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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Go out and buy a gas-guzzler, right now. Drive around burning tons of petrol and enjoy yourself in the process. Better still, invest your money in smokestack industries that belch fumes into the atmosphere. Not only is there a prospect of making a healthy profit but you will also be contributing to a better world:
The world has become a greener place in the past two decades as a result of climate change, according to a major study published today.
As the climate has warmed, the Earth has become more lush and rich with vegetation, notably in the Amazon rainforests, according to a study jointly funded by the US space agency Nasa and the US Department of Energy.
In the Amazon, plant growth was limited by sun-blocking cloud cover, but the skies have become less cloudy. In India, where a billion people depend on rain, the monsoon was more dependable in the 1990s than in the 1980s.
So it appears that we are not destroying the planet after all. Nor are we ethically obliged to abandon our consumer societies or turn our backs on technology and progress.
Of course, a few of us were saying this all along but, amidst the whistling of different tunes, it is nonetheless instructive to actually observe the process of the juggernaut of received wisdom performing a 180 degree turnabout.
I predict that, within a few years, the whole notion of ‘global warming’ and its attendant primitivism will become every bit as laughable and discredited as the ‘Canals on Mars’.
Arthur Silber, whose “Light of Reason” blog I generally admire, is not very happy so it seems with our own Perry de Havilland for his recent dig at Jim Henley over the outcome of the recent Iraq war. Now, I am not going to revisit this increasingly well-flogged dead horse.
No, what I want to consider is a more general issue of principle. Arthur is a follower, in broad terms, of the ethical egoist philosophy set out by the late Ayn Rand. Rand denounced all those philosophers who enjoined Man to sacrifice his happiness and values for some other, usually mystical or collective, “good”. Instead, she set out an alternative, the “virtue of selfishness”, questioning why it is wrong for man to acquire and keep a value, including non-material ones such as respect, and freedom.
Arthur’s basic disagreement, so it appears, with those like Perry and I who have advocated toppling Saddam seems to rest on the idea that is is “altruistic” and hence wrong, to wish to liberate countries such as Iraq. No truly “selfish” libertarian could possibly endorse such regrettably altruistic behaviour, particularly if it costs blood and treasure. Force is only ever justified, on this view, if one has been directly attacked already and has the names, addresses and confessions of the attacker.
I think Arthur misses a key point. Consider the following – suppose that it is clear (and it is) that the bulk of Iraqi people hate Saddam and want rid of him (the Baathist thugs who benefitted from his rule are naturally not so keen). Suppose that the Coalition’s armed forces regard it is a great value to them that they should serve in forces which enable them to liberate folks from tyranny. This would be even clearer if they were funded like mercenary armies by consenting adults rather than through coercive taxation. Well, if these sort of considerations apply, the liberation of Iraq is a deeply “selfish” act on the terms that Rand would have seen it. It is a positive sum-game for both the liberators and the liberated.
Now of course none of the above resolves the more immediate issues of whether Bush and co exaggerated the WMD threat, whether Iraq was the most pressing issue after 9/11, or whether Saddam was clearly in direct cahoots with terror groups. My point is more fundamental. Many isolationists seem to have elevated the non-initiation of force principle to the level where it inadvertently seems to endorse the existence of particular nation states, including those run by the most brutal folk imaginable. What is so libertarian about this? Why should an Iraq, Soviet Union or a Nazi Germany’s national borders be accorded the same respect as those of a liberal democracy?
By all means let us preserve good manners in the libertarian parish. But those who argue that intervention a la Iraq is always and everywhere wrong are not, in my humble opinion, entitled to claim that those who differ are not libertarians.
And by the way, 99 percent of the stuff on Arthur’s blog is just brilliant.
Howell Raines, chief editor of the New York Times, that bastion of liberal-left opinion, has resigned, following the recent scandal surrounding young ex-reporter Jayson Blair, who fabricated numerous reports for a period of several months.
It would be arrogant to claim that Raines, who devoted inordinate editorial resources to covering such crucial matters as the admissions policy of the Augusta golf club while forces were fighting in Iraq, could be described as the victim of the blogosphere. But nonetheless bloggers like Andrew Sullivan have been relentless in chronicling how this paper has lost its way under Raines’ leadership.
Perhaps, along the lines of a famous tune, Sullivan and the rest should be humming:
“I can write clearly now that Raines has gone, I can clear all obstacles from my way…”
Due to a DNS/IP cock up, we have been off the air for a while… a shout goes out to the support staff at Hosting Matters for solving the problem with lightning speed when I actually told them what they needed to know.
