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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But the 9/11 deniers have two mighty weapons. One is technological. In the age of the internet, if you don’t want to read evidence that contradicts your fantasies, then you don’t need to. Just visit one of hundreds of websites that will supply you with freshly minted “evidence” to replace any bits of your theory that have fallen apart on you.
The other weapon is cultural. Thanks, in part, to multiculturalism, facts have been reduced to accessories in the West’s intellectual wardrobe. The postmodern message is that your version of reality is part of you; don’t let inconvenient truths damage your customised worldview and your self-esteem
– Damian Thompson. Often when I quote Thompson it is to fisk him but this one hits the nail squarely on the head.
One thing comes through to me as I hear the stories from those doing their part for the remembrance. Far from destroying America, the lowly jihadi’s have created a powerful religious symbol. The World Trade Center has become a site of enormous power. Tiny pieces of metal from the site have been forged into religious icons. They are a part of a warship, a part of wind chimes for a church. They are items treated with great awe and reverence, perhaps as much as were bits of the ‘one true cross’ to generations of the distant past.
To the Jihadi’s and to those who think they will one day bring Shari’a to America, I say, “You have not only failed. You have created icons of greater power than your Mecca.”
I will go further. Two thousand years from now you and your icons will be remembered only in dusty historical archives. The World Trade Center site will still be there and will have gained a patina of age and legend, a tale of demons who came from out of the East and carried death, destruction and great evil with them as they battered a brave and honorable people.
But the more evil they did, the more the forces of good grew, until one day the hand of all peoples were raised against them and they were cast back into the lowest depths of hell and provinces of the damned from whence they had come.
Jihadi’s, you are done. Your dreams are dead. Your followers are dead or will soon be dead. Your beliefs will be forgotten. You have made us stronger and you and all about you are dust in the winds of time.
I do not have to curse you. You have cursed yourselves.
Propaganda ‘own goals’ are always interesting. A couple of self-described anti-fascists from United Against Fascism produced a happy, confident video in which they laughed at the beating administered to a female English Defence League supporter by members of the UAF. The left-wing site Harry’s Place described it as horrifying. In the Telegraph, Brendan O’Neill called it “A glimpse into the class hatred at the heart of the anti-EDL clique”.
The woman concerned is a racist. She gloated on Facebook over the death of a Muslim woman whose burka became caught in a go-kart. But that’s not the point, as the author of the second post from Harry’s Place makes clear.
In the Independent, Laurie Penny writes Class snobbery about the EDL won’t halt the far right. Lady, that ain’t the half of it. The upper middle class laughter – oh, yes, in England laughter has a class – of Ben and Anthony as they call the victim a “the most tattooed horrible scrote of a woman” and their Rag Week chuckles as they say, “Never hit a woman – but they are not women” and “Never hit a woman – but DO kick a dog” will be like salt on raw skin to many working class men.
Anthony and Ben put this video on YouTube themselves, before the EDL got hold of it. They did not forsee how it would look to others. Like ‘No Pressure’ with real violence.
There is a further twist. The boiling surface of the internet has thrown up what are claimed to be the full names and personal details of Ben and Anthony. However one of the men named strongly denies that he is the person who made the video. One act of mob violence may give rise to another.
Zerohedge has noted that the IMF is reactivating its New Arrangements to Borrow facility. This is a backdoor channel for bailing out an insolvent Eurozone. It is time for Great Britain to leave the IMF as it injects money into failure.
As the whole of the international architecture for finance is becoming a byword for bailouts, why stop at the IMF?
“If feminism ever succeeds in making men and women full-fledged equals (for what else might?), we will be able to stop talking about whether women genuinely belong to the literary canon. Maybe there will even come a time when we can speak of Jane Austen without thinking of her as a female. Then comments like Naipaul’s will be universally mocked as the sexist “tosh” they so obviously are. Whenever this comes about, Jane Austen will still be a great author.”
– Audrey Bilger.
She is having a go at VS Naipaul, and even though I dislike aspects of feminism, I think her argument deserves respect. An interesting piece.
Yesterday I had a nice surprise. I was rootling around in the now resting blog of the Oxford (as in Oxford University) Libertarian Society, trying to find the video of a talk I did for them about how to spread libertarian ideas, nearly three years ago now, because I wanted to remind myself about something I had said. I found the video, but also something much better than the video, namely a selection of the more eloquent things I said, cleaned up and clarified by Oxford Libertarian Andrew Gimber. I had not realised until now that this was there, or if I had I had totally forgotten. My belated thanks to Gimber, what with a moderate amount of text being so much better and quicker to take in (to say nothing of more searchable) than a long video performance. It’s the difference between having over an hour to spare, or just a handful of minutes.
