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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More, that is, of high-handed Tory paternalism on display here in the Telegraph.
The Tories are not a part of the solution, they are a part of the problem. Oh and by the by, would anyone like to bet that, in the event that the Tories got into power again, their Eurosceptic position would be jettisoned as well?
Over on Where HipHop and Libertarianism meet, Cal makes a non-trivial observation pertaining to the much derided Cornel West rap album
I heard some of Cornel West’s rap album on CSPAN today. It is awful. He is not rapping to start with. Rapping seems to be a requirement for a rap album.
Yes, that would seem a rather important prerequisite! Still, if an ‘artist’ can win the Turner Prize for Art without producing any art…
It seems that the US media now have a new bugbear as the source of all teen miscreant behaviour: Osama Bin Laden. When a teenager (a loner, naturally) in Tampa crashed his airplane into the Bank of America building, the US media rushed to blame Bin Laden. No where has it been suggested that the usual suspects, heavy metal bands, were at fault. Marilyn Manson, Slipknot and Rob Zombie are all off the hook. American has a new bugbear and he has a towel-wrapped around his head. Osama bin Laden does share one thing with his musician miscreants co-defendants, they all made really crap and disturbing videos.
It seems the media was right one this one, a note was found praising Osama Bin Laden in the wreckage of the airplane, expressing sympathy for him and praising the events of the 9/11.
What is more alarming is that the airplane was just trailed and allowed to crash into the skyscraper. It does seem rather daft to watch the airplane crash and do nothing. We are supposed to be re-assured by the fact that the airplane was followed all the way into the building and that there were two F15s scrambled. Surely the whole point of chasing the plane was to shoot it down? No doubt the Al Queda cells left in the world are studying this event closely. Fortunately the boy stole a pathetic little 2 seat airplane. This is proof, not that it is needed, that the Americans still have not grasped the danger of air based terror.
NB: It is curious to note that some of the leading hard-core left wing bands in the US have kept very quiet since 9/11. There has been virtually not a hard-left peep from Rage Against the Machine, Zack la Rocha, Eddie Vedder or Chumbawumba.
Andrew Ian Dodge
“What Sucks? Statism Sucks!“
The following is the text of a letter sent to the London Daily Telegraph and published on 5th January 2002
SIR- It is perhaps not surprising to read of the rapid increase in armed crime (report, Jan.3 )
Since the authorities have banned the legal ownership of guns, the market in illegal arms has been stimulated and is no doubt very strong. Also, the treatment meted out by the authorities to people such as Tony Martin and the exhortations of the police to the public to yield passively to armed assault have given criminals the message that the public – unarmed whether it likes it or not – can be expected to be easy targets
It appears that some people (albeit a few) are starting to get it
In Dale Amon‘s article about his libertarian road to Damascus, he quite correctly points out that we are neither left nor right. For this reason the path by which the Samizdata people came to our respective forms of hyphenated libertarianism is often quite different.
Like Dale, Natalie Solent came to libertarianism from the left, in her case the overtly socialist British left (the ‘unequivocal left’ as I often call it). Although I do not know Natalie personally, we do have friends in common, one of whom I am dinning with tonight. However I read her blog daily and have seem many of her posts to an e-forum of which we are both members, thus I feel I have a very good idea of where she stands. Clearly socialism found her critically rational mind a poor place to set down roots.
Natalija Radic, having grown up under communism and living under that system until 1991, came to libertarianism perhaps more directly via the ‘dissident’ route. Unlike many, she was never an ethnic nationalist but rather an anti-communist. As she once put it to me, “Libertarians were the only ones who actually had anything interesting to say about liberty, rather than just economy, and why true liberty requires true capitalism”. As I was one of the first self-described libertarians she ever met (in 1992), I take partial credit/blame for spurring her off in the overtly libertarian direction.
However others on this forum have taken a vaguely similar path to me. David Carr and Tom Burroughes both have British Tory Party ‘history’. I too was very much one of ‘Thatcher’s children’, seeing her rise as nothing less than the start of a new Enlightenment.
