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]
|
Peter Cuthbertson discusses the importance of concepts and semantics to defining a political meta-context
If your arguments are irrational and unconvincing, and the consequences of people listening to them harmful and destructive, then you really need to have some other factor on your side to succeed. Sadly, those who advocate socialism, statism, lilly-livered liberalism and an ever-expanding government have just this. For almost every modern political argument is conducted in a lexicon that favours them, every debate being a competition between those who can use leftist language most convincingly – usually the left, unsurprisingly.
Daniel Hannan covered this phenomenon 18 months ago in The Spectator. It isn’t that the language prevents you arguing against the left – it’s that it prevents you doing so while still sounding as kind and as decent as your opponent.
‘Greed’ now means low taxes, while c’ompassion’ means high taxes. ‘Fairness’ means state-enforced equality, while ‘unfairness’ means an individual’s right to better himself. Any discussion of the relationship between government and citizen is perforce conducted in loaded terms. You can still make the case for greater liberty, but not without sounding rather nasty.
The column in question was far more focused on the problem than solutions, though he did note that there was hope for the future. However, the fulfillment of these hopes would require conscious effort to reclaim the political vocabulary. How can we achieve this? → Continue reading: Reclaiming the political lexicon
The recent war in Iraq has of course thrown up many examples of actors and actresses, many of them from Hollywood, who have taken a stand against war. What is interesting is that there appears, according to David Skinner in the Weekly Standard to be a divide in public life between the acting and sports communities, if one can use such a collectivist catch-all term like “community” (yes, I am aware there are nuances here). For example, while “documentary” producer and all-round blowhard leftist (I refuse to be polite) Michael Moore denounces Bush and the war, golfing god Tiger Woods (one of my heroes) takes a diametrically opposite stance, saluting the bravery of American soldiers on his personal website.
What is going on here? For example, I don’t really know what British sportsmen and women like Manchester United’s David Beckham or English cricket captain Nasser Hussein think about such things, although Hussein’s recent decision not to play against Zimbabwe during the World Cup attests to a moral fibre not usually seen among the thespian community. And I admired the fact that Beckham, apparently, asked for the Stars and Stripes to be laid in the mddle of Old Trafford, Manchester United’s home ground, at the start of a match just after 9/11. Skinner reckons that sportsfolk, unlike actors and actresses, have to deal in reality of a sort that makes them better suited to taking a view on issues like war.
I particularly liked this paragraph:
As competitors who directly face opponents, athletes may have less trouble accepting the probability of enmity between nations. They become famous over the strenuous opposition of other people. Their professional lives are in fact defined by antagonism and opposition. They have to individually dominate other players, and help their teams dominate other teams.
While with actors, he says:
when show-business types triumph, victory comes on a wave of public admiration that can make it seem like they were just elected the public’s favorite human being. If competition is the watchword of sports, adoration and acclaim are the watchwords of show business. This kind of career makes for a weak political education as one grapples to understand why a president would take actions certain to make him unpopular in important parts of Europe and elsewhere.
I think he is definitely on to something. Maybe libertarians should forget about ever trying to network in the artistic community and get on the golf course instead.
Some years ago I read some interesting ideas about the standards of the Victorian gentleman. Superficially they were very strict. There were things gentlemen just ‘did not do’, but the superficial inflexibility hid a deep pragmatism. Sometimes one has to break standards in order to keep them. One must have ‘rough men’ on the borders and in the dangerous lands. One must sometimes compromise oneself or commit a crime against ones deepest beliefs and suffer a lifetime of remorse so that others may blissfully exist ‘within the code’.
This is why we need the Anti-war Libertarians. They are there to remind us that war is in general a bad thing; it is something which often expands state power. They provide us with an unbending code against which we must judge our actions.
Libertarians are thinking beings, not robotic ideologues. There are times when we must knowingly do things we find distasteful simply because it is the world we live in or because an action protects something we hold dear. The existence of a code, is important. Without one each new action defines a new central position which is no position at all.
We Samizdatistas are the rough men and women at the borders of Libertopia, ready and willing to sacrifice our souls that others may sleep peacefully with their more strict adherence to gentlemanly libertarian behavior.
Guess who owns Monica Lewinsky’s old flat at the Watergate?
Her former neighbors, the Doles, bought it to enlarge their own living space.
I have been out of communications for the last week or so. Due the inability of Vodafone customer service to ring FEDEX to get a check delivered, I have yet to get international service running on my mobile. Living without a mobile phone is a terrible thing. How do people exist in the dark ages Before Mobile?
