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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“I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.” I know how the Duke of Wellington (attrib.) felt. The problem for a rational civil liberties campaigner is often not that you do not know who your friends are, but that you do – and that you worry whether, given what they actually think, they will be let out for the day and not talking to buttercups when you need their help.
Here is a breathtaking non-sequitur in the comments of the Guardian Comment is Free:
I think ID cards would be fine … but I think they should be introduced after the constitutional reform that guarantees safeguards, PR and no monarchy.
The comment is however appended to a piece of splendid news. The entirely sane Mark Thomas has managed to persuade the Metropolitan police to delete him from the National DNA Database.
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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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If the Duke actually said this, he had reason. Not only did the aristocrat regard his own troops as “scum”, but many of the officers he commanded had purchased their commissions. Furthermore, he often had to wage his campaigns primarily with allied troops rather than British ones, as at Waterloo. Yet, though the Duke looked down his long nose at many of his officers and men, he led them to victory. Wouldn’t libertarians be satisfied to be victorious even if they are dissatisfied in their allies?
Absolutely. I’m a pragmatist who wants to win, not to be an ideologically pure loser.
But my problem with some of my allies is much the same as Wellington’s with some of his. My understanding of the context is that this is attributed to him in contemplation of the allied army of the Waterloo campaign, when many of his best Peninsular War troops had been shipped off to the Americas.
He had very little idea what they would do in battle and had to deploy them rather cautiously.
There will be a lot of strange allies from many camps in the upcoming troubles but I would like to urge just one thing. When victory is obtained and the smoke is clearing and the victors are taking a breath before the next move, please, please, without hesitation, shoot the socialists at the earliest opportunity. All will be for naught else.
I read Mr Thomas’s column and I laughed out loud at the punchline.
I will wager a very large bottle of whatever he drinks that his fingerprints and DNA profile are on file now, they will be on file tomorrow and they will be on file forever. The wording of the response alone says as much. If his records had been removed, it would have said so – but it is a masterpiece of lawyerly equivocation. A UK civil servant who couldn’t turn ‘A decision has been made to delete . . . . ‘ into a decade of non-action would be drummed out of the service toot-sweet.
llater,
llamas
If you can’t trust the Govmint, who can you trust? Let’s just practice blind faith. While we’re at it, let’s just give all our money to the govmint- we don’t know what to do with it! And it’s worthless, anyway…
It is just one of those things that in certain campaings – such as No2ID, or the Countryside Alliance (remember those guys?), or opposition to the EU Constitution, that one makes strange ideological bedfellows. I remember attending an EU Constitution series of talks in Bloomsbury a few years ago and more than half of the audience who were opposed to the constitution were a mixture of protectionists, socialists, nationalists, or the just plain weird.
I was one of the sane, sensible, people, obviously.
(God that sounds conceited!)
Perhaps one thing to bear in mind about strange allies is to ensure that they are helping you, rather than you helping them. I’m thinking here of examples like the Iranian revolution, in which a collection of Marxists, trade unionists and other leftists thought those crazy Islamic fundamentalists were useful allies in their struggle…
Agree entirely, Ian B. May I provide an example?
I once belonged to the National Organization for Women, though I am male. I thought the organization promoted equality and resigned from it when I discovered otherwise. In the meantime, I noticed that the N.O.W. was taking positions on all manner of issues that had nothing to do with sex equality or feminism. Stands on the nuclear freeze movement and the environment (it was called ecology then) and immigration and foreign policy. It was a matter of “logrolling”, supporting others’ issues in the hope that they will become allies who support yours.
Yet, the N.O.W. rejected the growing numbers of conservative women who objected to the economic disaster of double-digit inflation and sharply higher taxation, and the social disasters of the national crime wave, racial quotas and the conversion of government schools into child care services. The feminists decided that they had no enemies on the left and no friends on the right, so they lost their main legislative project, the Equal Rights Amendment, when the rising conservative movement updated American politics. Whatever one thinks of the wisdom of that proposed amendment, its proponents failed to get it enacted.
I’ll have to get used to “strange bedfellows” when the Republicans, who were ecstatic about big government and military interventionism when it was GOP big government and military interventionism change their tune now that it is Democratic big government and military interventionism.
Not a big deal. I remember the last changing of the guard, when the Democrats, who were just fine with Clinton’s big government and military interventionism started poking around the edges of the resistance when they were exposed to GOP big government and military interventionism.
I’m sure that in both cases, some of these people came to understand a bit about principal, and continue working against the growth of government and the retreat of freedom when their former parties regain power. And who knows. It may be another 40 years in the wilderness for the GOP after the disaster of Bush.
“..Mark Thomas has persuaded the police to delete him from their database”
But have they actually done so?
How does he know?
No doubt he can call spirits from the vasty deep, too.