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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EU Commissioner Chris Patten, who has famously chided George W. Bush for his stance on the war on terror and who stated the September 11th attacked were ‘the result of globalization’, turns his attention to matters closer to home in The Spectator, namely how to forge a common European political identity where none now exists.
Patten is no doubt troubled by the rise of various anti-establishment political forces in EU member states, notably that of the National Front in France and that of murdered libertarian Dutch nationalist Pym Fortuyn. But Patten, in his usual delusional way, misses the essential point that one cannot impose a national or supranational identity where none previously exists. For a man who once was chairman of the Conservative Party, Patten seems curiously ignorant of the insights of such conservative thinkers like Edmund Burke and Michael Oakshott that national feeling is something that grows from below and takes organic form rather than be imposed from above. Patten thinks of national or supranational identity like a technocratic engineer. In this sense, then, he is heir to that strain of thinking which has been a key part of the French political system since the 1789 Revolution.
And there, of course, is the problem. The EU creates undemocratic institutions with considerable power like the European Central Bank and the European Commission, but then once problems present themselves, the likes of Patten scramble to figure out how to generate some kind of popular legitimacy for these bodies. That is surely putting the cart before the horse.
In his final paragraph, Patten writes: “A healthy European democracy will develop only when people begin to feel an emotional commitment to their European identity.”
But Mr Patten, people don’t WANT to be part of a European nation, hence they feel no need to create a common European polity. Until the elite political class of which Patten is a classic specimen grasp this obvious point, European countries will continue to be roiled by characters such as the ghastly Le Pen.
Over at the Liberty Log Alex Singleton comments (“Attack enemies, not friends” – May 16) on the ruckus between the Libertarian Alliance and the Daily Telegraph. Alex is not impressed by the LA’s anti-Telegraph stance, and notes that Andrew Dodge is likewise unimpressed. For whatever it may be worth, I agree with these criticisms.
However, far more dangerous than the occasional spasm of Libertarian Alliance activity that I personally find embarrassing would be the absence of activity. I got a phone message the other day from Patrick Crozier who writes UK Transport and is also the Transport Spokesman for the Libertarian Alliance. He wanted my “approval” for a letter he had in mind to send to a newspaper about some railway matter, and regretted that I wasn’t in to bestow it. I listened to him regretting my absence and I said, out loud: “Send it mate, send it! It’ll be fine!” “I’ll send it anyway” was how his message concluded, to my delight. And of course the letter (“Nationalisation is NOT the Answer”, posted on UK Liberty – May 14) is fine. In another recent phone conversation with Patrick I recycled for his benefit a business slogan which I’m fond of: “Load! Fire! Take Aim!” Do stuff. Think about what worked and what was stupid. Then do more stuff, and more. Shins get kicked. Feet sometimes get tripped over. (I don’t suppose my LA colleagues have loved everything I’ve written here, or always agree with the line I may take on the radio, e.g. this morning when I was defending Political Correctness). But every time we make one of these little efforts and or strike some spark or other the LA website counter creeps upwards, and the word about liberty and libertarianism gets around.
None other than the talented and angst fuelled Bitter Girl! 
Gene agrees with The Law is there to perpetuate the state, not protect its subjects and has his own perspective on who ‘owns’ the law
Contrary to the lesson from many of the cowboy movies I was reared on, that you can’t take the law into your own hands, I have learned that you dare not allow the law to be taken out of your hands.
Since the just powers of a government are derived from the consent of the governed, the government has no legitimate authority that is not a natural right of the individual, derived from the natural right of self defense.
To the extent that a government restricts one’s right of self defense, that government ceases to be a representative government and becomes just one more highwayman extracting a ransom from those who pass by.
Gene
I did well enough to blog about it, so here goes. I took the line above, that sometimes Political Correctness isn’t going all that mad, it’s just people trying to be correct and not hurt each other’s feelings. I also mentioned that when I was helping a friend run some maths teaching classes some while ago, I took some photos of the children and my friend asked me to stop, because, you know, it might not look good, so now I’ve outed myself as a paedophile. Oh goody.
