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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I have gone straight from the buzz of London to the grey nostalgia of Prague and am now sitting in an internet cafe named appropriately Globe. I can hear English being spoken as this is a favourite place for the English-speaking ex-pats and my inner Anglospherometer is telling me that it’s time to blog. I have been in Prague for two days now and given that this place is in a different world in terms of mentality and time, please take the following comments as potentially confused ramblings of a travelling blogger…
In the short time I have been here I have managed to cover a multitude of activities – checked out (no pun intended) what is new in Prague since my last visit two years ago, visited a monstrous museum of modern art (previously communist archives, the building, not the pictures, obviously…), had a blazing row about nationalism and political discourse in the Mittel Europa and managed to send two Jehovah’s witnesses on their way amicably and within twenty seconds! I am particularly proud of the last one…
I have been thinking about the best way of debating in a place like Central Europe where a Western style of discourse does not create the expected responses. Roll on the popularisation of shared meta-contextual discourse…! The usual evolution of an argument from a thesis through antithesis to a synthesis, does certaintly not apply here. A statement is made, often categorically, so a thesis is born. However, presenting an anti-thesis is dangerous as the aforementioned blazing rows are certain to ensue….What is needed is some kind of validation of the grains of truths carefully exctracted from the original statement. This is interesting (and frustrating) but I think it springs from the need of the Central Europeans to assert their intellectual identity by having it first recognised by their debating opponents. Then, perhaps, room for sneaking an anti-thesis in is created, en route to a wonderful and all encompassing synthesis, providing ample justification for gallons of lovely alcohol to be consumed. As a second thought, who needs shared meta-context when you have alcohol?
On my wanderings through Prague I have been walking along Wenceslas Square, the main square where the 1989 demonstrations of the ‘Velvet Revolution’ took place. I noticed that some shops are hiring people to walk around holding large placards to advertise their wares. This is a familiar sight in the West, especially in Oxford street, the main shopping street in London and I have often looked upon these as another sign of ‘unbridled’ capitalism. Here the locals tell me in a voice dripping with moral satisfaction that such advertising is going to be banned soon as it insults the human dignity. Mindful of my debating experience in this place, I meekly pointed out that perhaps these people may be quite content to earn some money by an activity that does not involve much effort and that by banning it, they will be deprived of the opportunity to have their human dignity offended at a price they are prepared to be paid… As expected I did not get far but I have acted as the lone voice of free market and capitalism. Today, I have seen a girl reading a book whilst at the same time holding a large sign advertising an Irish Pub… So much for insulted human dignity!
I have another three days to go and depending on my ability to access the internet and my mental stability, I may blog again. If not, once in London I will no doubt find plenty to write about privacy and security, computers, markets and other far less nostalgic topics.
I’ve just been perusing the stats in a CNN poll of Americans taken recently and thought this line is worth sharing:
Q23: Now I’d like to ask you a few questions about the U.S. response to the September 11th attacks. Do you approve or disapprove of the military attacks led by the United States against targets in Afghanistan?
Total Rep Dem Ind Feb02a
Approve 88% 95% 87% 81% 87%
Disapprove 9% 2% 11% 14% 85%
DK/NA   3% 3% 2% 5% 5%
This is perhaps one of the few times in my life I’ve found myself in agreement with 9 out of 10 people, although I’d like to at least think I agree more strongly than most.
I have not written about the Middle East before (and have not written much lately at all due to excessive demands on my time), as I do not feel very qualified to address many of the issues there. In some ways the interesting thing to me about Israel and the Palestinians is not so much what is happening but the strange way people report what goes on there.
Both sides seem to view Israel as somehow ‘special’. Its detractors point out its lousy human rights record and the ethnic nature of its definitions of nationality as if somehow that made Israel worse than the vast majority of other non-Anglosphere countries in which these facts also apply. I wonder why so much is said by the detractors about Israel’s beastly treatment of non-Jews and yet so little is said about Belorus or Burma or China’s beastly treatment of everyone within their borders.
