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.
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Gabriel Syme and I (and a certain Frogman) have been away from our keyboards for a few days because we have in Geneva, adding our efforts to that most worthy of activist groups, Bureaucrash, on the occasion of the first outing of Eurocrash in Switzerland. The target for our attentions was the Fifty-seventh World Health Assembly held by that hotbed of socialist obscurantism, the World Health Organisation.
The simple message of the Eurocrash was not something all too many of the people participating in that tax funded Tranzi event wanted to hear: Capitalism Heals/Socialism Kills
 Step One: Infiltrate the WHO events by getting a badge…
Step Two: wander over to the UN Palace of Nations…
Step Three: take embarrassing pictures of UN type folks smoking in front of where WHA sessions are going on…
Step Four: hand out pro-capitalist leaflets designed to demonstrate that there is more than one point of view…
Step Five: get run out of town by UN cops…
Although it was all only a very small fly in their ointment, it was all worth it just to see the incredulous expression of people at the notion of pro-capitalist demonstrations on UN property.
The next round of jolly japes immediately afterwards was to crash the screening of a new film by socialist activist German Velasquez, called ‘Profits or Life?‘, which criticises attempt to uphold the intellectual property rights of pharmaceutical companies who have developed many life saving drugs. Velasquez was supported on a Q&A panel afterwards by Marxist activist Carlos Correa. Twenty or so Crashers turned up to to ask a few rather awkward questions and distribute some rather clever leaflets which dissented from the movie’s message…
Crasher Niger Innes asks why, given that the
panel was representing itself as the voice of the
poor in Africa, there were no Africans on the panel? Ouch.
Crasher Stefan Metzeler points out that as the
majority of drugs are not under patent anyway,
blaming intellectual property rights for the Third World’s
health problems, rather than massive regulatory statism and
a lack of free trade, is rather idiotic…
And then who should appear in the audience but Dr. Harvey Bale, who Velasquez’s movie has cast as ‘the ugly American Bad Guy on the side of the evil pharmaceutical companies’. Far from being the sinister character ‘Profits or Life?‘ portrayed him to be, he turns out to be an urbane and very articulate fellow as he addressed the point which had been made on-screen. Never have I heard a man demolish another man’s arguments so systematically and yet remain utterly charming and polite.
And then Dr. Harvey Bale, the Director General
of the Geneva-based International Federation of Pharmaceutical
Manufacturers Associations had a few words…
And with that, the Crashers vanished into the surroundings… well, into Geneva actually in search of food and drink. A fairly interesting time was had by all and I found the event a very useful networking opportunity as well.
I am about to be on Talk Sport Radio, at about 1 am tomorrow morning, they said. I have just done an interview about President Bush’s crackdown on porn, with a guy called Duncan Barkes. I tried to make sense, and probably made some sense. The purpose of this post is to tell you this, not to spend the next three quarters of an hour telling you what I think about it all.
But I will summarise it:
Duncan Barkes: Should porn be illegal?
Me: No.
This could all be a tease (there have been hundreds of similar reports about a referendum on scrapping the pound for the euro).
The EU constitution in itself may not be worse than what the British version is mutating into. If adopted our choices become a pan-European libertarian movement or a secession.
The latter may not be as easy as the Confederate attempt in 1861 from the USA (less public support in the UK, more heavily outnumbered by the rest of the EU etc). Hopefully such a secession could be more Slovenian than Croatian.
The advantage of a referendum is that it cannot be worse than letting the Prime Minister decide alone.
The disadvantage is that it will only happen once the result is known in advance to suit the government, so that when they win, it can slip through the single currency without a vote (that is what the French government did with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992).
Either way spread the word: by next weekend we could have a live campaign on our hands.
The other day, in connection with my soon-to-end duties as the Libertarian Alliance Phone Owner, I got a call from a householder who is having a run-in with his local politicos. I gave him the same answer I give to all such persons. Write down your story, and send it in. If it is a story worth telling, we will spread it around. Here is an email to send it to. Oh, all right then, here is an address. (No email is a very bad sign. You can’t do any sort of politics these days without email.) Sometimes I then have to add that we are a (heavy emphasis) publishing organisation and not a “campaigning organisation”, i.e. zero expense lawyers and PR experts who will do all your fighting for you. Generally that is the last we ever hear from such persons.
