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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A sign of health from the larger body politic spotted at, of all places, the Detroit Auto Show. Brock Yates of the Wall Street Journal notes that the massively cool show features gargantuan amounts of the horsepower so beloved of the masses, and very little of that underpowered PC crap prescribed by our putative betters.
Utopians might expect that the auto makers will offer countless octane-stingy hybrids and zero-emission fuel-cell vehicles to a public seeking to wean itself from all addiction to the cursed internal combustion engine. Sadly, this is not the case. Tree-huggers and Friends of the Earth would be better advised to picnic on the banks of the Love Canal than to set foot in the vast precincts of Detroit’s Cobo Hall.
On the pole position, as it were, was the rakish Chrysler ME412, a so-called halo car (read image-builder) coupe that, thanks to four turbochargers pumping high-test into its gasping 12 cylinders, produces 850 horsepower. DaimlerChrysler engineers who developed the monster claim it will generate top speeds approaching 250 miles an hour.
Throughout Cobo Hall lurk dozens of such muscle cars, Ferraris, Vipers, Lamborghinis, BMWs, Jaguars, Audis, Acuras, et al., ready and willing to tear up pavements and strike the fear of God into unwitting passengers at the touch of the throttle. Four hundred horsepower is not unusual. Three hundred horsepower can be found under the hoods of literally dozens of sedans and SUVs. Two hundred horsepower is simply not worth mentioning.
Sounds like fun to me. Chicago is having its auto show in a few weeks. Its been a few years since I went, so I do believe I will drive (yes, drive – probably in my full-size pickup, thank you) down for a look. The larger point is slipped in at the end of the piece:
The lure of the open road increases by the day. With it comes the romance–perceived or otherwise–of a freedom ride at the wheel of an automobile. This is a hateful thought for greenies, social engineers, media elites and intellectuals everywhere, but the lunatic love affair with the car remains in a state of steamy passion.
There is no debating that hybrids and fuel cells make sense in terms of the environment and reducing fossil-fuel dependence. But until these new powerplants can equal current conventional gasoline engines in terms of performance, cost and durability, auto makers will respond to the harsh realities of the marketplace. No amount of government mandates, media pressure or high-minded pontifications can replace the simple laws of supply and demand.
The internal combustion automobile is one of the biggest engines of personal liberty ever created, right up there with the firearm. With it, the individual is free to leave the jurisdiction, free to travel on his own schedule, and free to haul an enormous amount of stuff around with him if he desires. “Mass” transit trains its users to be livestock, and so it is no wonder that our putative betters are constantly trying force us into its cattle cars. The old saw about totalitarian governments making the trains run on time cuts deeper than many think. By contrast, the automobile makes you captain of your own ship.
Enough with the mixed metaphors. The American insistence on bigger and more powerful automobiles, and continued avoidance of mass transit except as an utter last resort, should give lovers of liberty cause for cheer.
I have no time to expand, because I’m about to go out and about for the rest of the day, but just to say that this, by Julia Magnet for City Journal, is a terrific piece, about the great American movie maker (and about to be novelist, I read somewhere on my googlings for this) Whit Stillman. I adore his movies, especially Metropolitan, but the other two also. (Too bad they are still not yet available on DVD.)
Incidentally, my tastes in Stillman are shared in my corner of the blogosphere. See Patrick Crozier, and Stephen Pollard, who also links admiringly to the Magnet piece.
I won’t comment at length about Stillman, but I will just rattle off a few thoughts about why a devout libertarian like me adores the work of a deeply conservative critic of recent non-judgemental, post-modern, sexually liberated trends in bourgeois behaviour and thinking.
I am conservative in my tastes, in art, etiquette, manners (at least in aspiration), morals (ditto), drug use (for real – I never inhaled because I never touched it – too scary – the case for legalising drugs cannot be that they are harmless). It is merely that I am profoundly anti-conservative in politics, if by this is meant the imposition of my – superior and judgemental – tastes and opinions upon others. Political compulsion corrupts, and should always be regarded with suspicion, especially when what is being compelled is – to start with – genuinely virtuous and admirable. Why? Because then that which is genuinely virtuous and admirable will be corrupted, which is clearly far worse then when something silly and meretricious and wrong-headed is imposed, and corrupted. (That imposing something silly will probably do more immediate harm is true, but that is a different kind of argument to the one I just made.)
