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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For the first decade and a half of my life I remember thinking that if your schooldays are the happiest days of your life, then I was going to have a wretched life. Things were not much better at my first university (Cambridge – nothing but the best for me), where I failed to work nearly hard enough, at architecture, and from which I retreated ignominiously.
It was only when I switched to another less grand university (Essex) that the connection between educational institutions and being happy started to make sense to me. I learned a lot about politics, but I did it mostly by watching, listening, and reading. I did not participate in politics, if only because what I was being urged to participate in was, I increasingly realised, mindless sub-Marxist twattery. No, what got me going was the university drama club, rather grandly known as the Theatre Arts Society, TAS (pronounced TASS) for short. We were the TAS Clique, and we loved it. It turns out that TAS is still going, and is still called that!
Although I acted, my particular speciality to start with was ticket selling, which was how I first got seriously stuck into using the then-as-now ever-changing technology of communication to get maximum impact for your message with the minimum of cost. (I first started to learn, you might say, how to do Libertarian Alliance publications.) I can still remember the thrill of my first, first night, full house. From that moment on, and for the first time in my life, I was somebody.
As for my acting career, a friend said to me after my last bit of acting at Essex: “You know Brian I’ve seen you in lots of things, but I never knew you could act.” That was after I had played one of the junior Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, during the performances of which I finally learned what decent acting felt like. Ah, happy days.
And happy days that soon ended. Having decided not to become a real actor, I dabbled briefly in the idea of doing amateur acting as a hobby, and signed up to be in a production of Noel Cowards’s Private Lives for the local drama club near where my family home was. But the magic had gone, and I gave up drama and switched to political stirring and scribbling, which I have been doing ever since. As the decades passed I occasionally pondered if I might even get back into drama, in some capacity or other, but the opportunity never arose. Shame, but there you go. You get old. You stop doing things.
But then, a few weeks ago, suddenly, everything changed. → Continue reading: A drama dream comes true
A minority of musicians not only dislike the capitalist world, but they believe they can eschew it. Some of them have set up the sort of micro-firms that capitalism makes so easy to do. So they have spurned being sub-contractors or suppliers to large firms, and have become entrepreneurs instead – and think of it as rebellion.
– Richard D. North in Rich is Beautiful
James Waterton of the Daily Constitutional sees the need for more hardcore activists to spread the word for classical liberal values… and he also sees the need for more people to read his excellent articles. We agree with him on both counts
I was having a chat today with two friends about the nature of a market society. Both guys are intelligent, open minded and lacking ideological zeal. After talking about this and that, the discussion turned into me defending the free market of commerce and culture. Neither of them are heavily interested in politics, however they both articulated their positions with cognisance and we had a good discussion.
Because of the above discussion and the assumptions my friends held of the free market, I came to realise that – as enthusiasts of the free market – we do very little to actively promote the cause and its benefits. We hope our continually improving lives do the talking for us. Trouble is, these benefits can be twisted by people who do not agree with us. We are getting rich, says Green Left, at the expense of those in the third world and/or in our underclass. This is rubbish, of course, but it is an easily grasped concept, no matter how misguided. A group like Resistance goes out to a lot of schools to talk to students about the beauty of socialism. It is rich pickings for them there, because the simplistic truths of socialism appeal to minds that are neither sullied with the realities of human nature nor self-supporting adults. It is not hard to make a teenager feel bad about our society. Ask them if they lead a comfortable life. Show them a few pictures of starving African children. Let them join the dots. Child’s play. → Continue reading: We need a classical liberal ‘Resistance’ movement
Those of us who believe in an open immigration system acknowledge that this should not mean we let in those who support terrorism. So hurrah say I to this news:
“The Home Secretary has issued an order revoking Omar Bakri Mohamed’s indefinite leave to remain and to exclude him from the UK on the grounds that his presence is not conducive to the public good,” a Home Office spokesman said.
The wording “not conducive to the public good” comes from the Immigration Act 1971. The government says it needs new powers to deal with terrorism. The funny thing is that I cannot remember anyone talking about being able to exclude preachers of hate if they are “not conducive to the public good” before this last week. Could it be that the government does not actually know what powers it has?
Earlier this week there was an interesting moment in my personal history as a libertarian-activitist-stroke-blogger. I had a phone call from someone at The Times. “Millen” was the name, I think. He was asking me to contribute four hundred “headbanging” – his word – words on how the government is using the War on Terror to trash civil libertiess. I am not sure enough of the details of this story, and suspect that if I was, I might actually favour some of these alleged trashings, so I recommended that he give Perry de Havilland a ring, and Perry was happy to oblige.
For me what was interesting was that in his phone call to me the Times man used the word “Samizdata” – and what is more he was very nice about it – rather than the words “Libertarian Alliance”.
I switched to being a blogger, for Samizdata and elsewhere, from being a Libertarian Alliance person about three years ago. But because my home number used to be the contact number for the Libertarian Alliance, and because with my Libertarian Alliance Editorial Director hat on I used to do lots of little broadcasting performances and am still in their address books as that, I still from time to time get rung by media people who have me fixed in their databases as Libertarian Alliance, asking me to be on something or other. Never, until now, have they rung me up and talked instead about Samizdata. → Continue reading: Samizdata finally gets a mention
“Hi, we’re aliens from another planet and our intentions are purely hostile.”
The Simpsons.
