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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In my posting here yesterday about what is being inelegantly called “Smeargate” (aren’t you sick of this “gate” stuff?) I tried my best to keep up with events as they were already happening. I have a lunch date today, but just about have time to fling down some rather link-lacking thoughts (and done in ignorance of Philip Chaston’s previous posting) about what might happen next. (Later on today, I might just get to go through this and pepper it with links, but: I promise nothing. Meanwhile, sorry for all the typos and grammar screw-ups.)
I have long regarded Guido Fawkes as a genius, ever since he wrote this gorgeous pamphlet for the Libertarian Alliance. The thing about Guido is that he doesn’t just believe in liberty in an abstract this-is-the-best-system sort of way, although he certainly does believe that as well; he really loves liberty, his own liberty. His throwaway remark yesterday to the effect that he started his blog “on a whim” captures this quality very well. Tactically, this makes Guido worth about ten ordinary Guidos, because of the ten things he just might do tomorrow morning to make you wish you’d never been born, you just don’t know which one he’ll pick, if any of them. (He might just stay in bed.) Why don’t you know? Because he doesn’t know himself. Oh, he has schemes afoot. “Plots have I laid”, as Richard says at the beginning of Richard III before he acquired his numeral. But just when the knife will go in, just which applecart will be upset, which bandwaggon will have its wheels ripped off, which establishment forehead will disintegrate in the face of an oncoming sniper bullet, you never really know. I would hate to have him as an enemy. → Continue reading: One down and the rest of them to go – why it’s fun to be Guido Fawkes today
Guido’s scalp may place further problems for the blogosphere. Labour’s line has been to blame the medium and the messenger, spreading the slurry of ‘dark arts’ to Guido and even Cameron, though they are the primetime guilty party.
Now that the monopoly of the mainstream media has been blown right open, Labour MPs are demanding regulation and trying to put the lid back on Pandora’s box. Hear their complaints: the blogosphere is an arena of tittle-tattle and gossip, compared to the comforting blanket of reporters and the NUJ who will take you out to lunch and treat you with respect. They will want to turn the clock back.
Well, it is the goodness of blogging sunshine that reveals the dark arts. Time to start flaming the political vampires who suck the lifeblood out of Britain with their lies, expenses, and hypocrisy. Time to follow up with garlic and the stake.
I wasn’t lying on purpose.
– Derek Draper on Channel 4 News (already nailed down as the defining soundbite of today by Iain Dale)
This posting will tell any Brits who care about it absolutely nothing, but perhaps our many American readers should be told about this. This being the downfall of one of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s closest advisers. A certain Damian McBride has “resigned” because of some emails about smearing various Conservatives that he sent to another Labourite, the widely despised Derek Draper, who tries to blog for Labour.
Blogger Guido Fawkes is being credited with this outcome, not least by the guilty men themselves. They have spent much airtime today jabbering away on Sky News, the BBC, etc, about how “disgusted” they are that their emails have been read. Disgusted that they were caught was how it sounded. Guido’s numerous commenters are exulting. “Good on you Guido”, “we must mark the date in our diaries”, but “mission definitely not accomplished” until such time as this government beast or that government beast (a certain Tom Watson MP is apparently next in line for the chop), or the King Beast himself, are nailed to the Guido wall.
King Beast Brown, I mean. For there is indeed something very Nixonian about this, or at any rate it feels that way today. The thing to get is that Damien McBride is not like some College Republican ratfucking prankster. He is much higher up the greasy pole than that, far nearer to the H. R. Haldeman end of things, talking every day with the Big Beast himself.
By the way, the sneer quotes each side of “resigned” two paragraphs up are because when heavyweights in this government “resign”, all that happens is they change titles and move office. They keep their actual jobs and they get even huger pay-offs than otherwise, if only to stop them telling the truth to the media instead of the dribbling evasions they are pushing now.
The resigned one and his various defenders, including Draper, are asking us all to believe that their Downing Street computers were hacked into, and for all I know that may be true. But if that is so, what does it say about the wisdom of creating a Database State, given that these are the plonkers who will be in charge of it? As Guido has just pointed out, this was the week the government awarded itself the right to read all our emails.
Anyway, my basic point is: remember that big cheese TV guy in America who got caught making use of a forged letter that said something bad about someone, and remember how it was bloggers who blew the story to bits. And remember how people said during all that that this was blogging really making itself felt for the first time in real world politics. Well, that moment just happened here in little old Britain. Tomorrow, this will be all over the Sunday papers. Guido’s face and Guido’s blog – the actual blog, how it looks – is being flashed all over the TV news as I write this.