Its supporters on the other hand seem extraordinarily sensitive about negative remarks, reacting with ‘shock’ when even reasoned criticism about Israeli behaviour is made. Some months back I recall seeing a harrowing film clip of a young Palestinian child being shot dead by Israeli troops whilst he cowered next to his terrified father and yet the murmur from the usual talking heads in the Western media amounted to a shrug and saying ‘shit happens’. I recall seeing a blog (I forget which one) which said in its sidebar that it was writing about US and Israeli ‘exceptionalism’. Well frankly I don’t buy the notion of American ‘exceptionalism’ let alone that of some dusty Middle Eastern quasi-socialist quasi-religious ethnically defined state. The world is full of dusty quasi-socialist quasi-religious ethnically defined states.
And so if you detect an air of indifference in me, well I suppose I care as much about the conflict between Jews and Arabs as most Jews care about the conflict between Croats and Serbs. Which is to say, not much. Perry shares my lack of enthusiasm about the subject but he at least knows a bit more about it than I do.
And so the reason I find myself writing about the Middle East, at least indirectly, has less to do with the rights and wrongs of what Israel is and is not doing than with my own subjective perceptions and emotional baggage. I was watching CNN in a hotel in Zagreb earlier to day whilst waiting for a business appointment. As I watched, I heard a report from a female reporter near Jenin who said that Israeli tanks and armoured personnel carriers were moving through the area instructing all Palestinian males between the ages of 15 and 50 to come out of their homes and wait for transport to a place where they can be ‘questioned’.
Now I have no idea what the Israeli military actually has planned for these people but I felt a sudden surge not unlike panic inside me when I heard the reporter say that. In my part of the world many times within the last ten years, powerful armies have moved into a community and taken away entire male populations based on the simple fact of their ethnic background. I found myself desperately hoping that those Palestinian men would find some dark cellar or attic to hide in rather than be bused off somewhere, their fate entirely dependent on the wishes of armed men who by and large feel no commonality of community with them.
I am not on anyones side in that conflict. Israel (and the Palestinians) did not help or hinder Croatia in its recent war and I feel much the same about them, yet I cannot help but pray that my feelings when I heard that report were baseless and irrational. There are already enough communities in the world with no young men in them.
As Jason Pontin points out in his article on Red Herring, there is a bifurcation of inventiveness on the planet. A few places do all the entrepreneurial heavy lifting, the rest look on. It is not just circumstances but also cultural factors which produce innovation.
‘Please do not ask for credit as a kick in the bollocks often offends’
– Seen on a notice behind a bar in a less than salubrious part of London last night.
It is good to see the private sector doing its part in discouraging unwise accumulation of debt in this era of absurdly low interest rates
Having made a dig at our Gallic cousins on Thursday it is only fair to point to a welcome burst of common sense from the land which has of course yielded such wise people as Alexis de Toqueville and Frederic Bastiat, both genuine liberals (i.e. not socialists).
In the Financial Times’ editorial pages today, psychoanalyst and author Michel Schneider writes that in France, the state has become so big as to represent a mother-figure to many of its citizens, who increasingly regard themselves as children. Schneider is the author of Big Mother: the psychopathology of political life, and the whole article is worth a read. So as Dr Glenn Reynolds would say, go read it.
There is a nice article about blogging by Daniel Sorid on Reuters. At last someone who actually understand why blogs are better than Usenet.
I always enjoy a hearty guffaw when American enviro-mentalists claim that they are warring against big business and ‘greedy’ corporations. Those guys should just go over to Europe where they can enjoy working hand-in-glove with corporations in a real partnership for a ‘greener’ Europe (not to mention a more expensive one).