American journalist, Cathy Young, wades into the Intelligent Design (ID) versus Darwinian evolution controversy. It is an issue that appears to be causing more of a ruckus in Jefferson’s Republic than in Britain, which until recently, was pleasingly unruffled by attempts by religious folk to roll back the achievements of science (I have not a clue what Islamists think of evolution). Champions of ID seem, at any rate in the United States, to be coming from the so-called conservative side of the political divide. As Young points out, though, it is by no means clear why conservatives should take this stance:
In some ways, evolutionary theory is more compatible with conservative ideas than with leftist ones. Indeed, proponents of applying evolutionary theory to human social structures tend to be viewed by the left with suspicion, particularly on biological explanations for sex roles. As several commentators have pointed out, it’s conservatives who reject the notion that complex organization requires deliberate central planning — in economics. Why should biology be different?
Exactly. The Hayekian idea of spontaneous order is similar in some ways. It is arguable that Darwin’s appreciation of the emergence of complex systems may have been influenced by the writings of the Scottish Englightenment, such as Adam Smith and his famous idea of the “invisible hand”. It is entirely possible to believe in the existence, or indeed entertain the possibility of a Supreme Being and yet still sign up to Darwin’s theory and the subsequent development thereof. An atheist would presumably find it very hard to support ID, I would have thought. Here is a link to lots of stuff about this issue here, from a broadly pro-evolution perspective.
Should ID be taught in schools? Well, as a taxpayer, I object to what I think is a bogus theory being taught with money seized from my wallet. If parents want to teach religious ideas to their children, I have few objections. My only caveat is that parents do not have an unfettered right to indoctrinate their offspring, although given the rebellious instincts of most kids, this is pretty hard to do over an extended period of time in a vigorous, pro-science, pro-reason culture.
GR: Do you think our technological civilization *is* fragile?
SS: On the contrary, I think it’s immensely resilient. Note that famines generally occur in countries where peasant farmers are still the majority! It’s precisely the complexity that makes it so hard to damage; economies are like ecosystems, they’re more stable as they grow more complex. They work around damage.
– Science Fiction writer S.M. Stirling (interviewed by Glenn Reynolds), stating something that is pretty obvious when you think about it. I think I would also argue that the global communications and global supply chains that have come into existence in the last few years make it dramatically more resilient rather than less. There are vastly more brains linked together and these supply chains actually contain massive redundancy.
I gather from the front of The Sun on this morning’s news-stands that there is some kind of scandal in relation to the umpteenth series of the voyeur’s soap opera. One of the competitors, an exceedingly pretty young women called Makosi, turns out to be an actress. She may have been acting at some point, possibly in covert collaboration with the producers of the show.
You could have knocked me down with a feather. If they are selecting people for good-looks, exhibitionism, emotional incontinence, and absence of that untelevisual thing, interior life, then surely a crew of poets, pharmacists, dustmen and bankers is more likely than actors? And they are bound spontaneously to generate gossip for gay men and teenage girls without outside intervention. You only have to retell the uproarious stories of the last seven weeks at the office to realise that.
Matt Devereux sees reasons to be cheerful in the land of the Rising Sun
Statist hero of the week? On Monday Japanese premier Junichiro Koizumi announced that he would make plans to privatise the national postal service his key election pledge. After losing the privatisation motion to the House of Councillors (upper parliamentary house), Koizumi decided to call a snap election to ask the Japanese public “whether they think the same way.” Early indications show that the strategy might well have paid off, with the Prime Minister’s approval rating rising 9 points thus far on the back of this single issue. In practical terms, the privatisation process will be long and hard.
Japan Post is far more than just a stamp and mail operation. Its $2.9 trillion held in savings and insurance effectively make it the world’s richest bank. With approximately 8,000 more post office outlets than in the UK, the prospect of opening the Japanese state monopoly to market forces make our plans to privatise Royal Mail pale in comparison. It’s not the statistics that impress, however. It’s the extent to which Koizumi has dared to stake his future on a subject recently lacking in North Atlantic political relations.
Take the 2005 Conservative Manifesto – the word “privatise” does not appear once. This despite Michael Howard’s half-baked promise to allow private treatment at NHS prices (and standards) for those willing to pay. It’s as if ideas of free trade and free enterprise have abandoned mainstream UK politics altogether. It’s been left to us crazies on the sidelines to remind the public that high taxation/high spend is not necessarily the only policy.
President Bush fares a little better, though even in the US the semantic goal posts have changed. Pre-election, Bush actively used the term “privatisation” in relation to his proposed shake up of Social Security. It was, he said, a “top priority”. Then, when the election campaign took full swing, privatisation became “reform”. The top priority of Social Security became no priority in Bush’s victory speech. Iraq was everything. Democrats picked up the “p” word as a term of disgust for the administration’s strategy and continue to run with it. The most recently published Rose Garden press conference transcript proves the extent to which Bush is careful not to mention the “private” in relation to the “social”.
What is it that has forced this anti-privatising doublespeak onto the Western political right? Perhaps if our leaders were more eloquent in their defence of the things we hold dear we’d vote for them again. By making a free trade issue central to his election campaign Koizumi is asking for a mandate to dismantle a state monopoly. In this at least the Japanese PM deserves our respect. Now, Mr. Koizumi, about Kyoto…
“The Government uses a false dichotomy that liberty and security have to be traded off against each other. But you can indeed have both life and liberty. The freedom to express yourself short of inciting violence does not threaten security but bolsters it: I want to know exactly who my enemies are by reading their freely spoken words. And when they cross the line and incite people to terrorism, I want the Government to do the one thing with my tax money of which I approve: protect me from these nutters by throwing them in jail or out of the country.”
– Perry de Havilland writing in today’s Times of London.
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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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