Hosting Matters are simply the best, so give them your spondulies and host your site with them!
They rock 
I bet I know what Tony Blair dreams about at night. I’ll bet that while he is tossing, turning and crying out in his sleep, his dreams transport him to the dusty, fetid alleyways of Baghdad. There, he strides forth like a grand, confident colossus surrounded by a squadron of husky, shaven-headed Royal Marines. Gaggles of excited Iraqi children bay and yap around the fringes of this entourage, hoping that the Great White Leader From Across the Seas will stoop to confer some benediction on their tiny heads. But he cannot stop. He is too busy. He is too single-minded. He knows what he wants and he is determined to find it. All other priorities are rescinded and greeting the thronged masses of downtown Baghdad will have to wait.
Suddenly, through the whirls of settling dust, he spots it. A big warehouse miraculously untouched by Cruise missiles or JDAMs. He points. “There” he says, “that’s where they are”. Tony and his bodyguards break into a trot and then a run as they draw near to the entrance of the warehouse. One of the squaddies produces a bolt-cutter and snips off the padlock with a flourish. The great doors are swung wide open and, inside, gleaming and shimmering with pointy Ba’athist menace is a phalanx of stonking, great missiles, each one marked ‘London’, ‘Manchester’, Birmingham’, Leeds etc.
“I was right, I was right” yells Tony triumphantly. “I told them so. I told them Hussein had WMDs and they didn’t believe me. Well I’m going to make them eat their weasel-words. I’m going to shove it right up ’em and show ’em whose boss and….. → Continue reading: It’s the WMDs, stupid!
A clean hippo is a happy hippo…
and remember: safety first –
never stand between a hippo and a dishwasher
Should people be allowed to own their own cruise missiles? It’s a favourite question among libertarians discussing gun control, and always good for a chuckle. But now we are going to have to grapple with this issue for real.
Says Bruce Simpson, 49:
Some time ago I wrote an article in which I suggested that it would not be difficult for terrorists to build their own relatively sophisticated cruise missiles using off-the-shelf components and materials.
Not surprisingly, that piece has produced a significant amount of feedback from the tens of thousands of people who have read it so far.
→ Continue reading: So how do we feel about cruise missile control?
… and that includes making music, creating pictures, writing verse, shooting films and producing computer games that annoy the crap out of other people.
An attempt by the usual ‘guardians of morality’ to regulate the nature of computer games in a way that would never be tolerated for the written word has been defeated in a US court.
“If the First Amendment is versatile enough to “shield the paintings of Jackson Pollock, music of Arthur Schoenberg, or Jabberwocky verse of Lewis Carroll”, we see no reason why the pictures, graphic design, concept art, sounds, music, stories, and narrative present in video games are not entitled to a similar protection. The mere fact that they appear in a novel medium is of no legal consequence.”
Score one for the good guys!  Now let me fire up my copy of Grand Theft Auto… I feel like running over a few hapless pedestrians.
The full ruling can be found here [pdf file].
Instapundit links to this UPI report:
WASHINGTON, June 2 (UPI) — As the U.S. media still digests the shock and lessons of the Jayson Blair affair at The New York Times, a far older and far worse journalistic wrong may soon be posthumously righted. The Pulitzer Prize board is reviewing the award it gave to New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty more than 70 years ago for his shamefully — and knowingly — false coverage of the great Ukrainian famine.
“In response to an international campaign, the Pulitzer Prize board has begun an ‘appropriate and serious review’ of the 1932 award given to Walter Duranty of The New York Times,” Andrew Nynka reported in the May 25 edition of the New Jersey-published Ukrainian Weekly. The campaign included a powerful article in the May 7 edition of the conservative National Review magazine.
Sig Gissler, administrator for the Pulitzer Prize board, told the Ukrainian Weekly that the “confidential review by the 18-member Pulitzer Prize board is intended to seriously consider all relevant information regarding Mr. Duranty’s award,” Nynka wrote.
The utter falsehood of Duranty’s claims that there was no famine at all in the Ukraine – a whopping lie that was credulously swallowed unconditionally by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and many others – has been documented and common knowledge for decades. But neither the Times nor the Pulitzer board ever before steeled themselves to launch such a ponderous, unprecedented – and potentially immensely embarrassing – procedure. Indeed, Gissler told The Ukrainian Weekly that there are no written procedures regarding prize revocation. There are no standards or precedents for revoking the prize.
