One day, I have no doubt, we ourselves shall be dispossessed – though only if we forget that a territory belongs really to those willing to possess it.
– From ‘The Column of Phocas’, a novel by Sean Gabb.
|
|||||
|
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] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
Samizdata quote of the daySeptember 1st, 2006 |
 15 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Thaddeus,
er…
What is your point?
Seems like a clear point to me. People in Britain seem to have no interest or will to do what is needed to ‘posess’ Britain, just so long as their tiny patch of political power or welfare hand out lasts long enough for them to snuff it and make it someone elses problem.
I think he may possibly saying that there will come a day when the idea of territoriality, as it relates to cultural identity, will be thought of as an archaic and outmoded concept. We will be free to roam the land and sea of the Earth as members of the human race rather than as being British, American, Indian, Chinese, etc. etc.
I could be wrong though.
Do you suppose the Native Americans, or the great pre- European civilizations of Mexico and South America had a failure of the ‘will to possess their territory’?…..Well the Inca’s were coca heads and the Plains Indians mescaline, the Aztec’s used ‘Teonanacatl’….drug fortiture law, you use you lose….LOL
“Thaddeus,
er…
What is your point?”
I quite enjoy Thaddeus’ style. His trollish, shallowly glib contributions to Samizdata contrast nicely with the more Pooterish musings of Jonathan ‘Adrian Mole’ Pearce. The result is Samiz-Lite: a blog to skim and flee rather than digest and ponder. Ubi sunt the intelligent Samiz of yesteryear?
But Old Holborn, we can always depend upon de Havilland to administer a sound kicking to The Man.
Hmmm, for some reason that conjures up a mental image of Alex and his ‘Droogies’ in Clockwork Orange.
I find Sean Gabb interesting, even though I think he’s a pair short of a dozen.
Old Jack Tar,
Now I never met Perry (though I have had a small number of discussions with him on Samizdata) and of course I’ve seen many photos of him posted here. From this experience I never thought of Mr DeHavilland as being a particular fan of rape, ultraviolence or Beethoven.
Well maybe Beethoven.
I doubt we’ll ever see a future where man can walk and go as he pleases without borders. Man is a highly territorial creature and I don’t see that changing really. Sure, I suppose some super-commies might come along and conquer everyone, thereby eliminating borders, but even then there would be borders within the super-state where “certain folk” aren’t allowed to tread.
These open-borders people want the benefits of cheap labor and more votes for their team, all the while doing whatever they can to avoid rubbing elbows with those same people they claim to champion. Man seeks out other men with whom he shares similarities and then forms communities, that won’t change no mater how many laws are passed.
____________________________________________
As for “will to possess” I think it has really only become a problem in recent history. Most of the time land was gained though military conquest, it was then held on to by settling your own people and displacing the current inhabitants (through death or just plain making it unplesant for them to stay). After all, land only really belongs to whoever occupies it (or whoever has the power to take it at will and put someone on it that is more “co-operative”).
Now, western civilization has decayed to the point where you can completely skip step one and go straight to settlement part. We have been told ….. nay, forced to to welcome strangers into our midst, no questions asked. Just don’t fool yourself if you think the new inhabitants will keep the borders open once they’re finally in control.
The Romans (Western Empire) had a similar problem. They too reached a point where their numbers had dwindled to the point that they felt that they needed all those barbarians to fill the ranks of their military (i.e. jobs Romans wouldn’t do). Once the gates were open, however, the Romans never managed to close them. Now, all the glory and power of the world’s mightiest empire is just a tourist attraction.
To be fair, the Romans had the will, just not the means. Now we have come full-circle to where we possess the means, but not the will. The results will be the same, however.
Not really. Speaking as one of those open-borders people, I want the economic benefits of being awash in high initiative labour and I could not care less about votes. Also large scale immigration tends to make welfare systems untenable in the long run, which is an added bonus.
Then how do you explain London? Walk down a street and you will see mixed ethnic and mixed race couples by the cart load. Unless someone is using force to prevent it or using tax money to distort the process (i.e, state funded ‘multiculturalism’ and other anti-assimilationist policies), people mix rather better than you (or Hans-Herman Hoppe) care to admit.
One day, I have no doubt, we ourselves shall be dispossessed – though only if we forget that a territory belongs really to those willing to possess it.
Who talks like this?