I’ve also been without ethernet connection since I do not yet have an 802.11b (wireless) card. So I may sit thirsting Ancient Mariner like in a cafe filled with wireless internet chatter but unable to drink.
Although I was well connected in Connecticut, I was totally occupied with an R&D job there and barely took time to skim Fox News each night before falling into an exhausted sleep.
So that is why I have not been commenting much on the war. I had thought it might at least last long enough for me to get a few licks in before the end. That was not to be. Modern warfare, like modern culture and technology have speeded up to an almost post-human time scale. If I had gone on business for two months during WWII little would have happened. Or perhaps I should say, little in terms of modern hyperspeed warfare. A major battle might have been engaged and fought to conclusion; a invasion might have established a beach head; the Battle of Britain might have started and be reaching a peak of ferocity… but the war would not seem to have changed in its’ essence.
Contrast 1938-1945 with March-April 2003. It started as I left Belfast and its’ effectively over as I sit here in DC barely a third of the way through a series of consultancy jobs. They held a war and I’ve mostly missed it.
It’s a fast old world we live in.
The UN, meaning significant portions of its membership such as France, Germany, Russia etc. are refusing to simply lift sanctions against Iraq automatically until they get their way politically… which is to say to dilute US and British control over post-war Iraq.
So even after Ba’athism is gone, the sanctions could be maintained. In short, the people backing this are saying “do what we want or we will make the Iraqi people suffer even though the regime the sanctions were designed to contain is now gone”.
And the thing that really sticks in my craw is that these sanctimonious bastards think they have the moral high ground.
More evidence, as published by Reuters today (and not in its “oddly enough” pages) is coming out that Saddam’s Iraq was a key supporter of Islamic terror. Looks pretty damning to me.
Come on peaceniks, please tell us this is all a CIA-inspired plot.
Our worst suspicions have been confirmed. The British Chancellor Gordon Brown is suffering from SARS (Severe Acute Robbery Syndrome) but every time he sneezes it’s the rest of us who catch the cold:
Pay increases in the private sector have slumped and are not enough to cover Gordon Brown’s tax increases, figures from the Office for National Statistics showed yesterday.
Economists were alarmed by the news as it could make the recent downturn in high street spending prolonged. It may also be politically significant, especially for Mr Brown.
The last time millions of voters had their pay packets cut because of tax increases was in 1974, when the then chancellor Denis Healey put 3p on income tax. Over 21m people currently work in the private sector.
I don’t know how many people work in the public sector but I do know that the number is much higher than in was in the early 90’s. Since 1997 especially, the ratchet of taxation (both direct and indirect) has gradually been cranked up to fund a staggering growth in government. The Labour Party’s natural constituency, the middle-class kleptocracy, has been showered with money and perquisites as a reward for their loyalty while, even now, they moan interminably about a ‘lack of resources’.
Meanwhile, the 21 million wealth creators have sadly bought the lie that only by accepting an ever-increasing burden can their lives improve. These Atlases may soon want to shrug and give their allegiance to a genuine tax-cutting, government-shrinking political party.
Sadly, we don’t have one in this country.
Now, you simplistic burger-munching Americans, you’d better pay attention and start trembling in your cowboy boots because Timothy Garton Ash of the Guardian has got a stark warning for you:
America is on probation. That, in four words, is my verdict on Gulf war II.
Did you hear that? Is that anything less than crystal clear? You’d better just watch your step, that’s all. Otherwise you’re going to be in really, really, really, really, really, really BIG TROUBLE!!
In what purports to be a big, back-slapping, wound-healing, Euro-unity love-in the heads of the current EU states and the ‘Vilnius 10’ are meeting in Athens.
The ostensible purpose of the conference is the execution of an Accession Treaty that will enlarge the Union from 15 states to 25. Unofficially it is also the first opportunity for pro and anti-war states to settle their differences and seek a common voice.
Fat chance!!
French President Jacques Chirac, who outraged east Europeans in February by slamming their support for the U.S.-led war on Iraq, warned the new EU members on Wednesday to do more to find common European stands.
By ‘common European stands’ what he actually means is that they must agree to having their foreign policy (and much else) decided for them in Paris. In effect, the other European states must become petit France.
“The European Union is about more than just a large market, common policies, a single currency and free movement,” he said pointedly. “It is more importantly about a collective ambition, shared disciplines, firm solidarity and naturally looking to the European family.”