The Ukrainian famine of 1929-33, named the “Harvest of Sorrow” by historian Robert Conquest in his classic book on the subject, was the largest single act of genocide in European history. The death toll even exceeded the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people a few years later.
One of the lesser lies now circulating about the Cold War, Communism and all that is that because it is now history, we should all forget about it.
So, in an attempt to spread interest in this important issue by trivialising it, I have a question. Walter Duranty � Jimmy Duranty. What if any is the connection between these two persons?
Jimmy Duranty was the bloke who sang that song that they used at the end of Sleepless in Seattle, right? And in one of my all time favourite movies ever, What’s Up, Doc?, Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand sing a song called “You’re The Top” or some such thing, and during their version of this, reference is made to “The Great Duranty”. Walter, yes? Or is that Jimmy? If it’s Walter, it shows how the lie has reverberated down the decades, but is it?
It’s not that I’m opposed to writing serious prose about murderous famines and about the scumbags in the West who concoct and print lies about how these murderous famines aren’t murderous famines at all and then spend another seventy years lying about all their earlier lies – merely that joking around is one of the ways you draw attention to such things.
Although I am unlikely to be in a rush to join either of these organisations, today is a day a day I can say I am for once in agreement with their current campaigns.
Amnesty is campaigning against Castro’s crackdown on dissidents. OK he might not change his ways just because you send a letter of complaint, but Amnesty also, rightly, reckons the US government embargo needs to go. More contact will weaken, not strengthen Castro. And anyway, if I want to go to Cuba, what business is it of the US government?
Oxfam has also been making some helpful noises on Trade for Africa, on CNBC in Evian one of their spokespeople rightly said aid did not matter any where as near as much as trade. The best thing for Africa would be an end to subsidies for American and European farmers. Their latest paper on the G8 summit has the usual nonsense about how poor taxpayers in the West should subsidise rich kleptocratic dictators in Africa through government-to-government aid, but also calls on G8 governments to…
Address the enourmous harm being done by the subsidies rich Western Countries pay their farm sectors to produce a glut of cheap food which is dumped on world markets, undercutting African farmers and robbing their livelihoods. To fight a war on unfair trade rules, the G8 countries should: Immediately stop using subsidies and export credits that cause over-production and dumping of surpluses in developing countries. Open their own markets to all products from Africa and other low-income countries.
Looks like the message is semi-seeping through to NGOs.
As for Bono and Oxfam’s “Drop the debt” campaign, even a greedy capitalist like myself recognises that debts derived from old Cold War era geo-political bribes should not burden Africa’s children. Time for a market-solution to the debt. Let the failed-states go bankrupt. Alternative, better, delivery mechanisms for education and healthcare can be created. Africa doesn’t need corrupt governments and armies, it needs teachers and nurses.
Paul Staines
On a recent visit to Lancashire (a county in the north of England) I found a 1906 Chambers encyclopaedia in the house I was staying in.
Now whilst the encyclopaedia had lots of the then newly fashionable statism within it (the “historical method” in economics and other such nonsense), it did have some interesting articles and the one on Iceland caught my eye.
Most libertarians are aware of the Iceland example of a basically free society. How incoming settlers arrived in an empty land (apart from a handful of monks in a tiny area), and established a private property based society without such things as taxes.
Also how things first went well over time – for example with slavery dying out (the Norse settlers started off with Irish slaves – but, over time, the practice of slavery fell apart) without any civil war.
However, then (after centuries of settlement) tithes were introduced in the 1080’s (Iceland had become Christian in 1000 – so Christianity did not mean religious taxes at first). And then (after a couple of more centuries) a few families tried to monopolise the courts of justice (which arbiter one went to had been a matter of choice), fell into conflict – and the Icelanders made the fatal mistake of inviting in the power of the King of Norway.
First under the Kings of Norway and then (far worse) the Kings of Denmark statism grew in Iceland, with state control of much land, monopoly of trade and on.
A sad tale – supposedly one well fitted for grim minded people like myself.
However, the story did not end there. I have long known that in stages in the 18th and 19th century a lot of freedom was restored to Iceland (by later Kings of Denmark), but I did not know just how much of a free society Iceland became again.
Reading the Chambers article was instructive. Not only was Iceland a free trade country (which I knew) it was also a land of a fairly high cultural level.