I believe that a Stillmanian attitude to social life will eventually win through in the free market of ideas and of institutions. I don’t believe that it has any chance in a world of politically imposed good manners.
That is the kind of conservative I am and the kind of libertarian I am. If libertarianism means assembling a panty collection from one’s sexual conquests and boasting about it, or in saying the first thoughtless thing that comes into your head no matter how hurtful, or in abandoning one’s children for the sake of personal liberation and pretending that one is doing them a favour, then to hell with libertarianism – that is to say with “libertinism”. It is just that the way to spread ideas like mine is to spread them by following one of them, which is not to force people to do things or think things against their will. It won’t work. Be eloquent. Don’t hit people. Argue with them, politely. Take a stand, but try not to be hurtful. Use words.
To put it another way: freedom creates civil society. Political compulsion destroys it.
Commenters please be kind, this was written in rather a hurry. Postings here have been a little thin lately, and I judged that something hasty, about and provoked by the thoughts and movies of Whit Stillman, would be better than nothing. I hope that at least some of you agree. For the kind of thing I would like to have managed, read the Julia Magnet piece.
My thanks to Tim Evans for drawing it to my attention with an email.
There’s a terrific Steyn piece to be read here. I’m not sure if I could have read it sooner, without purchasing the Atlantic Monthly in paper form but I am delighted to have read it now.
Final two paragraphs:
Amid the herd-like moral poseurs, Kazan was always temperamentally an outsider, and his work benefited after he became one in a more formal sense. But, both before and after, his best productions concern themselves with a common question: the point at which you’re obliged to break with your own – your union, your class, your group, or, in Kazan’s case, your Group. The 1947 Oscar-winner Gentleman’s Agreement strikes most contemporary observers as very tame, square Kazan. But, in a curious way, that’s the point. When you start watching and you realize it’s an issue movie “about” anti-semitism, you expect it to get ugly, to show us Jew-bashing in the schoolyard, and vile language about kikes. But it stays up the genteel end with dinner party embarrassments, restricted resort hotels, an understanding about the sort of person one sells one’s property to. Dorothy McGuire and her Connecticut friends aren’t bad people, but in their world, as much as on Johnny Friendly’s waterfront, people conform: they turn a blind eye to the Jew-disparaging joke, they discreetly avoid confronting the truth about the hotel’s admission policies, and, as Gregory Peck comes to understand, they’re the respectable face of what at the sharp end means pogroms and genocide.
That’s what all those Hollywood and Broadway Communists did. They were the polite front of an ideology that led to mass murder, and they expected Kazan to honour their gentleman’s agreement. In those polite house parties Gregory Peck goes to in Kazan’s movie, it’s rather boorish and tedious to become too exercised about anti-semitism. And likewise, at gatherings in the arts, it’s boorish and tedious to become too exercised about Communism – no matter how many faraway, foreign, unglamorous people it kills. Elia Kazan was on the right side of history. His enemies line up with the apologists for thugs and tyrants. Whose reputation would you bet on in the long run?
Well I surely hope that that last rhetorical non-question is correct, and anyway, even if it isn’t, merely agreeing with posterity is not the point. The point is being morally right now, and if posterity is wrong, so much the worse for posterity. That aside, this is the kind of piece that makes me want Mark Steyn to carry on carrying on for just as long as he can manage it. Morally he says all the right things here, and he is obviously so well informed about the artistic issues that no semi-philistine from Hollywood would dare to play the philistine card. Of such pieces are ideological victories fashioned. For as long as there are anti-anti-communists in business, then for so long should they be lambasted until anyone they might influence gets the point.