But this latest call was different, because today I received an email, exactly as was promised, and these people have clearly taken the trouble to be easy people to help (a very important art if you want to get ahead in the world, I think):
Dear Brian,
As per our discussion please find below some information on my fight against overarching government Please let me know if you have any questions and if you list the story at one of your blogs. Please let me know if you have any other ideas of how I can drum up support or highlight this excess of regulation, loss of property rights and waste of taxpayer’s money.
Thanks for your help
Christian
____________________________________________________________
Government spending £100,000+ to have our skirtings lowered by less than an inch!
This is a personal call for support. Hammersmith and Fulham Council has taken issue with the internal renovation of our home of a Grade II listed building (a detailed description of the dispute is on www.stpaulsstudios.com). The council asserts that the skirtings we inserted are 0.8 inch too high and has pursued us in court three times over the matter and losing each time. We have recently won again in the Court of Appeal. During the proceedings Lord Justice Longmore called the council’s conduct vexatious. Despite having already spent more than £100,000 of tax payer’s funds, some council officers want to continue this extremely wasteful activity.
This is the right time to have your view heard. There is a meeting by the Planning Application Committee on March 8. We would like to ask you to either get in touch with one of the councillors on the committee (preferred solution) or to express your support to us. Despite it going on for 4 years none of the committee members have asked for a site visit!
Colin Aherne, Labour, Tel: 020 8753 2192
email colin.aherne@lbhf.gov.uk
Will Bethell, Conservative, Tel: 07980 017 569
email will.bethell@lbhf.gov.uk*
Michael Cartwright, Labour, Tel 020 8741 5238
email michael.cartwright@lbhf.gov.uk
Caroline Donald, Conservative, Tel 020 8749 3859
email caroline.donald@lbhf.gov.uk*
Greg Hands, Conservative, Tel 020 7381 2593
email mail@greghands.com*
Wesley Harcourt, Labour, Tel 020 8749 3298
email wesley.harcourt@lbhf.gov.uk
Jafar Khaled, Labour, Tel 020 8753 2020
email jafar.khaled@lbhf.gov.uk
Dame Sally Powell, Labour, Tel 020 8753 2021
email sally.powell@lbhf.gov.uk
Frances Stainton, Conservative, Tel 020 7385 3672
email frances.stainton@lbhf.gov.uk
Charlie Treloggan, Labour, Tel 020 8753 2013
email charlie.treloggan@lbhf.gov.uk
The councillors with an asterix are new to the committee.
Your action can rescue us from this futile and erroneous legal interpretation and save all of us from our tax money being wasted (the rates already high enough as they are).
Yours Sincerely,
Christian and Katya Braun
137 Talgarth Road – London W14 9DA
020 8563 0612 – Fax 020 7691 7185
support@stpaulsstudios.com
Now that is how to campaign. That is how to get other people to help you. And if you follow the link in the paragraph under their subheading, you’ll find further details of the dispute, just as it says, and you will be even more impressed.
This listed building thing has really got out of hand. It has got so that if they list a building no one wants to own it and it collapses into a ruin.
Yesterday afternoon I was out and about walking in London, and just before I got to Parliament Square I encountered a demo. It was not raucous or unpleasant. It was nice. It was old people complaining about their council taxes, which obviously I am all in favour of.
Following the example of supreme Samizdatista Perry de Havilland, I now take my DigiCam with me whenever I go a-wandering, so I was able to start snapping. At first it was just nice old people accompanied by nice policemen, with nice buildings in the background, but only very crude signs to say what it was all about. However patience was rewarded, and some of the signs were highly informative.
27.2%. Ouch! Whatever happened to stealth taxes? (Hey hey LBJ, you killed 27.2% more kids today than yesterday, you bad bad person. Not the same ring to it, somehow.)
And this one takes onlookers into the university lecture theatre.
Okay, okay, I’m excited, and I want to know more. How can I follow it up?
Wow, a website. They say, in fact Perry just said it to me in connection with this post, that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I reckon best of all is pictures with words embedded in the pictures, explaining everything. Preferably with an internet link.
I disagree almost completely with George Monbiot’s political ideas, but I share his curiosity about the Revolutionary Communist Party, that’s Living Marxism, no: LM (as LM for Living Marxism as in L for nothing M for nothing), no Spiked, that is to say Institute of Ideas. Who are these people?
