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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George Will, dorky docent of American conservatism, detects a return to the libertarian stylings of Barry Goldwater at the Republican national convention.
Four decades after a Republican convention in San Francisco nominated Sen. Goldwater, sealing the ascendancy of conservatism within the party, his kind of conservatism made a comeback at the convention here. That conservatism – muscular foreign policy backing unapologetic nationalism; economic policies of low taxation and light regulation; a libertarian inclination regarding cultural question – is not fully ascendant in the party. But the prominent display and rapturous reception of Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger demonstrated that such conservatism is not an insurmountable impediment to a person reaching the party’s highest echelons.
For structural and probably cultural reasons, it is highly unlikely that America will ever have anything other than a two-party system. For this reason, pragmatic libertarians will have to learn how to work the two-party system. For all their manifest shortcomings, the Republicans seem to be a more hospitable environment at this point.
But the domination of the Republican Party by cultural conservatives did make some other conservatives — libertarians and religious skeptics, among others — feel uneasy, even unwelcome. Being derided as RINOs — Republicans in name only — did not help. And the dominance of the cultural conservatives gave force to the Democrats’ and media’s caricatures of the Republican Party as a brackish lagoon of intolerance, a caricature that, like all caricatures, contained a trace of truth.
For all the rending of garments coming from the Democrats and the secular left, I see remarkably little in the way of actual state action implementing the allegedly theocratic cravings of the social conservatives since their rise to influence in the Republican Party. I certainly disagree with them on a number of points, but a careful reading tends to show that a great deal of what they want falls into the area of civil society, not state action. They have, of course, been infected to some degree with the virus of statism, but cries of alarm from the statist left that the Christian conservatives are attempting to implement state-mandated mind and social controls smack more of projection than anything else. Much of the social/cultural conservative agenda is defensive and reformist – they are animated by a desire to roll back what they see as a state-facilitated and noxious cultural of radical relativism and secular radicalism. Even their current flagship issue – the “defense of marriage” – boils down to preventing change from being imposed by state organs without democratic approval.
Interesting times, my friends, interesting times.
ADDENDUM: A few additional thoughts whilst standing in line for lunch.
In discourse, terminology is destiny. As a legal drafter, I always go first and foremost to the defined terms of a contract, regulation or policy. In bashing out the paragraph above on cultural or social conservatives, I mistakenly adopted some of Will’s terminology.
The bugaboo of the left (and their organ the Democrats) in the US is the “religious right,” and my comments in the paragraph above are directed primarily to this bugaboo. Aside from religiously driven moral concerns, though, the major driver of real social/cultural conservatism in this country is the puritan streak that has been handed down through the ages as the antithesis of the hedonistic American thesis.
In recent decades, this puritanical impulse has been mated to the statist impulse, yielding such unholy offspring as the radical environmental movement, the anti-smoking crusade, the nascent anti-fat crusade, and of course the drug war. You will note that the puritans reside comfortably all across the political spectrum in America, and have had a much greater impact on state activities than religious devotees. Neither the Republicans or the Democrats has really made any effort to take on the puritans, who in many ways have become a major bulwark for the cult of the state.
War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
– John Stuart Mill
Does anyone believe that Michael Moore actually had this conversation?
I mean, with an actual live human being, and not just in his own head.
Well, since people don’t want to talk about the really big issues (the mainstream media v. blogdom cage match), we might as well give ’em what they do want: the Kerry kerfuffle.
For agonizingly detailed analysis of the blow-by blow, then either Power Line or Captain’s Quarters is probably the place to go.
My take:
Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass what Kerry did as a soldier in Viet Nam all those years ago, just as I don’t really care what George Bush did as a pilot in the National Guard. Both seem to have served adequately well, and I would be perfectly happy to let sleeping dogs lie. I am perfectly willing to stipulate that nothing either man did as a soldier has any relevance to their race for President.
End of story? Not really, because the Kerry kerfuffle is not really about what John Kerry did as a soldier. As far as I can tell, the Swifties are not accusing him of war crimes (Kerry handles that all by himself, not that anyone believes him). They are not even accusing him of incompetence, really. Even by the Swifties’ account, he brought all his men home, killed a few bad guys, and generally carried out his mission as well as most young officers. Plenty good enough.