However my political background is very transatlantic (my mother was American, my father British). Back when I decided to go to university in the USA, I fell in with the inimitable Walter Uhlman via our mutual fascination with guns, interesting women and unusual beer (or was that unusual women and interesting beer…my memory is a little fuzzy there). We both moved in very ‘Reagan Republican’ circles, as did pretty much all our extended circle of friends. Most of that circle in the USA still are voting Republicans yet nearly all are at the emphatically libertarian end of the party. I think I can safely say Walter votes Republican these days for entirely negative reasons, i.e. they are the lesser of two evils. I recall seeing a pithy quote to the effect ‘The Republicans support Big Government whereas the Democrats support really big government’. This is certainly a view that would produce a grim nod of agreement from most of my Republican friends who regard voting Republican as a rear guard action to be done with little true enthusiasm. Unfortunately I do not see any point whatsoever for voting Conservative in the UK at the moment. Unless someone like Oliver Letwin gets control of the top echelon of the Party I am unlikely to change my mind even under the ‘lesser of two evils’ principle, not that Letwin is much to get excited about to put it mildly.
Like many UK libertarians, I abandoned the Tory Party after Thatcher, who was in truth an actuator of liberty without being a libertarian herself, and I moved out of the political mainstream altogether. Certainly with the defeat of Michael Portillo in the leadership battle to succeed William Hague, any last fantasies that the Tory party might rediscover any affinity for liberty was harshly disabused. It definitely had a very radicalizing effect on me.
My business background is in various aspects of international finance, though I am not doing that these days, and so it would be fair to say my attachment to capitalism began as self-evident axioms, like most practicing capitalists and serial entrepreneurs. Only later did I acquire deeper philosophical and theoretical understandings of a less intuitive and practicle nature. It was through this process that I think I began to see the glaring philosophical holes in conservative thought, with its largely intuitive underpinnings that sow the seeds of its own failure. When I read remarks by some conservatives that ‘libertarianism is a weaker form of conservatism’ I find it hard to keep a straight face and can only assume these people have done little more than timidly stick a tentative toe in the vast ocean of libertarian theories lying beyond the arid shores of the constitutional legalisms they mistake for society’s bedrock.
Yet that is also why I see things differently to Dale. I don’t despise conservatives, at least not all of them. Where as I regard socialists (or ‘liberals’ to use the weird American euphemism) as entirely wrong, I regard some conservatives as half-right (no pun intended).
As I seem to have gotten some dander up on a previous post (for which I am utterly unrepentant), this may be a good time for me to discuss a more general topic: why Libertarians are no closer to the Right than to the Left. I’m not going to do this by writing a philosophical treatise but by describing a personal journey.
I have been a Libertarian-writ-capitalized for almost as long as there has been a Libertarian Party. I missed the beginning by a few years and much regretted that lost chance to have voted for someone other than Jimmy Carter. I certainly would not have voted for a Republican (other than Goldwater but I was far too young then) under any circumstances, then or now, and most certainly not for one tainted by association with that most evil and dishonest of all 20th Century Presidents, Richard Milhouse Nixon.
I was a libertarian from the time I was a young teenager, but there was no Party to associate myself with or to tell me that I was not the only one with beliefs about individual liberty. I admired Barry Goldwater greatly and respected his opinion that the Vietnam war should either be fought or not fought. This earned him an undeserved warmonger label and succeeded in electing the man whose name I was chanting in marches around the Pittsburgh Federal Building a few years later when I was one of the organizers of a Guerilla Theatre troop of the Yippy variety:
Hey, Hey LBJ, How many kids did you kill today!
Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win!
This was partly youthful nose-thumbing at holier than thou right wing bigots and partly a major dislike of the concept of draft slavery. I might add that our troop broke up because most of it was involved in a court house riot after their targetted arrest at a demonstration in front of Draft Board member Julius Steinsaper’s house. I was away for Easter and missed the fun. I use the word advisedly as quite a few of my friends went to the hospital with patches of hair ripped out, broken bones, you name it… and I think one policeman pulled a muscle in his back while beating someone and another whacked his own hand with a billy club. That part of our troop became “The Pittsburgh n”, where n equals some number I have long forgotten.
