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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It’s easy to be shocked this side of firewall. I do not like Yahoo!’s complicity with the Chinese communists either but if we are to boycott them for it, let’s not leave out Cisco, for example. It was Cisco who provided the infrastructure that made Yahoo!’s self-censorship a gesture of compliance necessary for continuing their business in China at all:
In the United States, Cisco is known (among other things) for building corporate firewalls to block viruses and hackers. In China, the government had a unique problem: how to keep a billion people from accessing politically sensitive websites, now and forever.
The way to do it would be this: If a Chinese user tried to view a website outside China with political content, such as CNN.com, the address would be recognized by a filter program that screens out forbidden sites. The request would then be thrown away, with the user receiving a banal message: “Operation timed out.” Great, but China’s leaders had a problem: The financial excitement of a wired China quickly led to a proliferation of eight major Internet service providers (ISPs) and four pipelines to the outside world. To force compliance with government objectives–to ensure that all pipes lead back to Rome–they needed the networking superpower, Cisco, to standardize the Chinese Internet and equip it with firewalls on a national scale. According to the Chinese engineer, Cisco came through, developing a router device, integrator, and firewall box specially designed for the government’s telecom monopoly. At approximately $20,000 a box, China Telecom “bought many thousands” and IBM arranged for the “high-end” financing. Michael confirms: “Cisco made a killing. They are everywhere.”
True, freedom and opposition to a brutal regime should be more important than profits and voicing our disgust with global companies’ perverse priorities is necessary to alter them. By the way, Perry, did anyone call for a boycott of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola companies during the Cold War? I remember the drinks in their distinctive bottles that put some fizz into my rather gloomy childhood under communism. Hmmm. 
The issue is more complicated than a simple call for boycott of the global companies that have more than the Western face and are operating in repressed political regimes. In the article by Ethan Gutmann, “Who Lost China’s Internet?” (quoted above), a Yahoo! representative puts forward a kind of ‘moral appeasement’ case given the two options – either you please the Chinese state ‘big mama’ watching the Internet or the Chinese people have no internet at all.
It is interesting, to say the least, that it was Microsoft who did not give in to the Chinese authorities and demonstrated that what is “normal” in China can be altered under duress.
When Chinese authorities ordered Microsoft to surrender its software’s underlying source codes–the keys to encryption–as the price of doing business there, Microsoft chose to fight, spearheading an unprecedented Beijing-based coalition of American, Japanese, and European Chambers of Commerce. Faced with being left behind technologically, the Chinese authorities dropped their demands. Theoretically, China’s desire to be part of the Internet should have given the capitalists who wired it similar leverage. Instead, the leverage all seems to have remained with the government, as Western companies fell all over themselves bidding for its favor. AOL, Netscape Communications, and Sun Microsystems all helped disseminate government propaganda by backing the China Internet Corporation, an arm of the state-run Xinhua news agency.
So, boycott them all or ask ourselves whether “there is only one way to deal with a company like Yahoo and make them pay a price in the market for their collaboration with the brutal regime in Peking”.
I hate sounding like a dried-up professor by insisting on going back to underlying concepts and definitions but in this case I will. One of the responses I received on my international ‘morality play’ was from Derk Lupinek and although he believes that we should attack Iraq and set up a democratic government, he didn’t think that we have any “responsibility” toward the Iraqi people.
It was his understanding of rights that intrigued me sufficiently to comment on it:
Rights are nothing but wishful thinking without the power to enforce them. The power of enforcement requires an emotional commitment on the part of many individuals. Each individual agrees to help enforce the rights of others and, in return, each individual gains the right to protection under the group’s power. The individual has this right because he contributes to the power that enforces the right. Individuals must contribute to the power that enforces rights or else they have no right to protection under that power. So, I think we can “call for freedom and progress for ourselves” and not feel obligated to kill ourselves helping other countries, especially when those people do not contribute to the preservation of our rights.
I detect a category fallacy in the above paragraph. The definition of a right as wishful thinking without the power to enforce it. So does it mean that where individual’s rights are abused and often cannot be enforced, they do not exist? A right is not a right unless it is enforceable and/or enforced? Just because some people do not wash, should we deny the existence of soap on the grounds of its ineffectiveness with the unwashed?