I am very proud of my little contribution to the anti-anti-anti-communist genre, a piece called Why I Support The Contras. My one regret about this is that it is available in pdf form only, as yet. (I will correct this Real Soon Now.) And now, like Johnathan Pearce in the previous posting, I say, never forget what Communism did and what its disgustingly self-righteous stooges in the West are still retrospectively fronting for.
This (it seems I can read at least quite a lot of Atlantic Monthly on line) makes the same point.
This book has been out for a couple of years, but such is my backlog of reading material (it seems to be common problem among us libertarians) that I have only just got round to reading this enthralling and at times harrowing account of how a group of dare-devil British mountaineers, inspired by the challenge of the Himalayas, mixed high-altitude adventure and spying activity against the Chinese during the mid-1950s. If you love books on central Asian geo-politics, mountaineering and some appallingly good rude words, you will like this story.
Sydney Wignall, a Welsh mountaineering enthusiast, very nearly died from maltreatment at the hands of the Chinese PLA after he and his fellow mountaineers were kidnapped at gunpoint during an expedition to Tibet. Without giving away any essentials, the book, written in a sort of Kiplingesque style, rams home the utter horror of what has happened in Tibet and against its people as a result of the Chinese incursions since the end of the Second World War.
This book is a timely reminder of what a disgusting thing communism is and what it can do to people. It also tells, however, tales reflecting the very best of human character and spirit, not least among ordinary Chinese people caught up in the collective madness of Mao’s totalitarian order. It also makes me want to visit the Himalayas one day.
On a long taxi ride through London this afternoon, I spotted an excellent article by Stephen Glover, of the Spectator, on the increasing government control of the UK press via its new ‘watchdog’ regulator (read: Censor). This is a splendiferous bureaucrat body bearing the relatively innocuous and seemingly inexpensive title of Ofcom:
Well worth a read. Let me supply you with a flavour:
Ofcom is the brainchild of an interfering and overbearing government. We have never been closer to state control of the press.
Hey, I could have written that, even in a really bad mood! I like it!
Say what you like about my MP, Boris Johnson, he does still occasionally knock out a magazine with the odd great article. What does surprise me about Mr Glover’s article is not the increasing control of the press from this New Labour Luvvie watchdog, but the parasitic salaries that these busy-bodies have awarded themselves. They are simply incredible:
The first thing we learnt was that the regulator had awarded more than 70 of its staff contracts worth more than £100,000 a year in pay and perks. This was significantly in excess of Ofcom’s earlier estimates. Evidently this new arm of the state will be quite a little gravy train. Lord Currie, the chairman, and, it so happens, a good friend of Gordon Brown’s, will be paid £133,000 a year for a four-day week. Stephen Carter, the regulator&’s chief executive, receives £250,000 a year.
Blimey O’Reilly!
Seventy apparatchiks on more than 100k a year, who do not actually produce anything except government censorship diktats. Incredible. Even Julius Caesar’s Romans would’ve blanched at this proto-imperial excess.
Well done Stephen Glover and Boris ‘The Blonde One’ Johnson for publicising this New Labour larceny and blatant attack on the UK free press. The Speccie will probably get their publication license revoked, as a result. But, heck. It will be worth it. Keep sticking it to them, Boris!
Dr Harold Shipman, one of the most prolific non-governmental mass murderers in recent history, has killed himself. There will be an enquiry as to why he was able to commit suicide, but to my mind the real mystery is not his death, for which few tears will be shed, but rather why he did the things he did.
Good riddance.
Mark Steyn’s has something to say about the Kilroy-Silk affair in the Telegraph today. True to his ‘notorious’ style he does not mince words. Enjoy.
Let me see if I understand the BBC Rules of Engagement correctly: if you’re Robert Kilroy-Silk and you make some robust statements about the Arab penchant for suicide bombing, amputations, repression of women and a generally celebratory attitude to September 11 – none of which is factually in dispute – the BBC will yank you off the air and the Commission for Racial Equality will file a complaint to the police which could result in your serving seven years in gaol. Message: this behaviour is unacceptable in multicultural Britain.