In an earlier action we set up a baby doll in Mellon Square Park and offered passerby’s imaginary shots for a quarter. We were soon surrounded by about 20 or more police and police dogs; the street was blocked due to the number of police vehicles parked there while Pittsburgh’s finest debated whether we were violating a City or a State ordinance by carrying a toy Tommy Gun in public. Their boss finally came by, probably to find out why the rest of the city was denuded of police… he looked at the 6 of us with one toy tommy gun… he looked at the 20 some of well armed police surrounding us… he looked at us again… he looked at them, shook his head in disbelief and waved at us to just simply go away. I could not help the strains of “Alice’s Restaurant” going through my head.
One cannot say I came away from the incidents above with a great deal of respect for the police and the State. That is not even to mention the busts of friends for grass, the busts of others with planted drugs, the newspaper reports about friends busts that listed items that turned out to be birth control pills and the like…
Above all else, the 1960’s and early 70’s were a battle against an extremist right wing society that had no compunctions about the use of violence to suppress people. If you did not conform (and god help you if you were so nonconformist as to be black!) you were a Commie and the Enemy. This attitude in the government culminated in the Kent State murders of 1970.
On the day it happened I was at an antiwar demonstration at which my girlfriend was tossed in the back of a Tactical Police van. You know the sort, the cops they keep in a cage and feed raw meat to. So I was not in the best of moods towards the evil state when I saw the news about the murders a few hours later. I and thousands of other students were ready to go out and bring down the government that night, and if anyone had truly had a clue there would have been a nationwide attempt at something foolish. Even as it was, the reaction was so large and so angry and so sustained that it was the turning point. The kids who died at Kent State very directly helped end the draft, the war and everything the Right wing stood for.
Much of the New Left (ie the kids) in those days were profoundly non-statist. The by-word was “do your own thing”. Live and let live. Don’t enslave me to go fight your war for your reasons.
But there was another element. The left may have been the flag around which we rallied, but the flagholders had their own agenda, and towards the end that agenda started to be foisted on us. I could probably do a bit of research and give you the precise day on which I parted company from them. A Senator from Ohio was speaking in Skibo ballroom (the CMU student union) and instead of asking about the war or some other “correct” issue, I asked about support for the Mars program. For those who don’t know, this was the post-Apollo time when Mars programs were still being discussed… just before the long knives came down and the remaining Saturn V’s became horizontal bird houses.
After the talk, I was caught near one of the ballroom doors by one of my co-radicals, and a co-founder of CMU’s “Effete Snobs for Peace” (ESP). The exchange went something like this:
John: That was a really pig question Dale.
Dale: <3 beat pause> Go fuck yourself, John.
At which point I dropped all connection to campus radical organizations. John had done me the favour of explicating that the Left was as profoundly anti-liberty and anti-individualist as the Right.
This left me politically homeless for some years. I worked hard, did theatre, played music, partook of the musicians holy rites of SD&RR and in general lived the life of a free man (one that would curl the hairs of a Right-Winger) and utterly ignored politics other than to wish as much ill as possible on Tricky Dicky during the Watergate hearings.
Finally, in 1978 I ran across the Libertarian Party. I have voted straight party ever since. Or at least when I can get my absentee ballot sent over here, something which seems to be beyond the organizational capabilities of Allegheny County.
So if I seem a bit harsh on Right Wingers… it is because I am and I simply don’t much care. I do not see them as any more of a fellow traveller than I do those on the left, and the left has much better parties and is a lot more fun to hang out with.
I went into a small café in Zürich today and inadvertently tried to pay with Euro’s rather than Swiss Francs. The woman looked at me as though I had just handed her a dead mouse, then peered at the note, holding it in two fingers with her arm fully extended as if worried she might catch something. I snatched it back and handed her some Swiss Francs. She nodded and said “Much better… Euros are so ugly”.