Which leads me nicely to the various concepts of rights. There are actually three versions at play here. One is the natural rights theory, which assigns inalienable rights to an individual by his/her virtue of being a human being. I will not go into assumptions behind this one here as it is a well-worn and therefore lengthy topic, suffice to say it is the one I subscribe to. That is why I cannot agree with Derk Lupinek’s subscription-based rights, whereby individual’s rights are defined arbitrarily by and within groups of individuals, and protected by a sort of social contract enforced by mutual consent.
In my post on Western intervention in totalitarian regimes, however, I haven’t used either concept of rights, natural or positivist. I was merely thinking of the individuals trapped in totalitarian regimes who never had a choice to enter in any such agreement about either definition or protection of their rights. It is that freedom of choice I feel we have some sort of moral obligation to help them obtain. Not because they contribute to the power that enforces the right or because we are somehow legally or otherwise bound to do so.
Let me put it another way. Try to explain to a child being beaten up by a bunch of thugs, that he has no right to protection since he has not contributed to the power that enforces that right. If you can manage it, you may be consistent but not very humane.
In his usual, sweetly controversial way Brendan O’Neill spells out his opposition to the planned US bombing of Baghdad rejecting the West’s right and its responsibility to intervene in Iraq or anywhere abroad.
He sees the world in realpolitik terms where the only ‘right’ of the West to do as they please comes from competing rights – i.e. the West’s right against the sovereign right of smaller nations. Apparently, given that is not the case now as almost everybody accepts that
Western powers should ‘do something, anything!’ about corrupt, victimised and poor states, instead all we hear is the word ‘responsibility’.
Brendan finds curious the implicit notion that ‘we’, the West, have some kind of responsibility to do something about Iraq. And by extension anywhere else, even if the regimes are repressive. At least he is consistent in his position which is a rare virtue in today’s muddled-up musings on individual and collective morality, rights and responsibilities.
Let’s have it out then, Brendan.
Round 1: The West is not a uniform block. It is a collection of nation states, governments, or as we, Samizdatistas, like to think of them, a bunch of bureaucratic and oppressive collectivist entities, and as such it cannot be assigned rights or responsibilities. There may be unifying or common features characteristic to the Western world and there may be some moral force vested in those.
Round 2: Freedom is what makes us, the ‘West’, better. I find curious Brendan’s implicit notion that Western values are on a moral par with those of the non-Western regimes whether it be ex-communists or the Third World. Therefore there can be no ‘moral’ right or responsibility to intervene. Given Brendan’s scepticism of the state and governments, perhaps his notion is based on something like: Those who live in glass houses, shouldn’t throw stones…
However, there is such as thing as relative comparison. I may not like the Western states and governments but they are a damn sight better than the communist regimes of old and the oppressive regimes of the present. However flawed the Western moral, political and social fabric may be, it got there by way of choice and freedom! I say it was thanks to progress based on freedom, rights of an individual and other visions and aspirations of the kind I recall Brendan calling for:
It seems perfectly clear to me that we need more development, more production, and bigger and loftier ambitions. (10th July 2002)
Round 3: Monopoly on power. The problem is not assignment of rights or responsibilities to the international players but the fact that only governments currently have monopoly on power and force of the kind needed to bring freedom to those living under totalitarian regimes. This has not always been the case and so people did not need to look for moral guidance in international affairs in the press releases of their politicians and defense officials. Individuals with convictions could fight for their vision regardless of the official position. Take Lord Byron in Greece, Tom Paine in the French Revolution and George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway in the Spanish civil war.
Round 4: If it’s evil, fight it. Brendan says:
They [the left and liberal opponents to war] seem to have forgotten two important points: democratic governments, by their nature, cannot be imposed from without – and to those on the receiving end, choosing between diplomacy and war is a bit like choosing between a rock and a hard place or between having a gun pointed at your head and having somebody pull the trigger. It’s no choice at all.
Speaking as someone with experience of being on the receiving end, the Soviet empire was evil and repressive and there has never been a chance of achieving democracy from within. The only hope for those trapped inside was pressure from without combined with the inevitable but oh so slow decay of the system. My parents’ generation is a ‘lost’ generation – the best years of their lives wasted by communism. Why? Because the West didn’t have enough balls in 1948, 1956 and 1968 to kick the communist arse. Iraq is a variation on the same theme. Therefore, I say, if force is needed to defend freedom, use it.