Mention was made of the phrase “nitty gritty”, which the British police are apparently not allowed to use now as it’s some kind of reference to slave ships. I’d been told this was going to get a mention, but as usual you only think of what you should have said afterwards. And what I should have said is that “nitty gritty” is objectionable not because it’s racist, but because it is a massively overused managerial cliché. If the PC brigade could also decide that “at the end of the day” is offensive on account of being a disparaging reference to Muslim daily prayer habits and that “the bottom line” is also verboten because it causes fat women to be unhappy about the size of their bums, then good riddance to those two cliches as well.
I’ve just fixed to be on the Mike Dickin Show, on Talk Sport Radio, just after 12 noon today. I’m to be asked about various varieties of “political correctness gone mad” stupidities, like a grandad being stopped from videoing his grandkids at a party, because he might be a paedophile, or something … What will I say? I look forward to finding out.
Talking of Sport, did any of you Samizdata consumers see the Zidane goal for Real Madrid in the Champions League Final last night? It was one of those “worth the price of the ticket alone” moments. Basically the ball went ballooning up into the air and took an age to come down, but when it finally did ZZ volleyed it into the top left hand corner, in a manner which would be extremely hard to do on a practice ground. To do this to win the biggest cup final in the world outside of the European National Championships and the World Cup is astounding. Like all the very best goals, it didn’t look to be seriously on until it had been scored. But I won’t be talking about sport on Talk Sport. I’m one of the token political commentators that they have to justify their franchise. Sadly, broadcasting in Britain is still heavily controlled by the politicians, although radio less so than TV. Soon, this kind of stuff (i.e. stuff like Samizdata) will be spoken as well as written, and the radio “professionals” will be bitching, just like the print pros bitch now about blogging.
Last time I boasted about the fact that I was going to be on the radio an Australian dominatrix tuned in. What exotic persons will listen this time? Sorry, no link to that, because I’m in a hurry, and I still find it complicated doing links back within Samizdata. If I do well, I’ll maybe have a brag here about it. If I don’t brag about it, draw your own conclusions.
Sharon Stone is looking pretty damn good for someone recovering from a stroke!
And what is this nonsense about the self styled ‘American Jewish Congress’ urging Jews to boycott the Cannes Film Festival because ‘the French are anti-Semitic’? And which ‘French’ would that be? The 80% who did not vote for Le Pen? Spare us the collectivist crap, guys… I do not see why a foreign Jewish organisation should feel the need to provide the neo-Nazi barking moonbats in France with an excuse to say ‘See? Those mean old Jews are boycotting all of France!’ Duh.
In the linked article, it also says ‘satirist Michael Moore’ is making a documentary about the Columbine school massacre. But satire requires wit and insight, so I guess there must be more than one Michael Moore because the only one I know of is a talentless ignorant prick, not a satirist.
It seems British Prime Minister Tony Blair can hide his love for the European single currency no longer. On Tuesday’s Newsnight television programme on the BBC channel, Blair claimed it would be a ‘betrayal of national interests’ for Britain to stay out of the €uro for political reasons and said he would persuade voters to join.
Well, it looks like the grinning insurance salesman/trendy vicar character who has been our Prime Minister these last five years has decided to plunge Britain into the €uro at a time when developments in Euroland make it even less attractive as an idea. The rise of the Far Right in France, the murder of Dutch leader Pim Fortuyn in Holland, high unemployment and worries about massive unfunded pension obligations make the idea of shackling ourselves to the euro mighty unattractive.
Of course the creation of the euro has made it easier for big firms to tap into a pan-European bond and equity market and made prices of goods and services on the Continent more transparent, which are benefits not to be sneered at. But I very much doubt whether Blair is going to flog this risky venture to the public on the grounds that it makes it easier for his Big Business chums to tap the world’s capital markets. Not very touchy-feely, is it? In an age of Visa and Mastercard, instant cash withdrawals and sophisticated derivative markets, it no longer is much of a hassle to operate in a multi-currency world as €uro-protagonists claim.
All in all the case for the €uro is weak and Blair is going to have a fight on his hands. Blair wants his place in history. But by staking his future on the €uro, he could become history.
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil, in its worst state an in tolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer!
-Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
Roger Dorrington is a builder with two teenage sons, called Nick and Joseph, who have a problem with heroin. There is another man called James White who provides them with that heroin since they were 14 and 15 respectively, in return for money. As most people would correctly surmise, the British state says it is illegal to sell heroin to children like Nick and Joseph.