Here is the Monbiot version, from last Tuesday’s Guardian:
The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter called the Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out to destroy competing oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners marched for better pay, it picketed their demonstrations. It moved into the gay rights group Outrage and sought to shut it down. It tried to disrupt the miners’ strike, undermined the Anti-Nazi League and nearly destroyed the radical Polytechnic of North London. On at least two occasions RCP activists physically attacked members of opposing factions.
In 1988, it set up a magazine called Living Marxism, later LM. By this time, the organisation, led by the academic Frank Furedi, the journalist Mick Hume and the teacher Claire Fox, had moved overtly to the far right. LM described its mission as promoting a “confident individualism” without social constraint. It campaigned against gun control, against banning tobacco advertising and child pornography, and in favour of global warming, human cloning and freedom for corporations. It defended the Tory MP Neil Hamilton and the Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansers. It provided a platform for writers from the corporate thinktanks the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. Frank Furedi started writing for the Centre for Policy Studies (founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher) and contacting the supermarket chains, offering, for £7,500, to educate their customers “about complex scientific issues”.
In the late 1990s, the group began infiltrating the media, with remarkable success. For a while, it seemed to dominate scientific and environmental broadcasting on Channel 4 and the BBC. It used these platforms (Equinox, Against Nature, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Counterblast, Zeitgeist) to argue that environmentalists were Nazi sympathisers who were preventing human beings from fulfilling their potential. In 2000, LM magazine was sued by ITN, after falsely claiming that the news organisation’s journalists had fabricated evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian Muslims. LM closed, and was resurrected as the web magazine Spiked and the thinktank the Institute of Ideas.
All this is already in the public domain. But now, thanks to the work of the researcher and activist Jonathan Matthews (published today on his database www.gmwatch.org), what seems to be a new front in this group’s campaign for individuation has come to light. Its participants have taken on key roles in the formal infrastructure of public communication used by the science and medical establishment.
I am in favour of good science, progressive technology, and I’m pretty sure I like genetic engineering insofar as I understand it. Above all, I’m in favour of what Monbiot calls “individuation”, and despise the idea that this makes me or anyone else who believes in it “far right”, i.e. (the old smear) in league with Nazis (who flatly opposed “individuation”). And “confident individualism” sounds great, and I believe that it is restrained by the confident individualism of other individuals. I’m against gun control, and against banning tobacco advertising.
So, does all that make Spiked/Institute of Ideas good guys? Apparently. → Continue reading: Revolutionary Communist Party as in Living Marxism as in LM as in Spiked and Institute of Ideas – I agree with George Monbiot: who are these people?
I bought the paper version of the December 2003 issue of Prospect yesterday, and was all set to quote from the two pieces I’ve already been reading with particular interest, while apologising for not supplying any links. Well, I can, but in the case of the longer article only to an introductory excerpt. How long even these links will last, I cannot say.
From Michael Lind’s review of D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little, which won the Booker Prize.
At one point Pierre’s cartoon Texas sheriff says: “How many offices does a girl have that you can get more’n one finger into?” The comic malapropisms of pompous black characters were a staple of racist minstrel-show humour of the Amos ‘n’ Andy kind. If Pierre, purporting to unveil the reality of black America, had depicted a leering, sex-obsessed African-American police officer unable to distinguish the words “office” and “orifice,” would jury members like AC Grayling – a distinguished philosopher whose work I have long admired – have voted to award such bigoted trash the Booker prize?
But I don’t want to be too hard on the Booker jury. They’ve democratised literature by proving that a book doesn’t have to be any good to win a prize, so long as it exploits socially acceptable national and ethnic stereotypes. …
Assuming Lind is right about the crassness of this book, and although I’ve not read it I have no particular reason to doubt him, the next question is: why? What gives? Why this animus against Americans, and especially against those most American of Americans, the Texans. → Continue reading: Market-dominant minorities of the world unite!