So do we have any right or responsibility towards those who do not enjoy the same degree of freedom as us? Perhaps not collectively, in the form of state intervention but as individuals we do. Otherwise how can we passionately call for freedom and progress for ourselves and then calmly insist that others will just have to put up with whatever kind of oppression they find themselves subjected to?!
I knew it wouldn’t take long for someone to respond to Leah McLaren’s criticism of the English male. By the way, Perry, I was not merely amused by her remarks, I also agreed with them. 
The gentleman defending Englishmen’s pride and amorous skills sounds nice and perfectly serviceable. Nevertheless, Leah based the conclusions in her article on about a dozen ‘dates’. Perhaps not enough to make sweeping statements about the entire male population of the British Isles, especially as there are always exceptions, but sufficient to get some insight into their ‘mating habits’.
Instead of discrediting Ms McLaren’s motives, one should ask – does any woman agree with her? To me her rather unkind analysis of an English male rang true not as an old adage about the reserve and reticence of the quintessential English gentleman, usually so painfully and embarrassingly at odds with his own emotions that only ‘tragic’ and ‘desperate’ situations a là Jane Austin novels force him to articulate them.
Leah may have been harsh in her judgement but yet… harsh. It all depends on what you are after. If she expected to be overtly fussed over, adored and ultimately made feel above all women, well she was probably not going to get that on the first or even the fifth date with an Englishman. In that sense, English men are perhaps slower but more solid once they sort out their sometimes convoluted emotions. (And I am talking about the kind of gentleman who wrote the article, I would not want to presume an emotional dimension in the laddish section of the population.)
Leah says she prefers a straightforward North American male who looks her in the eye telling her whatever she wants to hear. Good trick, if you can manage it. This is where the grain of truth in what she says is hidden. The English man does not understand women. Leah may have even been right about why that is. Separation from maternal affection at an early age, exclusively male company during the crucial formative stage, etc,..blah blah. None of this necessarily means that he cannot understand a particular woman once he decides to make the effort. What it does mean though is that he is indeed no match for the more romantically skilled nationalities, such as Italians for example. And believe you me this is not just another cliche. 
To be fair though I’d much rather have a date with an English gentleman than an oily Don Juan.
My absence from the blog (already briefly interrupted by two postings) was not due to aesthetic disagreements with the new face of samizdata.net. I went away on a holiday to Egypt where Internet access is not a priority and the ‘camel connection’ is particularly slow. 
Upon my return I also noticed a link to Samizdata merchandise and given my newly acquired tan I know which product to buy.
Although I spent most of the time cocooned in a luxury holiday resort (Marriot hotel in Taba Heights), I did have a chance to go on a trip into the desert proper and visit a Bedouin village for a bit of ‘local culture’.
There are the standard impressions of a traveller in the Middle East i.e. dodgy hygiene of food and other amenities, genuinely friendly locals (unless they are trying to sell you something), really hot weather, the graceful poise of camels, the beauty of the desert and the sea, but I have tried to add a few of my own.
I think the first prize goes to the local women for swimming in their chadors, which are like burqas but show the face. I felt sorry enough for them watching them walking around in the blistering heat but my sympathy soon turned to astonishment when I saw them floating in the swimming pool, their black garb trailing behind. Oh, well, to each his (or her) own…
Another slightly surreal moment occurred during a lunch in a Bedouin village where a large horned animal was roasted and placed at the mercy of the guests and their knives. The meal was accompanied by bottled water as drinking from the local water supply equals a gastric suicide. On the bottle, among Arabic script, I could clearly read www.sinai4you.com. Yes, the information highway reaches and extends even beyond goat tracks.
This is what you get for having a female contributor to Samizdata – I don’t think any of the guys would care to link to an article by Leah McLaren about The tragic ineptitude of the English male.
Leah is a Canadian reporter who moved to London and found her ‘dating’ experience profoundly inadequate. If you are an English male and thinking well, perhaps, it’s just her, she wasn’t interesting, attractive, sexy, blah, blah, blah enough, don’t even go there. She is right whether you like it or not! 
Obviously, there are exceptions, I hasten to add in order to salvage my reputation and male egos of those who might take my emphatic agreement with Ms McLaren personally.