And before anyone says, I don’t think vanity linkage like this is quite as vain as it looks. If I don’t link back to my past stuff, nobody will, and I know this.
I wonder what Andrew Gimber is doing now. Something good, for him and for the world, I hope. (This is not, I think, the same Andrew Gimber.) There is an Andrew Gimber on this list, and I think that’s him. Looks good.
I also wonder what the Oxford Libertarians are now up to. Something, I hope.
General point: What you shove on the internet hangs around. Even before the internet, what someone said a long time ago can hang around in someone’s memory and have big long-term consequences, even if whoever said it had no idea at the time that the person with the memory that it stuck in was even listening. That being one of the points that I made in my talk.
“I wish Warren Buffett would emulate his father, Howard Buffett, the late Congressman from Nebraska. Howard Buffett decried the move to the welfare state. He wanted to end it. Also, he wanted the U.S. to get out of the Korean war and move to a non-interventionist foreign policy. Indeed, he was the campaign manager for Senator Robert A. Taft when Taft ran against Eisenhower for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination. I have a proposal for Warren that could cut tax rates for those whom he claims to care about and, at the same time, save having to raise tax rates on him and other rich people: get out of all the wars, close all the foreign bases, and save about $500 billion a year. His father would have liked that.”
– David Henderson.
In Italy last week, where I holidayed, I also attended the ISIL conference with a great bunch of fellow libertarian conspirators, such as Kevin Dowd, Tom Palmer and Detlev Schlichter. One of the talks was by Mary Ruwart, who has worked for many years in the medical field and has first-hand knowledge of the destructive power of the US Food and Drugs Administration. She argued that the cost to life in terms of drugs and treatments that never got approved runs to several million people, far outweighing the likely number of deaths from drugs that might have dangerous side-effects.
As Ruwart said, one of the issues that comes up in any discussion about drugs are patents. She disapproves of them – she called the process of getting a patent a “game”; but at the same time she pointed out that if drug firms have no certainty of being able to recoup some of their research costs due to a patent, and those research costs are inflated by the FDA and other regulators, then abolishing patents without first removing such regulators would be bad. In my view, it would be disastrous.
I thought about her talk when I came across this rather lame article by the Economist, in which the publication wonders why US drugs are so expensive and why production of them has slowed. Wow, I wonder why that can be?
Update: the FDA has been carrying out an absurd attempt to hammer dietary supplements. US citizens who want to stop this nonsense can register their views at this site.
Felicity Lawrence. Describing her as a health dominatrix doesn’t really work; some people find that fun. In this article, Why the new McDonald’s menu won’t make us thin, she writes:
The coalition government has chosen to cast public health as a matter of personal responsibility. It takes the classical liberal view that individuals should make their own choices, free from state intrusion. Nudging us to healthier choices is OK, but regulating is not.
On this liberal reading, the fact that your risk of being obese relates closely to your socio-economic status is not a question of social justice but a problem of the feckless poor being too ignorant or spineless to make good choices.
This is a dangerous misrepresentation. It conflates the right of the individual to freedom from interference with the right of business to the same freedom from government constraint. It ignores the fact that business intrudes on our choices constantly with its powerful marketing and sales strategies.
The part where she is projecting is the part I have put in bold type. It is Felicity Lawrence, not the supporters of a belief that individuals should make their own choices, who is conflating the right of the individual to freedom from interference with the right of business to the same freedom from government constraint. She is conflating the two rights so as to get her Guardian audience, generally hostile to business, to give up their residual hippy belief in freedom to do what one likes with one’s own body in return for the quick thrill of an anti-business sugar rush.
Those who believe that individuals should be able to do what they like with their own bodies may also believe that businesses should be free from government constraint. I do. They are both freedoms. They are not the same freedom. I would say that the freedom to do what you like with your own body, and mind, and life, is the fundamental freedom – is, in fact, freedom. The specific freedom of businesses is merely an application of that to certain uses of your time and applied to specific types of groups.
I get all sorts of emails, and this one, from a fairly well known money manager in the UK by the name of Terry Smith, is worth reading in full. It is the text of a letter he has sent to the Financial Times newspaper. The FT is behind a paywall so I reproduce it in full:
From Mr Terry Smith.
Sir, I refer to the debate being conducted in the pages of the Financial Times between those who propose further Keynesian measures, such as Martin Wolf (“Struggling with a great contraction”, August 31), and those who do not accept that they will work, such as Wolfgang Schäuble (“Austerity is the only cure for the eurozone”, September 6).