The most telling moment for me was when I dialed up Guido Fawkes, and instead merely got a big message saying: “Error establishing a database connection”. A lot of people, a lot more than usual, are tuning in to Guido just now, or trying to.
What a shame that the end result of this and other such dramas will merely be a Conservative government presided over by David Cameron. I still live in hope that such a government might be rather better than the present one, but I am not counting on it. Which makes me rejoice particularly at this, from Guido:
McPoison accuses Guido of having Tory backers – it just shows that they just don’t get it – this blog was started for free, with no committee behind it, no plan, on a whim. It is Guido’s plaything. The Tories are rightly wary of Guido and incidentally they have a PR problem tomorrow – the last thing they want are half truths mixed with smears getting out into the open uncontrollably.
The really important stuff will come when Guido gets stuck into the Conservatives for being too statist.
Even I had believed the oft repeated mantra that integrated circuits were a result of a spinoff of the Moon Race. According to George Guilder, at the end of Chapter 5 of “Microcosm”:
Like TI before it, Fairchild achieved its breakthroughs with virtually no government assistance while its largest competitors — chiefly the vacuum tube companies — were receiving collectively hundreds of millions of dollars in grants. But when the government needed a way to miniaturize the circuitry for its Minuteman missiles and its space flights, it did not use micromodules or any of the other exotic technologies it had subsidized. It turned first to Fairchild rather than to its early favorites and beneficiaries. Fairchild’s lack of military entanglement in the late fifties finally allowed the company to get the bulk of military and aerospace contracts in the early 1960s.
I begin to wonder if the government is actually responsible for the introduction of anything whatever. About the only thing left are a few DARPA projects and on most of those, other than the Internet itself, it is too early to tell.
Having neither the time nor the energy left to do a properly thoughtful posting, but still wanting to do a posting, what with everyone else here seeming to be out having a life, I went looking. And eventually I found this intriguingly quasi-optimistic thought, in a comment from someone called David Tomlin on this David Friedman piece.
The long run (very long run) trend of human history has been toward greater liberty.
In five or ten thousand years, if the human race still exists, I expect most people will be living in anarchist or minarchist societies, and other societies will be considered backward, as dictatorships are today.
Perhaps that is more like a thought for Easter Sunday rather than for Good Friday, but the times are depressing enough already.
Personally, I don’t see why such improvement need take as long as those kinds of numbers. I reckon a thousand years ought to be plenty.
Further thoughts from me, about the cogitations of another member of the Friedman dynasty, here.
Why are the Liberal Democrats not called the Illiberal Democrats if they are not liberals either? Maybe they should be called the Lino party, as in liberal in name only.
– Commenter Chris H
It is has surprised me that David Cameron’s Conservative Party, even though it has been pretty hopeless at resisting or promising to overturn whole assaults on UK civil liberties, has not embraced the idea of a mass repeal of such odious laws more enthusiastically. A commenter called KevinB has raised this point just now.
Consider the benefits: it would appeal to liberal-leaning folk who might otherwise not give the Tories a second glance and weaken the challenge from the LibDems; it would go down well with younger people normally less inclined to vote; it would be the right thing to do anyway. So why do they not make a manifesto commitment saying that in the first session of the next Parliament, a Great Repeal Act will be enacted that sweeps away hundreds of encroachments on UK civil liberties, such as the Civil Contingencies Act and the National ID database?
Of course, some of this might require the government to pull out of certain EU laws, but remember that the vast bulk of the laws imposed by New Labour have been domestically generated and cannot be blamed on the EU, important though that dimension is.
Now at this blog we are not exactly very nice to the Tories, to say the least. But it strikes me that a Great Repeal Act, or Restoration of Liberties Act, would be a nice, catchy idea that even the most authortarian cynic in the Tory ranks might feel would be worthwhile.
Following from Philip Chaston’s post immediately below, is the point that needs to be repeated as to how bad it is that the authorities are now trying – in vain, hopefully – to ban people from photographing the police. Had such photographing been prevented, then this incident, which threatens to engulf the police in further turmoil, would not have been recorded.
I cannot believe I am now writing stuff like this. This is Britain, right?
The Counter-Terrorist Unit is using a new strategy to stress test the alertness of their officers and the resilience of their response. By employing some buffoon as their leader, who makes little or no effort to conceal top secret information, the North West CTU entered Jack Bauer territory in order to round up the inevitable band of Pakistanis who just happen to be enjoying the lifelong learning offered by our universities (truncated for their purposes):
Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick was photographed entering Downing Street carrying a briefing note headed SECRET, on which details of an undercover operation against a suspected Al-Qaeda cell could clearly be seen.
The document set out the strategy for for the operation, an investigation into a suspected cell based in the north west of England and allegedly plotting an attack in the UK, including details of suspects and how the police intended to arrest them.