– Josh
Perry,
I never once said anything about race. Perhaps I failed to clarify but I was speaking less about color than culture. Borders are for separating different cultures more-so than colors. Sure, different cultures can co-exist within the same borders,but not without some tension. We in America had to deal with multiple cultures since our founding. The south and north have held very different cultures from the start. It took 4 years of sheer brutality and bloodshed against each other before those two groups started getting along in any real sense. A fight that was begun to ensure that there was no border between the two groups I might add.
I don’t have anything against different cultures mind you, I’m just the practical type that thinks that good fences make good neighbors. The alternative is that the neighbors get in an occasional argument and kill each other over stupid shit.
As for mixed-couples. I am one. I date someone waaaaay darker than myself. She came from across the southern US border on top of that. Do you know why we are together? We share the same cultural values. I’ll bet a hefty sum that those mixed-race couples walking hand in hand down the streets of London do as well or they wouldn’t be together.
Free movement may have a few benefits, but I think it far outweighs the inherit problems.
I donno….makes sense to me.
With the Aztlans eyeing California and the rest of the country knee deep in the unassimilated other, one could make a case for a willingness to continue to possess territory.
But not, of course, to those who have forgotten how…
A curious notion for an American to hold. I was also talking about culture but I mention race because it is something very obvious… and yet need not prevent a person for assimilating into a different culture. Culture is not a static things and a cosmopolitan culture which assimilates useful and interesting bits from other cultures and turns people from other cultures into us is what the anglosphere has been so good at doing.
Multiculturalism however is the opposite of cosmopolitanism. It assumes all cultures as as good as each other (an absurd notion) and that their separateness must be preserved by the actions of the state (i.e. it must make assimilation as hard as possible).
So my point is that without the state messing up the natural dynamics, people from other cultures naturally assimulate (though I am prepared to consider that people from Muslim cultures may be at least a partial execption to that theory).
Quite right Perry. I agree with the point about government meddling in afairs of assimilation 100%. However, here in the US, no government laws try to force assimilation on immigrants. Unfortunately, the immigrants have no free-market incentive to assimilate either, and there lies the problem.
This mostly happended due to the Latino community growing so fast in under 10 years that they became a major economic and influence bloc. Great for politicians and bussinesses, bad for everyone else who now can’t even communicate with the largest minority in our country on even a basic level. The time of the Cosmopolitan Melting Pot of American Culture is quickly comming to an end.
Immigrants through out our history have added bits of their culture to ours while they adopted the core “American” values. This has always been due to our policy of “let some in, turn off the faucet for a bit, let some more in” style of immigration. It gave immigrant groups the time needed to integrate with their new home and their new brothers to accept them. One group of immigrants, however hasn’t followed suit due to their ability to circumvent the normal procedure.
A Drudge-linked article I read the other day put the New York City area at 40% Latino. Think about that for a moment. NYC, one of biggest cities and one of the farthest ones from out southern border is closing in on having a majority population of a foriegn culture. In some other places the number is much higher. There are some places where you can’t order food or buy merchandise if your only language is English (not because they discrimnate, but because they speak little to no English), yet almost no place where you can’t do these things in Spanish. Instead of the immigrants adapting the host countries culture and customs, the opposite is occuring.
Such a rapid shift if culture is shocking “middle America” to the core right now. Red-staters and Blue-staters agree on very litte save one issue, immigration. Even some of the “liberal media” is finally turning on the open borders idea. People are caring less and less about Iraq, and the Middle East in general, and more and more about immigration. Any party that wants to be elected with an overwhelming mandate need only run on an immigration reform platform. Turns out that neither party is willing to take up this task at the moment, however. This is the one issue that may make a 3rd party viable in the US, or at least cause major splits in the big ones.
Alot of the EU’s immigration problems with Muslims have been big blog topics lately but the problem here in America with our southern neighbor is equally bad if not worse in terms of numbers. Our only saving grace is that our immigrants want our money instead of our blood.
The EU’s immigration problem is not necessarily with muslims. Immigrants to the EU tend to be from poorer countries in the mid east and sub-saharan africa which in turn tend to be predominantly muslim. They could have been of any faith.
The thing about religions is s that they are ideas and have no real physical presence. You can’t close your border to an idea. If an idea is attractive enough then it will spread, it doesn’t have to be rational, logical, beneficial, or even right, it just has to be infectious.
Maybe its not eugenics we have to be considering but eumemics (from meme. Though that could lead to being persecuted for what you think, not good.