But, if you’re Tom Paulin and you incite murder, in a part of the world where folks need little incitement to murder, as part of a non-factual emotive rant about how “Brooklyn-born” Jewish settlers on the West Bank “should be shot dead” because “they are Nazis” and “I feel nothing but hatred for them”, the BBC will keep you on the air, kibitzing (as the Zionists would say) with the crème de la crème of London’s cultural arbiters each week. Message: this behaviour is completely acceptable.
The situation starts looking serious with the concluding paragraph:
And so, when free speech, artistic expression, feminism and other totems of western pluralism clash directly with the Islamic lobby, Islam more often than not wins – and all the noisy types who run around crying “Censorship!” if a Texas radio station refuses to play the Bush-bashing Dixie Chicks suddenly fall silent. I don’t know about you, but this “multicultural Britain” business is beginning to feel like an interim phase.
Wired reports that the companies and organizations behind radio-frequency identification tags are scrambling to improve their image by promising to protect the privacy rights of consumers, after they were caught trying to dig up dirt about one of their most effective critics. They also announced development of devices that disable RFID tags, which they are placing on everything from shampoo bottles to suit jackets in the United States and Europe.
Privacy groups, led by Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (or CASPIAN), fear that businesses and governments can use those signals to track individuals’ movements inside stores and in public places. One organization may have been shamed into soliciting CASPIAN’s advice, however. The Grocery Manufacturers of America this week inadvertently sent an internal e-mail to CASPIAN suggesting it was looking for embarrassing information about the group’s founder, Katherine Albrecht.
The e-mail, written by a college intern at GMA, reads:
I don’t know what to tell this woman! ‘Well, actually we’re trying to see if you have a juicy past that we could use against you.’
Wal-Mart, which tested RFID tags and readers in at least two of its stores last year, said it would adhere to the RFID privacy guidelines published by EPCglobal, the EPC standards body. The guidelines require companies to publicly state how they plan to use data collected from the EPC tags. Wal-Mart spokeswoman Sarah Clark insists:
We understand and care about the concerns that some of our customers have about privacy and, as always, we put our customers’ needs first.
CASPIAN’s Albrecht said she welcomes tag-killing technologies, as well as the overtures by RFID users who want to work with her.
I just hope they’re looking for a real dialogue about the implications of this technology and not simply trying to appear concerned.
Stephen Pollard quotes from and links to this article, but doesn’t comment other than calling it “fascinating”.
It certainly is. Will Buckley’s starting point is one that will now be familiar to all attentive Samizdata sports posting readers, which is that in India there are now a lot of fans of the game of cricket. More than there are people in Europe, is how I have put it here in the past. I’ll say it again, but differently. There are more Indian cricket fans than there are inhabitants of the USA. That ought to get our readers’ attention.
When Tendulkar bats against Pakistan, the television audience in India alone exceeds the combined populations of Europe. In contrast, when England played Germany in Euro 2000, the combined audience of BBC1 and ITV was 17.9 million. The chief executive of Star TV (Sky’s Asian wing) asked himself recently, what is sport in India? It’s cricket.
Indeed. And you can’t separate the rise of Indian cricket from the rise of India itself, which has undoubtedly been one of the great world stories of the last decade. Without going into the whole they’re-stealing-our-call-centre-jobs things yet again, we can certainly say that economically those Indians have sure pulled themselves together recently, partly because of all that computer stuff, and partly because they no longer have the example of the USSR to misguide them.
All of which means that India is not just crazy about cricket; it has money to spend on it. Hence the interest being displayed by Mr Murdoch’s men. Australia may be the current world champions of cricket, but India are a cricket superpower in the making. Australia have made cricket exciting now. India means that it is certain – absolutely certain – to remain so.
