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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Q: What do you call a Frenchman wearing sandals?
A: Phillipe Pherlop
Do politicians really say what they think? Or is their language forever circumscribed by the weight of office, the delicacy of diplomacy and the sensitivities of a fickle public?
If that is true, then maybe ex-politicians find they are invested with a freedom of thought and action denied to them during their careers. Vide the loud and clear message from Baroness Thatcher in her latest book ‘Statecraft’.
“The preliminary step, I believe, should be for an incoming Conservative government to declare publicly that it seeks fundamental renegotiation of Britain’s terms of EU membership.”
We all know what she said and we all equally know what she means. ‘Fundamental renegotiation’ is a polite term for ‘withdrawal’. I say this not because I am in the business of second guessing Baroness Thatcher but because there is no way to ‘fundamentally renegotiate’ the rigid terms of EU membership without excusing yourself from the club. Can we exclude ourselves from the ‘Acquis Communitaire’? If so, we are out and that’s that.
She is not the first person in Britain to suggest full withdrawal from the EU but, to my memory, she is the most high profile. Despite possessing nothing now except an honourary title, Thatcher’s legacy and image loom large over the British psyche for both those who loved and those who hated her. This book will not herald any change in current government policy but it is still important because there is a certain power in simply saying the unsayable. It is like prising open a rusty, bolted door so that others can all begin heaving against it in unison. Up until now, debate in Britain has revolved around whether or not we should adopt the Euro. Now the debate can legitimately move on to our entire place in the EU. Thatcher has said it, so others can say it too.
It may not be the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end but the cracks are starting to show, as evidenced by all the urgent scurrying (deliberate use of metaphor) around by various media, government and political poobahs to condemn, deny, rebut and dismiss her remarks.
So get your crowbars out, boys and girls, we’ve got some cracks to work on.
As the ever lengthening stalactite of side bar links was becoming unfeasibly long, I have moved a big chunk of them to a separate page. This new page is also full of juicy goodness and well work you visiting.
“We just got a message from Saddam Hussein. The good news is that he’s willing to have his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons counted. The bad news is that he wants Arthur Andersen to do it”.
– George W. Bush (I kid you not!)
It is interesting how one things leads to another. Following a totally parochial inter-Samizdata phone (i.e. telephone) conversation between Perry de Havilland and myself in which he pointed out how we must not confuse Americans, South Africans, Indians or New Zealanders with unexplained British words like “tube” (London’s underground railway system) or with unexplained British acronyms like “HSE” (which is Britain’s “Health and Safety Executive”, not a cow disease) provoked thoughts in me of a grander sort. For what Perry is urging upon us is a new “international” variant of the English language, comprehensible all over the Anglosphere.
Jim Bennett, popularised the term “Anglosphere” to describe a set of shared cultural values, a meme-stream of common references, that is not just the British Isles and North America or even the USA plus the ‘white commonwealth’. It is the totality of the English speaking world united by more than just a common language: an English speaking cosmopolitan meta-culture.
Most discussions of the “Anglosphere” that I’ve read have concentrated on the ideological affinities of the nations and cultures thus alluded to. Common law, liberal democracy, and so forth. That’s not wrong, but there is a more mundane affinity at work here.
It is no accident that the word “Anglosphere” has erupted into vigorous life at the same time as the eruption of the Internet. Language zones are strengthened by international electronic communication, and physical distance rendered relatively less important, and this would be true even if ideology counted for nothing. We can be sure, for example, that in Spain (or is it Portugal, I can never remember which, and that’s my point), there are ‘internetted’ networks devoted to every tiny detail of what’s now happening in Argentina, patronised by readers on both sides of the Atlantic who never give a single thought from one month to the next about happenings in the USA or Britain or Germany or China, and all because of language. Spanish versions of Perry link Spaniards to the dramas of Spanish South America, just as Perry himself links us all to the dramas going on in Anglo-speaking America, Britain, India, New Zealand, etc.