Such so-called Keynesian measures as advocated by, among others, Ed Balls, Samuel Brittan, Paul Krugman, George Magnus and Barack Obama as well as Mr Wolf have not worked to date, and they will not work. Their advocates seem to assume that their repeated failure to solve our economic problems just means that the medicine must be repeated, which reminds me of Richard Nixon’s motto that “if two wrongs don’t make a right, try three”.
I say “so-called” Keynesians because these advocates seem not to realise that Keynes’ theories did not rescue us from the Great Depression. They are also asymmetric in their application of his theories – calling for ever larger deficit spending, having overlooked the bit about running a surplus in a boom. But above all, they do not seem to realise that they cannot work in a period of debt deflation in which a recession is preceded by the collapse of the banking system, as their current failure is demonstrating.
To the ordinary person in the street, the idea that we can rescue ourselves from a crisis caused by excessive borrowing by borrowing even more must seem mad. In this respect they are possessed of far more common sense than those who are currently advocating just such a course of action and purport to be our leaders.
The first step in rectifying this situation should be to make a clear and unambiguous statement about the actual debt the UK is carrying.
To give a lead to this, today we have circulated to every member of parliament a tin can emblazoned with the UK debt figure – £3,589bn including commitments for public sector pension commitments, private finance initiative and banking sector guarantees, so that they can see what it is they are metaphorically “kicking down the road” with their present policies. This, ahead of the party conference season, I hope might spur some considered and honest debate on this issue.
It is time for those who wish to lead us out of this crisis to tell people how bad the current situation really is and the painful remedies which will be needed to remedy it.
Terry Smith, Chief Executive, Tullett Prebon, London EC2, UK
I get the impression that this man is not looking to be elevated to the peerage. Good.
To the ordinary person in the street, the idea that we can rescue ourselves from a crisis caused by excessive borrowing by borrowing even more must seem mad. In this respect they are [he/she is] possessed of far more common sense than those who are currently advocating just such a course of action and purport to be our leaders.
– Terry Smith
In a typically overheated article at the Lew Rockwell website, is this extraordinary paragraph by Anthony Gregory:
“More important in U.S. fascism is the role multiculturalism plays in guarding against the accusations of violent prejudice. The U.S. government already addressed racial strife, our textbooks say. If racism remains, it is a problem with the culture and private sector – not the egalitarian state. The war machine and federal government were the saviors of blacks. LBJ, the same man who slaughtered millions of Asians, signed the Civil Rights Act, and so the federal government has been elevated to the status of being the Final Solution to racism, the redemption of America’s past sins. The all-out assault on property rights involved in Civil Rights legislation is itself a form of anti-racist fascism, yet to say so is to be met with incredulous perplexity, at best.”
This is a mixture of half truths and downright nonsense. (The “war machine” a “saviour of blacks”? WTF?). Yes, it is undoubtedly the case that “affirmative action” – which is euphemism for racial discrimination – is wrong and violates equality before the law. It is also true that some aspects of Civil Rights legislation have encroached on private property rights. But Gregory surely knows that some aspects of Civil Rights legislation addressed such indefensible acts as preventing black people – who were taxpayers – from gaining equal access to the public facilities they had paid for, as well as ensuring equal treatment for voter registration requirements, and so on. And given the statist abomination of the Jim Crow laws (enacted during the Progressive era), it is surely legitimate even for someone like Mr Gregory and his Rockwellian chums to accept that after such state-enforced bigotry was removed, it was a matter of natural justice to ensure that black people were put on an equal footing with whites in terms of access to public services that they had paid for.
It is, of course true in strictly narrow terms that a libertarian defence of the right to life and property does not say anything about how one should use, say, such property, nor should it. But life is so much more than simply focusing on such “negative liberties”; my conception of libertarianism is that it embraces social, not just narrowly legal or economic, freedoms. In my view, a free society is one that encourages “experiments in living”, in encouraging, or at least not scorning, the eccentric, the different, etc, with the key proviso that such experimenters bear the consequences of their actions. And I get a strong sense from Mr Gregory that he hasn’t much time for such things, for all his raving about how the US has been a “fascist” country. The problem is that by using that term to describe something like Civil Rights legislation, it leaves our vocabulary looking a bit inadequate when describing, say, Mussolini’s Italy.
On a slightly tangential point, here is Matt Welch, of Reason magazine, defending his recent book – co-authored with Nick Gillespie – from those “paleo-libertarians” over at the Lew Rockwell outfit. What a rum lot they are.
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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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