No, the current controversy is not about what Kerry did as a soldier, its about what he has done as a politician. Kerry’s career as a politician predates and encompasses his brief military career. He was an anti-war activist before the war, something of a glory hound during the war, returned to anti-war activism after the war, and has been a professional politician just about ever since.
Once you put the Swifties’ attack on Kerry in this context, they raise some very troubling questions. Kerry’s entry into the military, framed as it is by anti-war and anti-military activity, begins to look like opportunistic ticket-punching. His medals look like more of the same, especially when you look at how they have been used by him as props for his political career ever since (he famously pretended to throw them over the White House fence, only he did not, and now hangs them on the wall of his office). Indeed, Kerry has built his career on the foundation of his four months in-country, and has done so in a way that highlights what many see as fundamental character flaws. Kerry has very characteristically tried to straddle the fence on Viet Nam, claiming on the one hand to be a war hero and on the other to be an anti-war activist.
The Swiftie attack is not on his service as a soldier, it is about how he has used that service (cynically and opportunistically, in their view) to advance his political career. The Swifties are saying that the anti-war side of the straddle disqualifies him from leading America in the current war, which is a purely political argument that does not touch on Kerry’s service as a soldier.
They are also saying that the war hero side of the straddle is a fraud. Note that their quarrel is not really with what he did on the ground, it is with what he claims he did (in the military paperwork that resulted in his medals, and in his admittedly exaggerated accounts since then). What happened in the actions that resulted in his medals will be hard to sort out, but I would say the Swifties have landed some telling blows. Principally, Kerry has abandoned “Christmas in Cambodia,” the critical turning point that allowed his brave soldier and anti-war activist personae to co-exist.
Good lawyers know that nothing is more important than framing the debate. The Swifties, in their rage at Kerry for, in their view, stabbing them in the back, have not done a very good job of clearly framing this debate as being about Kerry the Cynical and Opportunistic Politico, rather than being about Kerry the Brave and Noble Swabbie. That will probably, in the end, rob their campaign of much of its power.
The folks who want Kerry to take power want to frame the debate as being about Kerry’s service as a soldier, so they can delegitimize and confuse the issues raised by Kerry’s career as a politican. Just because the mainstream media, who are pretty comprehensively in the tank for Kerry, are falling for and enabling this strategy, does not mean you have to.
James Lileks, riffing on John Kerry’s nomination speech last month:
My life today would have been much easier if I hadn’t been struck with the vision of a former president taking the podium in Boston to announce “I’m Bill Clinton, and I’m reporting for booty!”
President Bush had a chance to make a ringing endorsement of free speech rights, and he muffed it big time. From the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web (which doesn’t seem to do permalinks):
Never murder a man who is committing suicide,” Woodrow Wilson once said. President Bush seems to be following that advice, refusing to be drawn into the controversy over the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s allegations about John Kerry’s Vietnam War record. Yesterday the president did, however, make a procedural criticism of the group, as the New York Times reports:
In response to reporters’ questions, the president once again condemned the so-called 527 groups, which can raise unlimited donations and run attack ads, but cannot directly coordinate their efforts with the campaigns. . . .
“All of them,” the president said, when asked whether he specifically meant that the veteran’s group’s ad against Mr. Kerry should be stopped. “That means that ad, every other ad. Absolutely. I don’t think we ought to have 527’s. I can’t be more plain about it, and I wish–I hope my opponent joins me in saying–condemning these activities of the 527’s. It’s–I think they’re bad for the system.”
For once we’d have to say Bush is actually vulnerable to criticism from civil libertarians. Does he really mean to suggest that no group except a campaign or a political party has the right to express its political views? And of course Bush is substantially to blame for the rise of 527s as an alternative to campaigns and parties, whose fund-raising and free speech are severely restricted by the McCain-Feingold law, which he signed.
Why couldn’t Bush have said “Hey, its a free country. If they want to exercise their right to free speech, put out a book, run some ads, who am I to say no?”