Of all the many consequences of the 9/11 atrocities, I have noticed one that has hitherto gone unheralded and probably unnoticed. Amidst the long periods I have spent reading and scrutinizing the many voices of America that are broadcast over the internet, I have noticed with mounting bemusement a highly prevalent use of the term ‘Britney’
At first, I must confess that I was at a loss to grasp the meaning or significance of this term but, upon examining the context in which it is most frequently used its true meaning soon made istelf abundantly clear; the term ‘Britney’ is, of course, one of affection and endearment for us, the British
How could it be anything but, when used with such visceral relish by so many of our American cousins when they say things like:
Oh man, I really wanna rock with Britney
Or
Me and Britney gonna paaarteeeeee
Or
Wow, I dreamt about Britney last night and woke up with, like, a major woody
Hot salty tears of pride and gratitude roll down my cheeks as realise that our ‘special relationship’ has not only been undiminshed by time and circumstance but rather has deepened and solidified. How my heart swells with pride when I think of all those Americans in bars from Boston to Philadelphia and Chicago raising a glass of Pabst Blue Riband to toast the memory of Winston Churchill, a truly great Britney
This is nothing short of an inestimable gift, for, while the French are Frogs, the Germans are Krauts, the Canadians are Kanuks and the Russians are still Commies, we British are ‘Britneys’; the donees of a idiomatic expression that carries within its pithy cadence all those qualities that Americans have come to expect from us; steadfast and redoubtable, yet chirpy and easy-going
I exhort all my fellow countrymen and women to embrace and celebrate this term and make it our own and I urge our American allies to go forward and conquer their enemies for us ‘Britneys’ are with you
A personal and long standing view of Lord of the Rings
[Boromir speaks]
“I do not understand all this,” he said. “Saruman is a traitor, but did he not have a glimpse of wisdom? Why should we not think that the Great Ring has come into our hands to serve us in the very hour of need? Wielding it the Free Lords of the Free may surely defeat the Enemy. That is what he most fears, I deem. The Men of Gondor are valiant, and they will never submit; but they may be beaten down. Valour needs first strength, and then a weapon. Let the Ring be your weapon, if it has such power as you say. Take it and go forth to victory!”
The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter Two, The Council of Elrond
[…]
[Sam Speaks]
“But if you’ll pardon my speaking out, I think my master was right. I wish you’d take his Ring. You’d put things to rights. You’d stop them digging up the gaffer and turning him adrift. You’d make some folks pay for their dirty work.”
[Galadriel replies]
“I would” she said. “That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas! We will not speak more of it. Let us go!”
The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter Seven, The Mirror of Galadriel
For me, the Lord of the Rings works on every level, and I refer to both the magnificent new motion picture and the trilogy of books, which I first read in the early 1970’s as a child and have re-read many times since. It works on the most basic level as a glorious epic, rich with its own mythic cycle that borrows from Celtic, Nordic and Saxon traditions. Simply put, it is a bloody good read and the motion picture captures that most effectively, editing and abridging where needed without doing a fatal violence to the source.
Yet The Lord of the Rings can be read in many other ways as well. It also works extraordinarily well as a series of quite deep allegories. Certainly many people have subjected J. R. R. Tolkien’s remarkable epic to the Bunsen burner of allegorical analysis before, particularly those looking to divine a racist subtext. I have only ever read a couple such works and to be honest was unimpressed. I have read a few summaries of others but it has always struck me that the arguments of this or that critique of his work usually skirt around the core issue, for there are really only two facets of the story that truly matter: Frodo and the Ring itself.
I have always thought the allegorical meaning of The Lord of the Rings is starkly obvious and quite profound. Mankind in all its varied forms and mythic archetypes can be found with the story, yet in truth the reader is presented with a single representation of themselves: Frodo Baggins, the Hobbit. Frodo is us.
The entire story is about Frodo and his relationship with the Ring. Everything else is the supporting artifice. Frodo is Everyman, who does not choose the world in which he lives, rather the world is thrust upon him by forces at first seemingly outside his power to influence or even understand fully. It is Frodo, more than any other character, who dwells most upon the issue not just of dynamic reaction to events, but of moral choice. Although surrounded by mythic heroic characters of every shape and form, Frodo is physically puny, banal by predisposition and would be hard pressed to intimidate an irritable rabbit. Yet he is indeed strong, in that his strength is entirely moral strength… and because he chooses to exercise that moral strength, in the end he has no equal. We are shown that it is from personal moral courage that all other strengths derive and that all the weapons in the world count for little without that.