For those who missed it, Instapundit is having a go at the Chinese authorities and…Walmart. November 7th is the anniversary of arrest of Liu Di by plain-clothes police. No charges have been made and she has not been heard of for the past year. Petitions have been started, in China, with people putting their real names to them and being arrested for that themselves. This is the story:
Until the authorities tracked her down a year ago Friday, she (Liu Di) was one of the most famous Internet web masters in China. A third-year psychology student at Beijing Normal University, Ms. Liu formed an artists club, wrote absurdist essays in the style of dissident Eastern-bloc writers of the 1970s, and ran a popular web-posting site. Admirers cite her originality and humor: In one essay Liu ironically suggests all club members go to the streets to sell Marxist literature and preach Lenin’s theory, like “real Communists.” In another, she suggests everyone tell no lies for 24 hours. In a series of “confessions” she says that China’s repressive national-security laws are not good for the security of the nation.
But since Nov. 7, 2002, when plain-clothes police made a secret arrest, Liu has not been heard from. No charges have been filed; her family and friends may not visit her, sources say; and, in a well-known silencing tactic, authorities warn that it will not go well for her if foreign media are informed of her case.
It is largely the attention of the Western media and public that keeps dissidents afloat and their oppressor in some sort of check. Those who are visible beyond the barrier erected between the oppressed and the outside world tend to fare marginally better. At least they get publicity for their sacrifice and if the campaigning on their behalf is persistent enough, they may even get out of whatever hell-hole communist officials put them in. The thousands (in China probably an order of magnitude larger) ‘small’ human tragedies go unnoticed just as they did in communist Russia and Eastern Europe.
Looking back at the Cold War days it seems incomprehensible that such horrors could be tolerated next door to Western civilisation and capitalist liberal democracies. Marxism and communism – top candidates for the most barbaric and inhuman ideologies – have absolutely no redeeming features, whether in practise or in theory. Not only they create a living hell for ‘ordinary people’ but they bring destruction to those who perpetrate it. Communism, time and again, produces monstrous regimes that like Saturn devour their own offspring.
And for those who believe that letting China ‘evolve’ out of its totalitarianism is the best way forward, this conclusion is not an optimistic one.
…the Chinese security and police are regularly told to crack down. There may be exceptions, as when the daughter or son of a high party member or rich family gets in trouble; or when there are excesses of youth.
But these are exceptions. The rest – labor activists, upstart college students, journalists, writers, intellectuals, professors, dissidents, religious believers with too much spunk, those who stand out in a too-public fashion or attract too much attention – are warned, or arrested. In this reading of China, free expression is not improving in the short- and midterm.
Despite some changes of style, more arrests are taking place, and ordinary Chinese are still strictly censoring themselves.
It is the pressure from the outside that can have the greatest impact on what happens in totalitarian regimes. Glenn Reynolds thinks that challenging Walmart is a way to increase it. Well, that’s good enough for me.
For reasons I cannot even begin to adequately explain, the gatherings of the increasingly angry and militant pro-hunt movement conjours up ‘spaghetti western’ images in my head; the brooding silence, the tumbleweed, the flinty, menacing stares and the ‘man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do’ atmosphere of grim resolve.
Yes, somewhere out in merciless, sun-baked badlands, guns are being greased and cheroots are being lit. The Hunting Clan is fixin’ for a showdown:
Thousands of people have gathered around England and Wales to protest against moves to outlaw hunting with dogs.
Organisers said 37,000 protesters at 11 rallies on Saturday and one on Friday, to mark the first day of the new hunting season, signed a pledge to ignore any ban.
Alright, it is actually the middle of the verdant English countryside, but you get the gist.
Having failed in their appeals to reason, common sense and principle, the hunters are still threatened with a government prohibition that will eradicate a centuries-old tradition and the way of rural life that has grown up around it. They are being ‘run out of town’ for no better reason than that they are perceived as an easy target for a government that wants to score cultural ‘brownie points’ with the metropolitan elite.
So the hunters have decided that they are not going to be such an easy target after all. I do not see what else they can do. It is fight or die and they have chosen the former:*
The Declaration is an opportunity for those who support the freedom to hunt to demonstrate to the public, press, Peers, parliamentarians and the Government that we will never accept unjust law. Critically, it aims to convey in an unambiguous way that enough people are committed to either refusing to accept any law that comes into effect (if it does) that any such law would be unenforceable and so fail.
While the language is temperate, the intention is unambiguous: they intend a campaign of civil disobedience. It is an open and explicit challenge to the authority of the British government. What started as protest has become insurrection.
It is still not clear whether the government will press ahead with the abolition of hunting in England and Wales (the ban has already passed into law in Scotland). But, if they do, and these people are good to their pledge, then they are quite capable of making life very difficult indeed for the authorities. In effect, a low-level civil war will be waged in the English countryside.