In about 1900 (a time when there were hardly any state schools in Iceland – indeed when there was very little government at all) virtually every person could read and write (they were taught, by their families, in childhood) – and a large proportion of adult men could get by in several languages.
This was at a time when in, for example, Sweden (with its system of state education) about one in four people was illiterate.
Certainly after 1904 local government was allowed to grow in Iceland – but the fact remains that Iceland had, for a time, become a basically free society again.
It is these sorts of things that makes me (much to the confusion of the people who know me) take a fairly positive view of the future of the human race. The growth of statism is not inevitable – government control can decline without a collapse into chaos and a free society can be rebuilt.
Modern Western nations are (as is well known) fiat money, credit bubble, welfare states. They will fall apart, most likely quite soon – say over the next ten years.
However, I do not think that this will mean a collapse into savagery (mass starvation, cannibalism and so on). I believe that (with hard effort and good luck) something much closer to a free society will emerge.
I do not expect to live to see it (my own position is not a good one, and I am a fairly realistic man – not in the habit of accepting comfort from lies), but I firmly believe that many libertarians now living will see it.
You have both my best wishes and my confidence.
Switch on the TV, open a magazine, buy a newspaper or surf the net and it won’t be any time at all until you come across an advertisement for some diet-related product. Be it an exercise-contraption, a formula drink or a low-calorie food range, the market cup runneth over with weapons we can use to fight the Global War on Flab.
As a veteran footsoldier in this campaign (my abdomen is more ‘lunch-pack’ than ‘six-pack’) I bear many scars of battle. But I long ago realised that I can never really win this war. Though I have succeeded, with grim determination and effort, to cast off the oppressive tyranny of blobdom, my liberation has only ever been temporary. Somehow, by various means, the forces of fattiness manage to regroup and come roaring back to overwhelm me again and take me prisoner.
Still, surrender is not an option and I am always on the lookout for new ideas that may, I pray, grant me permanent victory and eternal snake-hips. Somebody recently suggested that getting one of those Jane Fonda videos might help and, prickly with expectation, I went out and bought one. Another let-down, I’m afraid. I spent the whole of last weekend watching ‘On Golden Pond’ and I didn’t shed an ounce.
Now, fortunately, I have private health insurance which means that my midriff mission-creep has few practical consequences apart from a vampiresque aversion to full-length mirrors and the occasional ‘magic flying shirt-button’. The same cannot be said for many of my fellow citizens who find themselves at the less-than-tender mercy of the state healthcare system:
Patients could have to sign up to healthier lifestyles under new plans being considered by the Labour Party.
Written contracts would ensure a certain standard of treatment in return for people following doctors’ advice and attending appointments.
Or, ‘Ve haf vays of making you slim’. Okay, in some ways I am quite pleased that this is now out in the open because it has actually been bubbling away just below the radar for a good few years now, mostly as ominous mutterings from NHS doctors that they might refuse to treat patients who smoke (despite the fact that taxes paid by smokers prop up the NHS).
Yes, carry on I say. How about a ‘no dangerous sports’ contract? A ‘stress-free career’ contract? A ‘no casual sex’ contract? A ‘no riding motorbikes’ contract? Why not? Since the NHS is clearly destined to become a lifestyle-policemen they may as well go the whole hog. And I sincerely hope they do because then our dirty, little secret will be secret no longer. The dirty, little secret (that no-one ever mentions in polite company here) is that nationalised healthcare is not free healthcare, it is rationed healthcare and this is just the latest rationing scheme.
The unpalatable truth is that this is a cost-cutting measure. Not so much doctor’s advice but bureaucratic diktat. Despite the extra squintillions of pounds that have been poured into it by the current government, the NHS still cannot meet the market demand for healthcare and so increasingly ruthless ways to cut the waiting lists are having to be formulated.
I have no doubt whatsoever that proposers of the scheme will argue they are only finding ways to improve people’s health and forcing them to lose weight and give up smoking is therefore a truly kind act of a caring government. But that is not why they’re doing this. And, while no reasonable person would argue that losing weight and quitting the weed can by anything but beneficial to health, a threat to withdraw healthcare for those who fail is nothing but a squalid act of bullying.
But, this is time for satisfaction not outrage. The great fabian promise of free healthcare for all regardless of who they are or how much they earn is finally showing up for the lie it always was. Let it grow and deepen. Perhaps, when some poor sod has been turned away from a hospital because of his ‘irresponsible’ roller-skating hobby, the British public will finally realise what Ayn Rand realised a long time ago: that the difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is merely a matter of time.
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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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