Don’t believe me? Well, take a look this latest ‘triumph’ of green ideology as the EU has passed a law requiring all electrical goods to be recycled
“The new rules, which would come into force in 2005, would require individual companies to pay to recycle their electrical products once the family home no longer had use of them
Mais Naturellement it all got rubber-stamped through the EU parliament without so much as a hitch nor a blink and is being roundly welcomed as a tool for ‘changing behaviour’. That’s what these guys love more than anything on earth; changing behaviour. They get a swelling in their loins at just the thought of it. Our behaviour is very bad you see. We’re all naughty children despoiling the earth and ruining it for future generations of EUnuchs. We must be smacked firmly across the backs of our chubby little legs.
Well, we have been smacked; smacked with the bill for paying for all this recycling which Europe’s state-backed monopoly giants will simply pass onto us consumers. Thankyou, chaps. I wasn’t paying anywhere near enough for my washing-machine. But what is my comfort when compared to the happiness of the greens, the Eurocrats and, above all, Europe’s quasi-state corporations
“The Parliament’s decision was applauded by Electrolux, the Swedish white goods maker, which called on EU Governments to adopt a similar approach. “What MEPs have done is good news for producer responsibility and is constructive,” Viktor Sundberg, a director, said.
Certainly its ‘constructive’. Its helping to construct a wall of protection for the likes of Electrolux from competition both domestic and foreign. Smaller non-state backed companies will not be able to handle the regulatory burden and non-EU suppliers will fall foul of the new laws.
This is why greens were invented; as a ‘black op’ for corporatists who need to protect their patch while fooling the public into thinking they are defending themselves against a ‘radical’ anti-corporate opposition. Still, you’ve got to admit that it works.
In the print version of The Times T2 supplement today, there was an interesting article by Ann Treneman about attitudes amongst a selection of British Jews living in the heavily Jewish Golders Green area of London. One particular section caught my eye in which Rabbi Pini Dunner remarked about a perceived increase in hostile views towards Israel and jibes about Jews. When asked ‘Like what?’ he replied:
“Like the phrase ‘You people…’ Language we do not expect. Colleagues at work will refer to ‘you people…’ What is that? People think: I am British. I am Jewish. I support the state of Israel. That does not make me ‘you people’. You don’t refer to Conservative supporters as ‘you people’ or black activists as ‘you people.”
Yet he is quite wrong on all counts. I think black people (activists, no less) would be hugely amused to hear they are not referred to as ‘you people’ by some sections of British society. And to hear Conservatives referred to in that manner all you need to do is listen to Prime Minster’s Question Time in Parliament.
Notions of identity are a complex thing in a multi-layered dynamic society like modern Britain. As a friend of mine once said to me, “In Jamaica I feel British and In Britain I feel Jamaican.” For her, feelings of identity bounce off context and her context keeps changing. For Rabbi Dunner, his feelings of ‘dissimulation’ from Britain are, I suspect, more a measure of his own feelings than those of British society around him. All I have to do to become one of ‘you people’ is start loudly espousing libertarian views in Britain or mentioning my Catholic background. My ex-wife once told me she hated it when in London she was referred to as one of ‘you Northerners’ (she came from Newcastle).
The British are a patchwork quilt of a people, not some volk, or Rabbi Dunner would find himself in a very different society indeed, one he would be far more removed from culturally than this one. When we express views that support foreign states or have unusual religions, then we should not be surprised when people notice we are different to them in some ways… but neither should be think it really matters all that much. We are all ‘you people’ to someone. Get over it.
Great news item via Reuters in Paris (no link yet, sorry):”a Paris bank employee who works for 37 hours a week, has 37 days holiday a year and sometimes wonders what to do with all her free time.
“When I go down to visit my family in Brittany for a long weekend they ask whether I actually have a job at all,” she says of the new leisure granted to her and millions of other French by a four-year-old law that has shortened working hours.
As certain columnists like to say, you couldn’t make it up.
Who cares about Israel playing Godzilla on the Palestinians? Record loss at Lloyd’s? Bury it on page 7. Are the Tamil Tigers coming in from the cold in Sri Lanka? Sorry, you seem to have mistaken me for someone who gives a damn.
England football captain and Spice husband David Beckham has broken a bone!
Oh the humanity! The horror… the horror…
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
– William Pitt
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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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