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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This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle…
This precious stone set in the silver sea…
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…
– William Shakespeare
My views on the state of The State (not just Britain, any state) are well known: I am a libertarian up towards the radical end of the minarchist spectrum.
Yet whilst going out for lunch today, I walked past The Trafalgar, a popular pub on King’s Road in Chelsea, and ended up watching the match between England and Argentina which resulted in a gripping and hard won 1-Nil victory by England. The roar and fierce chants of the English supporters in the pub was utterly magnetic and I found myself pulled in almost against my will, swept up in an irresistible atavistic fervour as if the blood of my ancestors on both sides of the line on Senlac Hill was calling to me to join the shield wall, to add my strength to theirs… now does this sound like the rationalist libertarian who writes anti-state polemics on the Samizdata?
Well, a society is not a state and a nation is not a government. Some libertarians may think that a libertarian future will have evolved beyond tribal yearning as we all live in rational individually determined free associations, but they are quite incorrect… because it is those very yearnings which will lead to many of our free associations.
Many hear echoes of the Nazi Nuremburg mass rallies in the football terraces and pubs of England but they are wrong because coming together to act collectively is not the same as collectivism. Only the state could have caused the Nazi mass rallies, but only the state could prevent such freely associated mass rallies we call football matches, because they are the expression of a deep seated need that will never ever disappear, no matter how rationally centred a society is. The need to wave the tribal banner and roar the latter day war cry can be turned to evil, but what great collective assemblies like football matches show that there is indeed another way to express those feelings which do not involve invading Poland or conquering India.
Here we go again… ever-expanding government surveillance powers and reduction of privacy as part of the drive for greater security. This time it is the US government digging deeper into the Web to capture and corral more of our digital detritus in the name of fighting terrorism.
The new FBI guidelines currently examined by the Senate Judiciary Committee would give federal investigators new licence to mine publicly available databases and monitor Web use. Civil liberties advocates warn that last week’s proposal is the latest step along a worrying path back to the 1950s and ’60s – days when investigators compiled dossiers on innocent American citizens based on their religious and political practices. FBI guidelines from Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert Mueller would allow field agents to gather information outside of criminal investigations, relaxing regulations set in the 1970s. Those rules, named after then-Attorney General Edward Levi, barred the FBI from attending political meetings unless they had a reasonable suspicion that a crime was being planned.
The new rules, by contrast, would authorise field agents to attend public meetings freely and request warrants with less interference from the main office. In addition, they would allow the FBI to monitor public Internet sites, libraries and religious institutions. Jim Dempsey, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology protests:
“I hate to be in a position of telling people ‘don’t go online and speak’ or ‘watch what you say,’ but you have to take from this that on an arbitrary basis, the FBI is going to be tagging people as terrorists based on what they say online,”
Well, actually, I am not sure what is wrong with that. Your mother told you (or should have told you) not to speak to strangers and be careful about what you say in public. And the Web is a public place whether because of its interconnected structure or because no communication is entirely secure and therefore private. I do want to be able to say what I want and where I want, as that is the most immediate and tangible demonstration of my individual and personal liberty. But at the same time, I also want the government that takes my money in order to ‘protect’ me to pay attention to any communication containing information about an event that could jeopardise my security, life and property.
So the same reforms can be seen as a long overdue end to restrictions that have hobbled investigators and denied them access to research tools available to anyone with an Internet connection. Intelligence failures in the FBI and CIA have come under the spotlight (and fire) amid new questions over who knew what in advance of 11 September suicide hijackings, which left more than 3,000 people dead.
I can imagine the phalanx of hard-core anti-statist libertarians bristling with indignation at the mere suggestion that I might consider any legislation that expands law enforcement’s ability to monitor communications anything but an infringement on privacy and individual liberty. Despite my sound libertarian track record on these issues (see related articles below), I would like to explore this issue further.
 It seems to me that the problem is not merely removing restrictions on investigators to monitor, gather and analyse information. Surely, amassing and making use of publicly available information with research tools available to anyone does not constitute abuse of powers …or does it? The difference between Joe Bloggs carrying out his equivalent of obsessive monitoring of other people’s communications and the FBI’s agent J.B.1984 is that whilst the former cannot do much with it (unless he is a cyber-freak villain in a Hollywood movie), the latter has access to considerable resources and monopoly on force that enable him to act on it. On the other hand, isn’t that what the US citizens are paying him to do?!