The truth of the matter is that the English male is confused by women in general, and by English women in particular. He handles foreign ones better, simply because he can be more patronising to them, especially if their first language is not English….Ouch! I know that hurt. 
The trick of a quasi-normal interaction with an English male is to stop behaving as a woman and just be a person easy to talk to. Generally, it works provided they can get past certain features of the female anatomy. Obviously, this approach is not suitable for ‘dating’ and Leah may have to stick with North American ex-pats. Good to hear that things have really changed there over the last 10 years…
Further to Tom’s appropriately titled introduction to the newly-elected Archbishop of Canterbury, the Brainstrust reports on Rowan Williams’ views of Iraq and Disney…
He who understands neither judges nor offends.
-Anonymous
I read Brendan O’Neill’s response to Perry’s challenge to take his spot-on rejection of ‘fixed wealth fallacy’ to its logical conclusion, i.e. laissez-faire capitalism, with mounting – wait for it – agreement.
For I agree with Brendan’s disappointment with ‘capitalism’ – I am also unimpressed by blundering inefficiency of large corporations and big businesses, by short-term horizons and inconsistency of their management. And I too am depressed by the effect ‘the limited mindset of capitalist bosses’ has on entrepreneurship, innovation and progress (even without the recent headlines about fraud and criminal accounting). What I see in the corporate world of today though is not laissez-faire capitalism but statist corporatist capitalism. Which by any other name would stink as much…
I do not understand though what Brendan means when he complains that capitalism cannot provide enough for everyone and can’t deliver what the world needs:
Of course, the truth is that neither side has a solution. It seems perfectly clear to me that we need more development, more production, and bigger and loftier ambitions. The capitalists can’t deliver that, and the trendy anti-capitalists don’t even aspire to it. To that end, I would say I am neither a capitalist, nor a so-called ‘anti-capitalist’.
I admit, Brendan, I do not have a solution, but then, I am not on either ‘side’ since my ambitions are bigger and loftier. The difference is I do not expect anyone, state or institution, to provide for me. I want the freedom to provide for myself and my nearest and dearest without interference from anyone. And I want free markets to be the mechanism for communicating my needs and for meeting other peoples’ needs. Because that is what capitalism is – the most efficient mechanism known to man for pursuing individual rights and freedom. It may not eliminate inequality but offers means to generate wealth to redress it.
Most importantly, it is freedom not capitalism that encourages creativity and motivates individuals to develop and progress. Laissez-faire capitalism ‘merely’ maximises that freedom and enables those individuals to pursue their ambitions. So let’s not complain that capitalism does not supply the big and lofty ambitions that Brendan needs – for me, that would be a depressing choice.
I cannot but note the discrepancy between compensations awarded to people who suffered from defective products on the opposite sides of the Atlantic. Take for example the classic(!) case of Stella Liebeck who was awarded $2.9 million in damages for spilling a cup of McDonald’s coffee on herself.
Compare this to a case in France, where it apparently takes more than a hot cup of coffee to claim damages, which are, in any case, nowhere near as spectacular. A French court has ordered two medical associations to pay damages to the family of a woman, Pascale Fachin, who died a horrible lingering death from the human form of mad cow disease (vCJD) after growth hormone treatment was administered with contaminated products to the tune of €394,000 (£253,060). Oh, and a paltry few thousand €uros to friends who looked after Fachin during her illness.
Go figure…
Not just blind but deaf, dumb and stupid
Science is a volatile subject. Traditional science originated from observations of the physical, specific and the immediate. As it progressed to modern science, the turning point being the Newtonian framework for understanding the universe, its evolution to Einstein’s theory of relativity and later quantum theory and computational science, it has increasingly concerned itself with abstract and often counter-intuitive concepts. In recent years a number of alternative scientific paradigms have sprung up and regardless of whether they end up being the next orthodoxy, they have already demolished some of the foundational theories in many scientific fields. Science, itself subject to evolution, pushes the Final Theory further as its horizons expand.
Religion is a stable and more or less fixed subject, certainly compared to science. It does make statements about physical reality and human affairs, but it does not concern itself with the temporary and the transient. I am therefore surprised that Brian can make such definite comparative statements about the two:
…the Book of Genesis makes claims about the origin of the earth and of its biological contents which, as was well understood in the late nineteenth century when these matters were first debated, are in total opposition to the theory of evolution. Either God was the maker of heaven and earth (as I was made to proclaim every Sunday morning when I recited the Creed at school) and men and beasts and plants and bugs, along the lines claimed in Genesis, or he was not.