Now as a libertarian, I think that blanket prohibitions are not the way to deal with the problems caused by addictive drugs like heroin. But I also think that addictive drugs are a problem and that this is best dealt with via social mechanisms like families and in particular ‘robustly engaged’ fathers like Roger Dorrington. However in the here and now of Britain 2002, heroin is a Prohibited Class A drug and the state would have us believe that this makes dealing such drugs A Serious Matter which should be left to the state’s blue clad enforcers.
Now Roger Dorrington is by all accounts a fine caring father to his children and thus does not want drug dealer James White giving Nick and Joseph heroin. As a result he warned the man to stay the hell out of his family house. So when Dorrington came home unexpectedly and found White cutting up heroin in his own house, he beat the drug dealer up and ejected him from his property.
White complained to the police and Dorrington was arrested for assault. White was not arrested at all in spite of the fact he brought a class A drug into Dorrington’s house to give to Dorrington’s children. People must not ‘take the law into their own hands’ says the state and yesterday a judge ordered Roger Dorrington to pay £250 (US $360) to the injured drug dealer and do 100 hours of ‘community service’. Dorrington says he will refuse to comply with either order and will no doubt suffer more later as a result.
So what exactly is going on here? Well it is not about justice, but then nothing whatsoever any state does is in reality about justice. It is not even about The Law, which is certainly what states say they are about in their tenuous claim to be legitimate expressions of a society rather than a vast engine of criminality. No, it is about what is the true priority of nation states. It is about power. 9 times out of 10, if a person sells (highly illegal) a class A drug (possession of which is illegal) on private property from which they have been explicitly excluded (illegal trespass), this will not rouse the state to do anything at all… yet when a private individual himself uses force to prohibit three illegal acts on his own property the state arrests the enforcer of its own laws and does not arrest the violator of several of its other laws.
This is the true face of the modern British state and yet more proof of what both Frédéric Bastiat and Thomas Paine said about State and Society being two fundamentally different things. States only provide justice incidentally en-passant to enforcing their laws. It seems now even that pretence is fading. The only illegal acts that truly stirs Leviathan from its theft bloated torpor is a challenge to its own monopoly of violence backed enforcement. The state not only wants you helpless, it takes concrete measures to make you helpless. No wonder they took our guns away.
The Dutch have rained scorpions of political death onto the Centre-Left coalition government and driven the List Pim Fortuyn into second place behind the Christian Democrats making it highly likely that that the ‘List’ will form some part of a new Centre-Right coalition government.
It is a spectacularly vicious kick in the Nether regions for the left but will it actually amount to anything more than ripples across a very stagnant pond? The media hacks have been quick to point out that, minus their charismatic leader, the ‘List’ is a party which is less than three months old and appears unfocussed and a little incoherent. For once, this may be more than the familiar journalistic (which is to say, socialist) whining and sour grapes. There does seem to be something which is rather cobbled-together and even rather amateurish about the ‘List’ which, whilst it may have benefitted from a sympathy vote to a degree, is also the collective expression of an impatient, anti-consensus, anti-elitist grouch.
Such movements, when they actually do get anywhere near the corridors of power, have a tendency to be ineffective; proving to be nothing more than smoke, mirrors and tinkling brass. Lacking both political nous and a clear vision, they may find themselves being outmanoeuvered by their establishment foes who, while lacking any enthusiastic support, nonetheless possess the guile and experience sufficient to form the de facto coalitions and horse-traded allegiances that ensure that they keep their grip on the real levers of power.
And the Dutch will find themselves right back where they started.
Got an email the other day from, I think, a Mr (and I’m betting it is Mr) E. Palmeri, who signs himself “erp”. He refers to the story I began to tell in a previous posting about Pfizer and its support, via such things as the Pfizer forum, for capitalism and for the free market. Like I say, it is a story, and I ended my posting with those exact words. Which erp took exception to.
“And written or not, like I say, it is a story.”
Like it or not, it’s always as I said, it’s never like I said.
His emphasis on never. erp implies (and this is what got under my skin and provoked all the thoughts that follow), that I don’t know the regular as-I-say rule. Actually I broke this rule on purpose. I was trying to suggest an air of unfinishedness about my thoughts, of me talking aloud rather than presenting the finished article. I was trying to push people into thinking about Pfizer, into finding out about Pfizer, into telling me and the rest of us about Pfizer, not to nail down the final truth of the matter. To this end, I deliberately used the frequently heard by me and quite often said by me unruliness of “like I say”.
erp knows the kind of thing I mean, because the second and final sentence of his email to me goes thus:
Love your blog anyway.