The issue here is not just what information is collected, by whom and for what purpose but the nature of the state and its authority. We don’t trust the state and its agencies to use the information for the designated purpose, i.e. our security and protection. We fear that information will instead be used for other purposes, namely, to increase the state’s hold on its citizens. There is no guarantee that after the crucial information about the terrorist plans has been extracted from the monitored data, the information about our private lives, incomes, interests etc, will be discarded. National security has always been used as a cloak for such exercise and it was mainly the US judicial system embedded firmly in the US Constitution that provided some recourse for the most flagrant breaches of individual liberty by the state.
So what is to be done, campaigned for or against, and posted on this blog? The usual stuff – discussions about the state and the legitimacy of its authority and powers, the limited or no government and most of all how the state has expanded beyond any justification. And so although I am willing to grant the state legitimate authority for the purpose of external (army) and internal (police) security in theory, I do not trust the state in its present practice. I will therefore continue writing about the issues of privacy, security and its impact on individual and civil liberties.
 When the state watches you, dare to stare back
That’s the headline. The story, in the Independent of yesterday (Thursday June 6), continues:
Medical staff at two London hospitals will be taught the emergency techniques on an intensive course that until now has been used to prepare military surgeons for frontline treatment of troops in the Balkans and Afghanistan.
The conclusion they’ll draw is that gun-control (in fact weapons control generally – the courses also include stab wounds) isn’t tight enough, and the law-abiding civilian tendency will have to surrender even more of their weapons, such as, I don’t know, their Sunday carving knives.
In my quest for unearthing new clever ideas on how to slake one’s thirst, it seems an inventor has cracked the problem of how to drink a mug of tea or coffee and chew on a biscuit at the same time while using only one hand. This could prove a handy invention for Brian Micklethwait’s end-of-the-month Friday libertarian get-togethers where drink and biscuits are consumed in vast quantities. Could such a nifty idea ever get the nod in a socialist state?
Soon Natalie Solent will be going: “Boys, enough already with the soccer, there’s a nuclear war about to start over Kashmir, new laws trashing what little remains of our email privacy, a vile British government to be overthrown, a bizarre British monarchy to be argued about, leftist websites to be denounced, Weighty Issues to be Addressed, etc. etc.” And emailers should be warned that even my fascination with soccer, in the USA or anywhere else, has its limits. Nevertheless, I found this from Rick Drasch most diverting:
There are regional considerations with soccer in the US. I grew up in Connecticut (where all towns are named after English towns or Indian words), and let me tell you that soccer is THE sport in southern New England. I have been playing soccer since I was 5. In school, we had no football team; our baseball team was a joke; but our high school soccer team is one of the best in the nation. The dominance of soccer extends throughout Connecticut into Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In high school, I personally did not know of a single football team in the state.
And there was me thinking that US soccer was all South American immigrants or maybe British immigrants, or else hired foreign guns.
As kids, we were genuinely interested (or at least tried to be) in what passed for a professional soccer team for our region, which I think were the Cosmos or some lame name like that. But games were rare and not advertised, and certainly not televised.
This must now be changing fast. You can now presumably get some kind of soccer from somewhere on the internet at any hour of the day or night if you know where to look. If not now then pretty soon.
I’m not sure of the reason why soccer dominates in that region; it’s not a monetary one. One theory I have is that it is a population issue. When you have 30 kids per class (of both genders), try and field a football team. If you actually manage to do it, you’ll still get killed. Nobody wants to watch your pipsqueak quarterback get terminated with extreme prejudice by a linebacker from a school in Jersey with 3000 students.
Or it could just be that it tain’t called “New” England for nothin’, gov.
I don’t think that Rick’s heart is really in that last bit, do you? – but the point about the physical danger of American football is surely a good one. With soccer, when you are severely outclassed, all that happens is that you get beaten 8-0, the way that Saudi Arabia was beaten 8-0 by Germany the other day. In general, I’ve heard it said, soccer is less likely to inflict severe long-term injury than American football, despite and in fact because of all that pain-preventing equipment that the footballers wear which enables them to carry right on jarring themselves to what eventually turns into an early and painful death. Hence the enthusiasm of those soccer mums.
To take my imagined Natalie Solent objection seriously, why blog on about sports like this? For the same reason that all newspapers have sports pages, I guess. It’s part of life, and a big one.
There are lots of reasons why we who love sports love sports. Here’s one that I haven’t seen mentioned lately, which is that with sport you do at least know what the hell happened. The daily bread of Samizdata is, let’s be honest, politics, or more loosely, “public issues”. But the trouble with “public issues” is that so often they aren’t. Simply finding out what the hell happened can take you all the time you have to spare.
Sport isn’t like that. The USA really did beat Portugal 3-2. It wasn’t 4-2, nor was it 2 all. It was 3-2 to the USA. It was 3-1 at half time, and at the end it was 3-2. I know it, and if you care, you know it. Way to go, USA!!