The bumbler has already been tainted by the Damien Green affair, but it takes real quality to walk around with SECRET tattooed on your forehead. Rather fitting that the fools who set up the surveillance society forget that it is a two way street. Watch and you will be watched! Since our security depends upon confidence, could we demote this tarnished officer to the role that he deserves: Sarjeant at Arms in the House of Commons, where he will be amongst those of his own kind.
Why was that slump, over and done with by 1922, so much shorter than the following decade’s? Well, for starters, he said, President Woodrow Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke at the end of 1919, while his successor, Warren G. Harding, universally considered one of the worst presidents in American history, preferred drinking, playing poker and golf, and womanizing, to governing. “So nothing happened,” Mr. Vedder said. Of course Mr. Vedder does not wish ill health — or obliviousness — on any chief executive. Still, in his view, when you’re talking about government intervention in the economy, doing nothing is about the best you can hope for from any president.
From a nice article on revisionist accounts of the New Deal and Roosevelt.
Via Marginal Revolution, which has a quite good comment thread on this issue.
Talk of Warren Harding, a much maligned president, reminds me of Paul Johnson’s book, Modern Times, in which that president gets a much-overdue rehabilitation, along with Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge.
This coming Friday, April 10th, I will be giving a talk at the home of the parents of Tim Evans, about the late Chris R. Tame. I was his junior libertarian partner, so to speak, during the 1980s into the mid-1990s, when I helped him to run the Alternative Bookshop, and did pamphlets for the Libertarian Alliance, so he obviously had a profound effect on my life. If you knew him, or if you have read any of the writings at the other end of the above link to the Libertarian Alliance website, you will know that I was only one among a great many.
 The purpose of this posting is twofold. First, I want to remind people about my talk. Emails have already gone out to most of those likely to be interested, and fliers were distributed at that very well attended Kevin Dowd lecture. But, what with this coming Friday being Good Friday, I have no idea who will show up or in what numbers. If you want to attend and have not yet emailed Tim Evans (tim at libertarian dot co dot uk) to that effect, then do so and he’ll send you attendance details. There has been talk of the event being video-ed. If that doesn’t happen, I will at least sound-record it myself. So, no need to bust a gut to be there in person if you want to at least hear my performance (always assuming that it is not so terrible that I decide to delete the only record of it).
My other purpose with this posting is to solicit help. Chris Tame had a lot of his considerable impact on the world in the form of meetings and relationships, personal and intellectual. He did do quite a bit of published writing and performing, but not nearly as much as he would have liked. When he died just over three years ago, prematurely, he did so while feeling, as did many others, that he would have had lots more to give had he only been allowed the time.
But Chris Tame nevertheless did have a huge influence, as you can tell by reading the comments on this Samizdata posting that marked his death in 2006. It is the nature of this influence that I will be attempting to shed as much further light on as I can in my talk this Friday. The gist of what I’ll be saying can be summed up in this comment by Dale Amon on that earlier posting:
I do not think the libertarian scene in the UK and Ireland would be anything like the same if he had not been there.
In addition to building the foundations and structure of the Libertarian Alliance and libertarian movement in the UK, Chris passed on masses of information, especially about the broad and ever growing range of libertarian books and articles out there, to a huge number of friends and acquaintances, to fellow libertarians of course, but also to many others from different parts of the political spectrum, and just to people he happened to come into contact with. The full range of such influences will never be fully known, but if you have recollections of Chris and of how he influenced or informed you, I would love to read a comment from you, or if you would prefer it, by you sending me an email (brian at brianmicklethwait dot com).
A good example of the kind of thing I mean is to be found in the opening paragaphs of Kevin Dowd’s recent lecture, in which Dowd mentioned just how much of an impact Chris had upon him. I know these sentiments to have been very heartfelt, because when I met Dowd just before he gave that lecture, told me all of that and more about how Chris Tame had helped and influenced him.
Without the indirect influence of Chris Tame, the Samizdata story would probably have been a very different one. I am by no means the only Samizdatista to have made a start as a self-conscious libertarian because of him.
My thanks in advance to anyone who can comment in the way I have suggested. If you are reading this for the first time after I have done my talk but still have something pertinent to add, please do not feel on my account that you are too late. I’d still love to read such recollections, and many others surely would too.
A final thought occurs to me. If anyone thinks that Chris Tame’s influence was bad, and did harm, I’d be interested to hear about that too. I will almost certainly not agree, but I will be interested. He has now been dead long enough for anyone who wants to to speak ill of the man without being pelted with the comment equivalent of vegetables. I do not want to encourage this, you understand, just to say that as far as I am concerned, that would be okay.
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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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