The French cannot hide their ambition to mold the EU in their image and turn it into a power-bloc that will challenge the USA. They’ve got their work cut out for them.
President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland, which reacted strongly to Chirac’s tirade in February, obliquely referred to the spat in his speech by saying in passing: “We want Europe to be based on wise transatlantic ties.”
I hope that the paladins in Washington realise just what an opportunity they have here to screw the French royally. There are festering divisions here that are just begging to be exploited.
Nor has this gone unnoticed by the British press. Speaking on television last night I heard the Sky News correspondent describe the entire conference as ‘rubbish’. In a welcome departure from strict anodyne reportage, he decided to tell it like it is and admit that this alleged show on ‘unity’ was nothing more than a potemkin effort designed to kid everyone that a country called ‘Europe’ lies just over the horizon.
Whatever else it may or may not have achieved, the Iraq war has driven a coach and horses through the fond ambitions of the enarques. The only real question is how long they will be able to maintain the pretense that tomorrow belongs to them.
A legal fight is being waged by a gentleman to avoid having to pay the detestable British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) licence fee. I honestly do not fancy the chances of a successful outcome to this fight, but good luck to anyone, I say, in taking on the BBC.
The BBC, as has been pointed out on this blog many times before and elsewhere by the likes of Andrew Sullivan, is able to get away with its grotesque bias in reporting on current events, its gloom-ridden soap operas and ghastly “sitcoms” because it is able to shrug off the bracing winds of consumer choice and competition. The BBC does actually have good people working in it (trust me on this). But unless and until the licence fee is consigned to the ash heap of history, expect no serious improvement from that organisation.
I always thought it was one of Margaret Thatcher’s greatest missed opportunities that she did not privatize the BBC.
When it comes to the British International Development Secretary, Clare Short, any attempt to analyze her views are bedeviled by the fact she is such a mass of contradictions and illogic. Yesterday at a briefing in London she was asked by a journalist if she thought the death toll of Iraqi civilians was a price worth paying for the overthrow of Ba’athist Socialism, to which she replied:
I do not think that the death of any human being is a price worth paying
Let us ponder that remark… that the Ba’athist regime was mass murderous is beyond doubt and clearly something of which Clare Short would be cognisant. So what is she saying? She is not saying that what even the hilarious Iraqi Minister for Information admitted was a small number of Iraqi civilians killed was too high a price to end two and a half decades of tyranny.
No, she is saying that the loss of even a single life is not a price worth paying… paying for what? To prevent the murder of thousands of Iraqi people every year, that is what. The term ‘absurdity’ seems inadequate somehow.
Face it… Clare Short does not give a damn about the Iraqi people. She is more concerned about preserving the sanctity of her surreal world view. Why else would she say such an idiotic thing if not because trapped within her dogmatic meta-context, she is simply incapable of saying anything else regardless of florescent evidence suggesting better moral theories.
As I have written before, to oppose the war on the grounds that the domestic cost in Britain or the USA in blood, treasure and encroachment of the state is too high a price for the sake of the Iraqi people, is at least a coherent viable argument… but to oppose the war on ostensibly altruistic grounds that the price to the Iraqi people of overturning the Ba’athist Socialist status quo is too high is simply ridiculous, given that the scale of that Saddamite tyranny was hardly a secret.
To have taken such a position at before the war or in the early stages of the campaign was at least somewhat tenable, at least for a person with a poor understanding of the military and technological realities, on the grounds the cost in blood would indeed be mind bogglingly high.
But to still use that argument after we know that the ‘massive casualties’ scenario has not proved to be the case is bizzare. Pictures of tragic little Ali Ismail Abbas are truly heartrending for sure, but how does that change the cold hard facts about the butcher’s bill if Ba’athism had not been overthrown?
To argue on a ‘what is best for the Iraqi people cost/benefit analysis’ means the likes of Clare Short cannot have it both ways… unless all that matters is not that a ‘single life’ is lost to violence but only who did the deed. Although Clare Short’s logic is hard for me to fathom, perhaps she is saying that preventing thousands of Iraqi civilians dying every year in Saddam Hussain’s jails and torture chambers is not worth a single Iraqi death if a British taxpayer funded soldier was the one who ended the ‘single life’ in question. Or maybe she means nothing of the sort.
So who exactly does Clare Short care about? What does she mean when she opens her mouth and makes noises that sound like English? I cannot figure it out.
|
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.
|