Well, imagine if we didn’t know, but only had lying press releases and evasive performances from the FIFA Press Secretary to go on, like at a summit conference.
“Mr Secretary can you tell us the score?”
“Gentlemen, I’m not able to reveal the exact score at this moment in time. This will, we now anticipate, be revealed rather more fully next Thursday, after the FIFA Results Subcommittee Meeting. What I can say is that this was a clean, honest and vigorous game, much enjoyed by all concerned.”
“Yes, but who won?”
“Is it true that two of the Portugal goals were own-goals?”
“Was anybody sent off?”
“Which of the USA goalkeepers played in the game?”
“Did Figo play?”
“How well did he play?”
“Did he score any goals?”
“One at a time please. Yes madam.”
“Can you tell us what colour shirts the two teams were wearing?”
“Why yes I can ma’am, the USA’s players were wearing….”
Etc.
World Cup Finals would be so vitally important that, as with Bilderberg meetings, it would be permanently denied that they ever happened. As for them ever telling us what the score was and who won, forget it.
But mercifully, sport is not like that. It has its intricacies and secret dramas and concealed scandals, but the basic story is out there for us all to see. Sport is egalitarian not only in who gets to play it and how likely they are to get hurt, but also in who gets to talk about it in a reasonably well informed manner. Answer: everybody who wants to! No wonder so many people prefer sports talk to politics talk.
And if we libertarians want to get our voices heard and our memes circulated in human as opposed merely to libertarian or more generally political company, then those of us who are inclined to join in with this sports talk should do so.
Bring on the Argies.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war! –
And you, good yeoman
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding: which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start.
The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit; and upon this charge
Cry – God for Harry! England! and St.George!
And, no, this isn’t just my muscular, traditional British chauvinism. France gets a thorough ‘Fisking’ and from a Frenchman no less!
J.P. Zmirak cuts right through the bull to remind us that the the ‘glorious’ French Revolution was anything but:
“That little thought experiment should give you an idea of what the French Revolution was really like – a digestive eruption of all the basest instincts in the lowest elements of society, led by power-drunk ideologues of the radical Left.”
The writer also goes on to point out that French Revolution had nothing whatsoever in common with the American Revolution, despite the two events so often lumped in with each other, and was driven by a wholly different impulse:
“It was utterly unlike the American rebellion against the English colonial officials – which amounted to a regional secession, led by the responsible members of the upper middle class. And for that fact we should be forever grateful – as should other countries which emulated the American model of political reform, rather than the French.”
He also goes on to lay the blame for so much future barbarity squarely upon the shoulders of those French leftist jackasses:
“At the heart of this exquisite movie is the relationship between Grace and the Duc d’Orleans. The latter is a pampered, ambitious, not very bright cousin to the tragic King Louis XVI, a Duke who throws his weight and wealth behind the Revolutionaries, in the hope that they will place him on the throne. He spouts, and no doubt believes, the new rhetoric of hysterical, xenophobic revolutionary patriotism – which would soon spread to Germany and Italy, planting the seeds of both the Nazi and Fascist movements.”
The whole article is written with the kind of florid anger born of pain and profound regret. It rings out a warning of the depravity and destruction which results from letting the bad guys get their way.
The recent massive U.S. government increase in subsidy to its domestic farmers comes in for a deserved and amusing mauling from Daily Telegraph journalist and Tory MP Boris Johnson. He is right to point out that by signing off the vast increase in aid to American farmers, Bush has compounded the damage to international free markets made when he agreed to steel and lumber tariffs earlier in the year.
On a broader point, this makes me wonder whether Bush is headed for going down in history as one of the most protectionist Presidents since the Second World War. On the domestic front his pre-election agenda seems to fallen apart with the exception of the tax cut. Instead, Bush is resorting to pork-barrel politics to shore up support in supposed key states for the Republicans ahead of the Congressional elections this autumn. Of course, we libertarians hold no illusions about politicians as a group, so I suppose Bush’s slide into cynicism should not surprise us. But I never thought I could write the following words – I am beginning to miss Bill Clinton. At least he believed in free trade, if nothing else.
It is impossible to save souls by coercing bodies. There is no such thing as a forced conversion. Men can behave morally only when they have the option of behaving immorally.
-Marc Glendening (one of the speakers at the Liberty Conference, see below, in his contribution to The New Right Enlightenment, Economic and Literary Books, 1985)
Just to make the point that the Liberty Conference on Human Rights, Civil Liberties, etc., this coming Saturday (June 8th), which I mentioned in an earlier post is not just warmed over Bolshevism, Chris Tame flagged the event up on the Libertarian Alliance Forum with the following introductory spiel:
Please note that this year’s annual conference of LIBERTY (The National Council for Civil Liberties) is quite historic, in that it features speeches and debates by libertarians and non-socialists, including myself, Marc Glendening of the Democracy Movement, Michael Gove of the Times and others.