Its hard to say what Bush really believes should be legal campaign discourse – apparently, political parties should have their contributions choked off, campaigns should be subject to strict limits (after all, he signed the McCain-Feingold bill that did just this), and independent, unincorporated associations should be prohibited from saying anything political as well.
Who does that leave? Well, the media and bloggers, I guess. So far, in the cage match between Old Media and the Unwashed Masses (that would be you and me), the Masses are ahead on points, in my book.
The latest engagement in the file sharing wars is a victory for the forces of, well, file sharing.
The makers of two leading file-sharing programs are not legally liable for the songs, movies and other copyright works swapped online by their users, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday in a stinging blow to the entertainment industry.
So far, so good. Those using file-sharing software to violate property rights are, after all, personally responsible for what they do. File sharing software has legitimate uses, and its makers should no more be held responsible for illegitimate uses than a camera manufacturer should be held responsible for child pornography.
Among other reasons, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc., unlike the original Napster, were not liable because they don’t have central servers pointing users to copyright material.
One begins to suspect that the court is straining a tad to distinguish its earlier decision shutting down Napster, but let that pass. One is always surprised to find the reliably statist Ninth Circuit signing paeans to the market, but whatever gets them through the opinion, right?
“History has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine, or an MP3 player,” [Judge] Thomas wrote. “Thus, it is prudent for courts to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories.”
Finally, a quote from the Ninth Circuit that I hope to find cited in other cases. Full opinion here, and hat tip to Hit & Run.
Glenn Reynolds gets in line with Samizdata, bridging the gap between your humble poster’s musings on big media and the current kerfuffle over Kerry’s account of his adventures in Vietnam.
But this story seems to me to be absolutely fascinating in that it reveals just how in the tank for the Democrats the mainstream media are, and how little the vaunted Cronkitean claims of objectivity and research and factual accuracy really mean when the chips are down.
To me, that’s a bigger deal than the underlying issue or even, in some ways, the election itself. Elections come and go, politicians come and go, and pretty much all of them turn out to be disappointments one way or another. But the “Fourth Estate” is a big part of the unelected Permanent Government that in many ways does more to run the country than the politicians.
Glenn does more than any professional journalist that I know of to bring together the public information on stories that catch his eye. His work on the Kerry “Christmas in Cambodia” story has been first-rate.
This article from the Washington Post, on the application of the little known Data Quality Act to hobble the regulatory leviathan, is full of unintentional insights. The Data Quality Act is, well, let the Post tell it, and let the insights begin!
The Data Quality Act — written by an industry lobbyist and slipped into a giant appropriations bill in 2000 without congressional discussion or debate — is just two sentences directing the OMB to ensure that all information disseminated by the federal government is reliable.
The first insight is, of course, the clonking great pro-government, pro-regulation bias that the Post brings to this story. Note the disparaging terms applied to this piece of legislation, which has a genesis and a pedigree that is totally ordinary – most legislation is the product of interested parties, and most finds its way onto the books via massive omnibus bills that no one reads. However, these routine facts of Washington life are given ominous prominence only when the media outlet is opposed to whatever was done. The rest of the story is riddled with similar bias – in the Post’s world, regulation is always good, always to protect the people, never fails a cost-benefit test, always supported by the preponderance of the scientific evidence, etc.
The next set of unintentional insights comes to us when the relatively innocuous purpose of the Act collides with the prerogatives of the regulatory state.
But many consumers, conservationists and worker advocates say the act is inherently biased in favor of industry. By demanding that government use only data that have achieved a rare level of certainty, these critics maintain, the act dismisses scientific information that in the past would have triggered tighter regulation.
First, of course, note who the Post asks for their opinion. Of equal interest is the rather revealing admission that, in the past, regulation was apparently handed down on the basis of information that was, how to put this, of less than adequate quality. Declining to regulate because the data isn’t there is, of course, a Bad Thing.
These final comments surely need no elaboration.
“It’s a tool to clobber every effort to regulate,” said Rena Steinzor, a professor of law and director of the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Maryland. “In my view, it amounts to censorship and harassment.”
. . . .
