.”
Human Rights Watch provides a comprehensive summary well worth reading in How Multinational Internet Companies assist Government Censorship in China. (Scroll down to point 4 for Skype.)
The real issue for me here is a moral one, not political or technological, although they define the context within which the moral choice should be exercised. I know and believe that technological innovation will prevail in the end. In fact, I am banking on it. For each repressive use of technology there will be new ways of bypassing it. My problem is that this merely treats the symptoms, not the disease. It leads to a kind of arms race, dictators and geeks locked in a battle to bypass each others’ technological resources and cleverness. True, geeks may be winning on that front. But the dictators are still oppressing and the losers (apart from the victims), in more ways than one, are the companies that have made the pact with the devil. → Continue reading: Complicity in a crime is also a crime
Why has Iraq turned out to be so difficult? Where did it all go wrong? Libertarians and neo-conservatives do not share many values but both agree that there are cultural characteristics which can render governance easier than this current war has shown. Iraq has proved that state-building can go horrifically wrong and that a chaotic situation involving a nation divided by tribe and religion can viciously spiral into civil strife.
After Iraq was conquered or liberated depending upon your viewpoint, the upsurge in terrorism sponsored by surrounding pariah states was very likely. Yet, if the correct steps had been taken to rebuild the Iraqi economy, then the insurgency would not have worsened. We would not now have a civil war, sectarian massacres, the dripfeed of corpses and kleptocratic authorities. All of these developments feed off each other in a failed state.
Iraqis were browned off with their impoverishment from sanctions and their ruined middle class aspired to the prosperity that they had enjoyed prior to Saddam’s wars. Now that middle class has departed. What did these Iraqis want? They wished for security and the expectation that thieves, from militias or the secret police would not steal their goods or injure and kill them. They wanted title or the local equivalent, whether individual or communally based perhaps for the March Arabs so that their chattels and homes could not be expropriated. After 2003, we should have appropriated and extended Saddam Hussein’s social revolution through free-market reforms, breaking down tribal loyalties with education and the modernising cash-nexus. Hernando De Soto expresses this advantage very clearly.
In early March, I [Ramesh Ponnoru] called de Soto to talk about the relevance of his ideas to Iraq’s future. As you will see, he was a model interviewee; I didn’t have to do much talking.
NRO: How important is the establishment of property rights in a post-totalitarian country such as [we’re hoping postwar Iraq will be]?
HDS: It’s obviously crucial. If you want to create a market society, that’s what it’s based on. . . . [T]he starting point, the genesis of a market society is property rights because it relates to the issue of what belongs to whom. Once you determine that, you know who starts with what poker chips. And once people see that the law protects rights that they already have, then people begin to believe in the rule of law.
They wanted a medium of exchange that the government could not devalue and that would enable them to travel to the surrounding countries and buy more goods. They wanted employment so that they could aspire to such travel, and create opportunities for themselves. The building blocks existed to satisfy the middle classes and avoid the degeneration of political conflict into the defence of religious and ethnic identity. → Continue reading: Back to basics in Iraq
Yesterday, I attended a most enjoyable Sunday lunch, with an old school friend and his wife . It began at a civilised time, 2pm, which enabled me, before departing, to hear the winner of CD Review’s pick of the best available recording of Haydn’s Symphony No. 88 on Radio 3. This delightfully sunny piece is one of my favouries, and Colin Davis and the Concertgebouw played it wonderfully. As I walked across the Thames to Vauxhall Station I took photos, in the perfect early February yet spring-like weather. The train I travelled on arrived at Vauxhall exactly when I reached the platform it stopped at, and was agreeably uncrowded. The walk from Wimbledon Station to my friend’s home was most pleasant. So I was in a good mood when I got there, and nothing happened from then on to spoil my enjoyment in any way.
Anyway. One of those present was a rather rich man, and I now know how you can tell a rich man. Ask him how many houses he owns. He hesitates, and then he starts counting on his fingers.
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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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