And there goes another grammatical rule, the one about sentences like that one having a subject, in this case a first person pronoun. But we can all see why erp dropped the “I”. Fearful of being thought a pedant and nothing else, he ended with a deliberately colloquialised attempt to soften the blow, which he didn’t intend really to hurt, and as far as I’m concerned it worked fine. Glad you like it mate. Thanks for the kind words.
Why do I make such a fuss about this? Partly it’s a technique thing. erp is complaining about one of the very things that we Samizdatans regularly go out of our way to do, as do a thousand other bloggers. This is a blog that likes to talk in different tones of voice to suit the occasion, and to suit the different voices of the different writers. What, asks Perry in the spiel at the top left, is “on the minds” of the Samizdata people?
This is a good question. And what’s on our minds is not always perfectly grammatical.
One of the best ways to persuade other people to share your thought processes, in our case libertarian thought processes, is to describe your own thought processes accurately. You persuade by writing out how you really do talk in your own head about what you are truly persuaded of. As an editor, I constantly find myself saying to a writer whose writing has got gummed up: “Step away from the keyboard. Tell me, out loud, what you’re trying to say.” Time and again the next thing I say is: “Great. Put that.” If the price I and my writer have to pay is that what’s being said doesn’t get enough of a grammatical polishing to suit all the erps out there, well, so be it. At least there’s a recognisably human voice being used.
Besides which, all these rules can be and are all the time being broken. erp is mistaken. Quite often these day, it is“like I say” whether erp likes it or not. English is not, thank goodness, one of those languages where if you ever stray from the official tracks some committee of erps will tell you to behave yourself or else, which is surely one of the reasons why it has spread so luxuriantly. (The contrast with French is painful, to the French. “But we control our language so much more carefully! Why isn’t it winning?” That could just be one of the reasons it isn’t winning, sunshine. Ever thought about that?) The English language is the ultimate anarchy. If I and thousands of others are saying “like I say”, and the people we’re talking to or for that matter writing for in a blog get what we’re saying (which everybody does including erp, even if they don’t all like it) then there goes that never, never to return.
If you want to be a good writer you probably need to know what most of these rules are, as I do, but you don’t have to follow them slavishly. Writing which is perfectly grammatical can be rather like the music written by all those contemporaries of Mozart, which obeyed all the rules but achieved little else. Mozart, meanwhile, who knew the rules inside out and every which way, would regularly have fun and games breaking them. For a famous and easy-to-find example, try the first few bars of Mozart’s “Dissonance” String Quartet K465. The erps of the day all had seizures.
I’m not saying: “Mozart broke the rules – I break the rules – so I’m Mozart”. I’m merely saying, you can do it. Grammar goblins won’t chase you to hell if you omit a noun or pronoun from the start of a sentence, or if you put like instead of as, or if (to mention some other rules I know about but break from time to time) you end a sentence with a preposition, or if you dare to – sparingly, and when you’ve got a good reason, like when an adverb absolutely has to be right next to the verb it qualifies without so much as a “to” in between, or when you don’t want any confusion about the adverb referring back to something else just before it so you put the “to” between it and what you’re wanting to separate it from, or if, as I am here, you’re having a laugh – split an infinitive.
Life is full of “rules” which in fact aren’t. I still remember the joyful moment when I realised that you don’t have to read a book by starting at the beginning and reading all of it in order. You can start anywhere you like, and stop anywhere you like. If you do this, no one will arrest you. Some dead schoolteacher may be yapping away inside your head when you break such “rules”. If so, think about what he’s yapping, and if you decide you’re not going to do what he wants, tell him to shut up.
Now don’t misunderstand me. I’m not putting a different rule in place to the effect that you should never read a book straight through from beginning to end. I’m just saying, you don’t have to.
This like-as business is trivial but the fact that it’s trivial isn’t so trivial. An essential part of living the free life (and thereby not being inclined to try to inflict unfreedom on others) is deciding which rules you really are going to stick to because you really believe in them, and which rules you’re going to allow yourself and everyone else you have dealings with to play harmless games with.
Loved your email anyway.
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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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