Quite so. I won’t be there myself, even though the Libertarian Alliance (i.e. Chris Tame) offered to pay my entrance fee, but Tom Burroughes has just emailed me saying he will, and that he intends to supply a report for Samizdata.
By the way, as not mentioned earlier (and sorry about that), the Conference is in Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1, starting (as I did mention) at 10 am and going on ’til 4 pm.
More from the Lemley family of California, in answer to an earlier question I posted:
My youngest daughter (5) plays soccer, and my oldest (8) doesn’t. (My oldest is more of a bookworm.) My youngest played her first year last year, liked it, and she’s going to play again next year. (The leagues play in the fall.) It’s pretty low-key, like “here’s the ball, and you go this way … not that way, this way.” She has fun with it, and we play in the backyard from time to time. The hope for her, and most girls her age, is that they have fun with the game and keep playing for as long as possible.
What this little report illustrates is why “soccer” has done so well. It’s simple. You just need a ball and a willingness to have fun kicking it this way and that. This is not a capital intensive game. You can practice it anywhere, and wear just about anything while you’re doing it. Hence the legendary successes that can be achieved by countries who are failing at virtually everything else. Argentina’s economy is a global embarrassment just now, yet they are among the favourites to win the World Cup. And hence football’s capacity to spread. “Soccer” is catching on in the USA, even as the more unwieldy and expensive “American” version of football (which is more like our rugby) fails to ignite over here or in mainland Europe, except as a way to entertain US expats.
By the way, the USA ladies team are the world champions, no less. (I heard a Channel Five commentator on US baseball mention this last night.) And in general, it seems that, like Russ’s daughter, most of the Americans who get interested in soccer get interested in playing soccer. Over here “football fever” has tended to mean millions of couch potatoes or travelling fans who merely watch soccer, a numerical fact reflected in the TV adverts which have in recent years become sodden with a truly depressing worship of football fandom. Hurrah, say these adverts, for the “real” fans, who waste their entire lives getting worked up about the results of games in which they do not play, and who might on the basis of this mania be persuaded to buy this or that beer or snackfood and thus sink even further into bloated immobility. Now I like to watch football myself, but please don’t tell me that this is the most profound thing I do. Happily it seems that my sense of being insulted and patronised rather than befriended by these adverts may be quite widely shared, and that this era of British football watching emotional excess may be fading. Most of the adverts in this genre that I most hate were actually on TV a few years ago rather than right now, and meanwhile “ITV Digital” has discovered that there are limits after all to the televised football appetites of Britain. But how much more pleasing it would be if “football fever” meant Britain’s football clubs each having a dozen amateur and youth teams playing every weekend.
What’s the betting that some time during the next two decades the USA wins the World Cup? And what’s the betting that when they do, most of the USA hardly notices?
Now, there is a headline that you don’t see too often. The sports sites here in the US, such as ESPN.com and SportingNews.com made note of the American team’s 3-2 triumph over the favored Portuguese, but didn’t make it the day’s top story — after all, the NBA and NHL finals are now underway. Plus they understood that this was a preliminary-round game, that the US might not advance out of their group and that Portugal could still win the World Cup despite this loss (although it is difficult to see how they would beat Argentina or England when they can’t beat the US, it is still possible.)
No such restraint was shown by America’s news dailies. While American sports fans yawned, American journalists fawned, comparing the win to the “miracle on ice” at the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980, in which the US hockey team beat the Soviet Union in the semifinal round. So why is the World Cup getting so much coverage here in the US? I have a theory: finally, the press has found something that America really, really sucks at.
We used to suck at the Winter Olympics, but this time around we dominated. The American economy continues to grow while Europe has stagnated; Mississippi, the poorest American state, would be midpack among European nations in per-capita income. The fourth estate desperately wanted to believe that we would not be able to hold our ground in Afghanistan, and ran “quagmire” stories right up to — and even beyond — the fall of Kabul. Now the World Cup rolls around, and FINALLY, the press has something to report on that America does not dominate. And they love it.
It’s just a theory, but I suspect that’s what’s going on. It’s not as though America is suddenly in the throes of soccer fever. I am a bigger soccer fan than 99.9% of Americans, and soccer is maybe my 5th or 6th favorite spectator sport. If you pressed me, I could probably name all the teams in the English Premier League or the Italian Series A, but I cannot name a single player on the US World Cup team. So what does that tell you?
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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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