You can’t have it both ways. Only by completely overturning what Christianity has meant for the best part of two thousand years, as the Church of England seems now to be doing by turning Christianity from a religion into a political sect, can you possibly believe that there’s no argument here.
I do not know whether you can have it both ways, but I am certainly not convinced by Brian’s argument. It doesn’t do to point out that one is ‘an orthodox twentieth century boy’ in one’s scientific ‘dogmatism’ and then proceed making sweeping suggestions as to intellectual viability of religion as a whole. The underlying assumptions at work here seem to be: a) the religious texts can only be interpreted in the 19th century fashion and b) the traditional understanding of evolution is correct and/or final. I shall not grace Brian’s use of the Church of England’s website with any assumptive force or category.
 The book of Genesis, written many moons ago, does contain some very specific and visual claims about how the world came about. The interpretation Brian is familiar with would have been based on 18th century ‘deism’, a rather mechanistic understanding of the world, gradually upgraded with the scientific knowledge as it progressed into 19th century. It wasn’t until 20th century that several scientific disciplines have been shaken to their axioms but none of the tremors have yet been translated into a wider meta-contextual knowledge, quantum theory being a good case in point.
 Brian says that ‘creationism’ is in total opposition to ‘evolution’. Without getting bogged down in definitions, if creationism means that the world was created, word by word, according to the book of Genesis, as some fundamentalist Christians insist, then I agree with Brian. However, that neither confirms validity of evolution as currently understood nor confines Christianity to the dustbin of the unscientific and irrational.
Let’s have a look at evolution. One of the foundations of the theory of evolution is natural selection. According to a modern paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, the fact that there are thousands of potential shell shapes in the world, but only a half dozen actual shell forms, is evidence of natural selection. According to my favourite scientist and complexity theorist, Stephen Wolfram, you don’t need natural selection to pare down evolution to a few robust forms. He also discovered a mathematical error in Gould’s argument and there are, in fact, only six possible shell shapes, and all of them exist in the world.
Organisms evolve outward to fill all the possible forms avaiable to them by the rules of cellular automata. [ed.note: Cellular automata are a set of self-reproducing mathematical rules.] Complexity is destiny – and Darwin becomes a footnote. A mollusk is essentially running a biological software programme.
Stephen Wolfram’s discovery about the nature of the universe suggests that the complexity that we see in the natural world can originate from very simple rule(s). One of the implications of his work is that it creates a ‘bleeding-edge’ scientific theory that proposes that the entire universe – with its perplexing combination of good and evil, order and chaos, light and dark – could have been started by a First Mover using a dozen rules.
It is therefore possible that neither science nor religion are ‘finished’ with their understanding of the nature of reality. For science, new paradigms may change the way it views the universe(s). For religion, it may not be necessary to revise its texts as the ‘creationist’ interpretation becomes irrelevant in the light of new scientific knowledge. One thing is certain though, I have more sense than to start debating religion with a devout atheist and especially one whose atheism, in his more lucid (i.e. not anti-religious) moments, is entirely rational. I merely object to the very narrow interpretation of ‘science’ and ‘religion’, namely Christianity, used to make a rather glove-in-your-face point.
Old habits die hard – the Russian Culture Ministry is considering banning a new Ukrainian film ‘Pray for Mazepa’. The film is about the controversial 18th century Cossack leader, Ivan Mazepa, who joined forces with the Swedish King Charles XII against Peter The Great. It portrays the Cossack leader as a strong advocate of Ukrainian independence and an opponent of Peter’s the Great’s tyranny – in contrast with the Soviet depiction of him as a traitor to Slavic brotherhood.
The Russian culture minister, Mikhail Shvydkoi, said the film distorted the truth and could damage relations between Russia and Ukraine. Just as well the US film industry honours the facts and often demonstrates its firm grasp of ‘history’ in films like U-571, The Battle of the Bulge, In the name of the Father, The Patriot, Braveheart, Titanic, Pearl Harbour, just to mention a few. The ‘special relationship’ between the United Kingdom and the United State need not be strained further. I am sure Tony Blair is especially relieved… 
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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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