With the modern “knowledge” economy heading the way it is, this is bound to count economically for more and more as the years go by. Which presents us in little old Britain with a dilemma. A generation ago, in the pre-internet age, geography (“zone”) counted for relatively more than it does now. Hence, partly, our desire to hook up economically with mainland Europe. But what if the new economy is now knowledge and language dominated, and trade of this newer sort with Tasmania is now massively easier for us mostly stubbornly mono-linguistic British than trade with France or Germany or China? And what if the English-language-based culture of the internet is creating (re-creating) stubbornly unbreakable bonds of loyalty and friendship, as it surely is? You would expect a drawing back by Britain from the European political commitment, wouldn’t you? A period of Euro-revisionism. Which might be a part of why that’s what is now happening.
But now forget politics, and think of sport. A few weeks back I did a semi-triumphalist semi-jocular posting about how England now has the best international rugby team on earth. Antipodeans were complaining furiously about this post by e-mail long before France made nonsense of it by beating England in Paris on March 2nd. The Antipodeans protested, quite rightly, that England’s alleged rugby superiority over South Africa, Australia and New Zealand wasn’t based on regularly beating these guys in actual serious rugby games, but on guesswork based on England regularly annihilating the likes of Wales and Scotland, and doing okay in very occasional and not-that-vital games involving touring sides, ours and Antipodean, with home advantage going massively to whoever is playing at home. That one simple barrier, jet lag, dooms us to playing regularly only against people geographically close to us. France has the same problem.
So what do we do? Send our entire international rugby squad out to Australia for the entire season, every season? Doesn’t work. If they can’t also play locally, how do we decide who these people are to be? Yet the alternative seems to be that England will remain stuck permanently just below the very top level. Here’s a case where zone counts for more than phone, even though phone is almost the entire reason that all these geographically dispersed countries are still playing the same game by the same rules. (On the other hand, if all the teams played each other regularly anyway, the rugby World Cup wouldn’t count for nearly so much…)
I don’t have an “answer” to this phone versus zone stuff. I’m just saying that this is an interesting way of looking at the world.
For a more detailed introduction to Jim Bennett‘s fascinating Anglosphere ideas, the Anglosphere Primer can be downloaded here in rich text format.
Samizdata slogan of the day
Bloggers may not be able to change the way newspapers are written, but we can change the way people read them
– Perry de Havilland
The splendid Julia Gorin puts the boot in right where it is needed regarding the psychopathology of the Anti-gun male
He often accuses men with guns of “compensating for something.” The truth is quite the reverse. After all, how is he supposed to feel knowing there are men out there who aren’t intimidated by the big bad inanimate villain? How is he to feel in the face of adolescent boys who have used the family gun effectively in defending the family from an armed intruder? So if he can’t touch a gun, he doesn’t want other men to be able to either. And to achieve his ends, he’ll use the only weapon he knows how to manipulate: the law.
Read the whole thing. Prepare to laugh until it hurts.
Neel Krishnaswami writes:
Utilitarian arguments are the only arguments I have known to successfully convince anyone across ideological boundaries.
…and…
A political philosophy beyond utilitarianism is essential to avoid absurdity, but concrete utilitarian arguments are essential both to convince others and to keep ourselves honest.
I definitely agree with Neel in the sense that theoretical concepts ought to be supported by empirical evidence and facts. My dislike of utilitarianism is based on one of its consequences – ultimate disregard for the individual. Numerous amendments and elaborations of utilitarian ethics and political theories fail, in my eyes, to remedy this serious flaw. Neel is clearly aware of it and provides examples to this effect himself. If I understand his point correctly it is more about the workings of the human mind and its susceptibility to be convinced by ‘utilitarian arguments’ more successfully than by statements of ‘ideological bullshit’.
In my experience utilitarian arguments that focus strictly on consequences or plain facts and numbers create one of two reactions in the opposing party – either attempts to discredit the source of the information and/or desire to go forth and collect similar ‘statistics’ supporting their views.
My second reservation about utilitarian methods of a debate is that they don’t work. How else do you explain the fact that the vast regiments of lefties (apologies to Perry for using the term out of meta-context) are still polluting the media and public life with their incandescently idiotic convictions about socialism, communism and current authoritarian regimes? No statistics, facts and numbers about Stalin and other communists and the atrocities they committed on the Russian and surrounding nations managed to eliminate communism as an ideology and barely forced its metamorphosis into a ‘benign’ socialism. The facts are dismissed as inconvenient and unconvincing if they clash with fundamental beliefs. Some are happy to use utilitarian arguments to defend communism even in its original guise – I have come across people who argue that Stalin may have done some naughty things but he also turned Russia into an industrial nation. ’nuff said.