Yet Steinzor, the Maryland environmental lawyer, and other critics complain that the OMB’s involvement politicizes the process. The expertise of the handful of scientists hired by Graham, they say, cannot match that of the thousands of experts on agency staffs.
President Bush has announced, and not a moment too soon, that the US will undertake a massive reorganization of its overseas deployment, moving troops out of theatres where war no longer threatens (e.g., Europe). Apparently, most of the troops would be brought home to the US.
As I have noted before, the security guarantee that the US extends to its nominal allies can be counterproductive, encouraging irresponsibility and anti-American attitudes in such allies. For nations, as for individuals, there is no substitute for self-defence.
It is awfully strange behaviour for an imperial hyperpower, though, isn’t it? Surely the evil Bushchimpler realizes that bringing troops home is no way to expand global hegemony. Whatever could he (or his puppetmaster Karl Rove) be thinking?
Update: Mark Steyn weighs in.
There have been grumblings from the commentariat in recent posts, questioning my libertarian bona fides because I think it is a good thing that journalists are treated like ordinary citizens, a bad thing that a former government grandee thinks he can break the law with impunity, a good thing that my government is at least trying to perform its most basic function – protecting me against those who trying to kill me and mine, and so forth.
I regard these positions as being pretty straightforward applications of a common-sense practical libertarianism, one that has no truck with either pacifism or anarchy, but it occurred to me that I hadn’t really laid out my basic principles.
Government is the wrong tool for nearly every job. At a minimum, civil society does a better job of creating and distributing wealth, and of regulating conduct that does not involve force or fraud. The regulatory state and the redistributionist state are both largely illegitimate and ineffective in achieving their stated goals.
Taxation is distinguishable from theft and extortion only through an attenuated theory of ‘consent’ that posits that your vote for the guy who lost somehow means you consented to a bunch of people you never even had te chance to vote for agreeing among themselves to take your money. Low taxes good, high taxes bad. → Continue reading: Back to basics
One of the conceits of the press here in the US is that the First Amendment, which states that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” somehow grants them special status and immunities from laws that we plebes have to comply with. Not too surprisingly, the establishment media sees itself as the “Fourth Estate,” Americanized as the fourth branch of government (after the legislative, executive, and judicial branches) entitled to its own kind of sovereign immunity.
They are wrong. If the freedom to publish is restricted only to a certain limited or identifiable class, then it isn’t really a freedom at all, but is a privilege.
One of the more common expressions of the misconception that they belong to a special privileged class is the belief among journalists that they are entitled to defy court orders. Specifically, they believe that the First Amendment somehow guarantees them an immunity against having to identify their sources.
One of the micro-scandals plaguing the Bush administration has been the entirely hoked-up l’affaire Plame. In a nutshell, when former ambassador and Saudi shill Joseph Wilson began lying in public about his fact-finding mission to Africa regarding Saddamite nuclear ambitions, someone in the Bush administration may or may not have “leaked” the fact that his wife works for the CIA and got him the gig. This was scandalous because his wife may or may not have been an “undercover” op, so that leaking her identity may or may not have been against the law. Valerie Plame was so concerned about being outed that she and her husband arranged for a nice photo spread in Vanity Fair.
The scandal was hoked up because the press knew from the get-go who leaked Valerie Plame’s name and identity, but nonetheless went on a rampage about a coverup and the need for a grand jury to investigate the White House for this dreadful breach of national security. In effect, the Washington press was demanding a grand jury to discover what they already knew. This bluff has been called – the grand jury quite logically subpoenaed the testimony of two reporters who had fingered the White House for the leak.
Newly-released court orders show U.S. District Court Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan two weeks ago ordered Matt Cooper of Time magazine and Tim Russert of NBC to appear before a grand jury and tell whether they knew that White House sources provided the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to the media.
Cooper still refused to answer questions after Hogan’s July 20 order, and on Aug. 6 Hogan held him in contempt of court and ordered that he go to jail. Cooper has been released on bond pending his emergency appeal to a federal appeals court. Hogan has ordered that Time pay a $1,000 fine for each day Cooper does not appear before the grand jury.
A timely reminder that freedom for all is not a privilege for the few.
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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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