So if the Hobbit is us, then what is the Ring?
The Ring is everything that Frodo is not. He is a weak little man, vulnerable and multifaceted. The Ring is strong, almost indestructible and pure in its single minded malevolence. It tries to corrupt all who touch it or are ever associated with it and it is about absolute pitiless control of others. Frodo deals not through agents or proxies, but directly, face to face, whereas the Ring makes its wearer invisible and extends its power terribly through its influence over the other Rings. It is the antithesis of interpersonal morality. No matter how pure of heart the person who wields it is, no matter how just their motivation for taking that power upon themselves, the end result is always corruption. Yet the lure of such power is so overwhelming that only the most truly moral can resist it when it is dangled in front of them: Gandalf and Galadriel are both offered the Ring but refuse it. Elrond too sees it for what it is and will have none of it.
We cannot use the Ruling Ring. That we now know all too well. It’s strength, Boromir, is too great for anyone to wield at will, save those who have already a great power of their own. But for them it holds an even deadlier peril. The very desire of it corrupts the heart. Consider Saruman. If any of the Wise should with this Ring overthrow the Lord of Mordor, using his own arts, he would then set himself on Sauron’s throne, and yet another Dark Lord would appear.
Powerful, corrupting and impersonal. The Ring is of course an allegory for the modern state.
I am slowly catching up with articles posted in my absence, and I really have to add my 2p about Kevin Holtsberry’s opinions on that lad in Australia. In two short words: They Suck. Any man who would deny a 15 year old his last chance to experience the joys of sex before his premature demise is simply sick minded. If people like this were in a position to have actually prevented it, I would go further and simply call them Evil, on a par with the Communists with whom Natalja also compares them.
Personally, I found this one of the more touching stories of a year that had all too much evil in it. I am very glad that in at least one case love and humanity prevailed. This is at the heart of why we want a libertarian society. Without State power men of evil intent will not have the power to prevent acts of compassion and kindness.
And in any case… there is always Las Vegas.
I’ve stayed aloof from the flying fur up to this point, mostly because I’ve been preoccupied with critically important holiday activities. So many pubs, so little time! But the holiday season is now past and I find myself in stable condition and on the road to full recovery… so it is time to roll up the sleeves and get blogging.
Everyone seems to recognize that Ruby Ridge and Waco were important. I think some writers have skirted the edge of just why that is so without actually stating it: they were liberty’s canaries.
No one who has read about the Branch Davidians will argue David Kouresh was other than a wacko. He was a religious nut. He was at the outer limits of American society, His death showed us precisely where that limit sat and was a clarion call to those of more moderate beliefs. It showed them they had better join in holding the line or else soon find themselves on the wrong side of it:
First they came for the Jews, but I did nothing because I’m not a Jew. Then they came for the socialists, but I did nothing because I’m not a socialist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I did nothing because I’m not a Catholic. Finally, they came for me, but by then there was no one left to help me.
Pastor Father Niemoller (1946)
I am not saying that the government actions were equivalent to the full blown horror of Nazism. They were not. They were however equivalent to the earliest, most tentative steps of it. Americans are not quite as sanguine about their governments’ motives and actions as Father Niemoller, nor are they disarmed or unwilling to fight if push comes to shove.
We need armed nuts; they serve a valuable purpose. To quote myself from a discussion on the politics of space over a decade ago and why we needed our own unreasonable extremists in that endeavour:
The ends define the middle
David Khoresh provided us a warning. He showed each of us exactly how far from the edge we stood and left us to decide what to do about it. The fact that American citizenry are armed means there is a very real set of checks and balances between citizen and government. The founders and the framers of the Constitution intended this to be so and that is why there is a Second Amendment in the hallowed Bill of Rights.
This is why I do not believe the United States is even remotely near a revolutionary situation. There are no problems there which cannot be dealt with in a civil and civilized Constitutional manner. I would go so far as to say no sane person should wish the line be crossed. Revolutionary results are unpredictable. Once a society has broken down into factions that solve all problems by weight of arms rather than by law, it can be beastly difficult to recover civil society.
James Lileks goes some creditable way to restoring my faith in journalism with this cracking piece
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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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