I find that the best strategy, and perhaps the most difficult, is one of exposing inconsistencies in the opponent’s ideas and hope to identify the beliefs that get in the way of a rational discourse. Beliefs are notoriously difficult to change. As one of the characters in my favourite film points out:
You can’t change people’s beliefs but you can change their ideas.
If however by utilitarian we mean anything relating to the specific, concrete and non-theoretical then we are simply using the term in different ways. Let me explain what I believe, that is, what my idea of a sound theory is and why I find utilitarianism pitifully inadequate in dealing with reality’s bigger picture. My judgement of a theory depends on three elements:
1. its content, that is its premises, logical consistency and order, its relation to reality
2. the motivation of its author and propagators
3. consequences of the theory when tested or put into practice.
To me consequences are secondary elements of a theory. They contribute to increasing or diminishing the theory’s credibility and its popularity. They can also influence the motivation of its supporters and their responsibility in upholding it. However, consequences in themselves cannot change the correctness of a theory itself; they can make neither true nor false a theory that is in itself flawed.
We make war that we may live in peace.
-Aristotle
All those people who greeted the inane steel tariffs with a yawn (“No one is interested in steel tariffs”, “it is just a bit of politics”) will be no doubt equally uninterested that the European Union, you know, the USA’s largest trading partner, is now planning fast track retaliation against the USA that will specifically target US states that benefit from the US protectionist measures.
They join Russia, Australia and Brazil looking into setting up a splendid little self-reinforcing destructive anti-international trade harmonic that will hurt everyone.
If there is anyone out there who did NOT think that international retaliation against US goods and services was the guaranteed response to the new US steel tariff, can they please e-mail me to explain why they did not think that was going to happen?
Now what were you guys saying about it not being any big deal and just being about internal US politics? So what’s next George? “Read my lips: No New Tariffs” perhaps?
Russell Leslie wrote in to disagree with David Carr‘s article Buddy, can you spare a lime?
“Even a child knows that nobody ever died from eating vitamins or herbal supplements.”
To which Russell writes:
Actually – people (specifically asthmatic children) die from the common alternative remedy “royal jelly” on a regular basis. People think of royal jelly as being a wonderful natural remedy but it does kill people.
Vitamin A, a fat soluble vitamin, will kill in excessive concentrations. Though generally the people that have died have been people that have eaten the livers of sharks, seals and (ooh! gross) dogs – rather than store bought vitamin supplements.
Comfrey can lead to internal bleeding in excessive doses (there are some reports that Calendula can do this as well, though I am not clear on how reliable these reports are).
Herbal remedies are fine when intelligently used – unfortunately some people do not have the mental wattage to do anything intelligently. It is not to protect the intelligent that some form of controls may be needed – only the truly stupid need protection – but no one wants to admit that they are stupid. It is difficult to devise a system of controls protects the stupid but that doesn’t get in the way of the skilled or intelligent.
However whilst Russell makes some good technical points, I think he asks a very leading question: how do we protect the ‘stupid’ from the consequences of their own actions?
This seems to accept as axiomatic that, firstly, people who take ‘excessive’ doses of vitamins or herbal supplements are necessarily stupid… and secondly that anyone has the right to ‘protect’ said ‘stupid’ people from their own actions. The first point is highly conjectural and the second is morally dubious to put it mildly. Surely the best way to induce sensible decision making to not to insulate people from the consequences of their actions, be they the people who take alternative remedies or the people who market them.
I love Economics classes that tell the ‘truth’ about environmentalism. The worst part of it is that the way they paint the two sides of the issue. On the one side are the conservatives who “think that money-grubbing companies will somehow fix the environmental problems”. On the other hand are the “progressives who who view government as capable of promoting an activist agenda to serve the general interest of the public”.
These quotes come from my economics teacher, who by the by I found out (through a campus Deep Throat) worked for Ralph Nader a while back. The textbook has similar viewpoints: the conservatives versus the progressives. Which one do you think most students support: those conservatives that want to go back to the old way or the progressives that want to move us to the future. Is it any wonder that environmental regulations constantly grow given the way it is taught? Is it any wonder why people my age do vote for Nader?
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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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