So, if cricket definitely has a future, what of English cricket? England versus Australia (the “Ashes”) used to be the biggest deal in the game. Not any more. What Will Buckley reports about the way cricket is played in England is, for me, the most interesting bit of all. → Continue reading: India means that cricket has a great future – and how England could still be part of it
The reasoning is clear and simple: if you drive a car, you must have too much money for your own good. It is time that HMG relieved you of some of this burden:
Motorists convicted of speeding may have to pay compensation for victims, the government has proposed.
The plan, published on Monday, is one of several changes to the funding of victim support services.
Motorists given a prison term or suspended sentence would pay £30 to a Home Office fund providing victim and witness compensation and support.
Those fined for speeding or driving without insurance would face a levy of £5 or £10…
He said a victims fund would put more money into services such as practical support, information to victims of rape and sexual offences, road traffic accident victims and those who have been bereaved as a result of crime.
So, if you get caught speeding, you get punished for sexual offences and murders.
Not that the absurdity will matter in practice. I predict that not a single real victim of any real crime will ever see a single penny of that money ever.
Arts & Letters Daily links to this Virginia Postrel article about Friedrich (and I’d thought I’d supply two links here, hence this interruption – I preferred all that to just putting “von”) Hayek.
Quote:
Hayek is fairly well known in Britain, where he spent much of his life, because of his influence on Margaret Thatcher. In the United States, however, well-educated, intellectually curious people who nod at mentions of Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, or Michel Foucault have barely heard of him.
Politics has a lot to do with that ignorance. Hayek drew on the traditions of 18th- and 19th-century liberal thought, leading critics to dismiss him as a man of the past. He defended competitive markets against the champions of central planning, noting that supposedly “irrational” customs, traditions, and institutions often embody the hard-won knowledge of experience. He advocated cosmopolitan individualism in an age of nationalism and collectivism.
But Hayek turned out to be ahead of his time, not behind it. Arguing with the social engineers of the mid-20th century, he grappled with problems equally relevant to the 21st century. He anticipated today’s rage for biological metaphors and evolutionary analysis, today’s fragmented and specialized markets, today’s emphasis on the legal institutions needed to make markets work, even today’s multicultural challenges.
Hayek’s 1952 book, “The Sensory Order,” often considered his most difficult work, foreshadowed theories of cognitive science developed decades later. “Hayek posited spontaneous order in the brain arising out of distributed networks of simple units (neurons) exchanging local signals,” says Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. “Hayek was way ahead of his time in pushing this idea. It became popular in cognitive science, beginning in the mid-1980s, under the names ‘connectionism’ and ‘parallel distributed processing.’ Remarkably, Hayek is never cited.”
I can still remember how a paperback series called “Fontana Modern Masters” did not contain a Hayek volume in it, because the lefty academic in charge of the enterprise simply forbade it. Robert Conquest dissecting Lenin was acceptable. Lenin might be a bit bad, but he was at least important, you see. Anyone writing about Hayek, however critically, was beyond the pale. He was not part of the agenda. He didn’t count. It would seem that, thanks to the championship of people like Steven Pinker, he is seriously starting to. Evolutionary Biology is a bandwagon with too much momentum for a few clapped out Marxists to halt it, and if the Evolutionary Biologists decide that Hayek matters, he matters.
Prediction: in twenty years time most of the biologists will be better economists than most of the economists.
When reading the Telegraph on Saturday, I came across an article tucked away somewhere on the fourth page that left me foaming at the mouth. It was about the plans expected in Labour’s next election manifesto to force taxpayers to contribute up to 30 per cent of the cost of running all political parties. I have been waiting to calm down so I can blog about it coherently, and today I noticed that the good Dr Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute has raised his voice already in a letter to the Editor of the Telegraph:
He [Lord Triesman, Labour’s ex-general secretary] says that sound policies need good research, and that is expensive. But taxpayers already pay huge amounts for policy research from our universities. And yet more is freely available from independent bodies and think-tanks.
Taxpayer funding only consolidates the status quo. It will go to the biggest existing parties. How are newcomers (and radical new ideas) to break through when the old guard is awash with funds to use against them?
I can just hear the Labour policy apparatchiks scratching their heads and saying Hmm, we haven’t thought of that, honest…
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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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