Regardless of whether or not that scenario comes to pass, I get the feeling that the hunters have started something that will have consequences in the future. The Labour government’s sustained attacks on rural England have led to an awful lot of people getting angry, getting political and getting organised and of such activism are revolutionary movements born. I have no idea how long it will take or what it will become but I do strongly suspect that the countryside movement will metastasise into something much broader and wider than the issue of fox-hunting.
[*The link is to the homepage of the Hunting Declaration where sympathisers can download a copy of the Declaration to sign and send in with or without a donation to the cause.]
I could not resist a bit of mischief making… The BBC has set up something called iCan, which Wired magazine described thusly:
A couple of years ago the British Broadcasting Corporation was blindsided by a grassroots campaign against rising taxes on gas. Although discontent had been growing for some time, the BBC didn’t report the story until the British army was called out to protect gas stations from protesters.
Hoping to avoid this kind of blindness to ordinary Britons’ political concerns, the broadcasting behemoth is launching a radical online experiment to reconnect itself with grassroots sentiment.
[…]
On the other hand, the effort is intended to counteract what officials at the broadcasting network feel is widespread political apathy in the United Kingdom, marked by low voter turnout at elections and declining audiences for its political programming. As a state-financed institution operating under a royal charter to inform, educate and entertain, the BBC feels it is within its purview to help disenfranchised citizens engage in public life.
And therefore I have taken it upon myself to set up an iCan campaign aimed at… encouraging people to not vote (i.e. active voter apathy, yeah I know it is an oxymoron) and to regard politics as just proxy violence. I have called this Anti-Activist Activism. Come join me as I take some herbicide to the BBC’s grassroots.
It is just too damn tempting 
Update: I have made the first journal update at Anti-Activist Activism called Turning iCan into iShouldn’t.
Following up on this earlier report here, more London School of Economics Hayek Society, here’s their latest news, from the society’s President Nick Spurrell:
Compassion and Capitalism Event – There will be held a major event tomorrow, Wednesday 29th October, with French thinker Christian Michel from Liberalia, entitled “Compassion and Capitalism”. Please do come along. There will be a talk and then questions and debate. D703, Clement House (Hong Kong Theatre Building) on the Aldwych. 12pm. Wednesday 29th October. No tickets necessary.
Students’ Union Elections – Tomorrow and Thursday (29th and 30th October) there will be held the LSE Students’ Union elections for various positions which hold authority and influence on the policy of the students’ union, the body which regulates the work of student societies including the Hayek Society.
Should you wish to vote, you may do so in the Quad, off Houghton Street on Wednesday or Thursday. The following Hayek Society Committee members are standing:
General Course Representative: Jonathan Gradowski (Hayek Society Auxiliary Officer); NUS Conference: Nick Spurrell (Hayek Society President), Peter Bellini (Hayek Society Financial Officer), Daniel Freedman (Hayek Society PR Director); Postgraduate Students’ Officer: Natalia Mamaeva (Hayek Society Secretary), Ryan Thomas Balis (Hayek Society Auxiliary Officer); Court of Governors: Daniel Freedman (Hayek Society PR Director); Alykhan Velshi (Hayek Society Journal Auxiliary Officer), Matthew Sinclair (Hayek Society Auxiliary Officer); Academic Board: Nick Spurrell (Hayek Society President); ULU (University of London Union) Council: Alykhan Velshi (Hayek Society Journal Auxiliary Officer), Matthew Sinclair (Hayek Society Auxiliary Officer)
Discussion Group Next Monday – There will be held, as usual, next Monday evening, the Hayek Society discussion group. All are welcome, in this informal environment to take part in a chaired discussion. The topic this week will be on the environment. More details soon… Monday 3rd November, 7pm, George IV pub, on campus, upstairs. Please feel free to come along.
The thing that impresses me about all this is that the stuff in the middle, about standing for various electoral offices, is not happening on its own. These people are holding speaker meetings and discussion groups as well.
Libertarians/classical liberals/whatevers who get involved in student politics often justify this by saying that the politicking “draws attention to the ideas”. But often they get so busy politicking that they forget about pushing the ideas. Worse, in order to get more votes in their damned elections they actually conceal or even contradict the ideas in their public statements, on the grounds that the important thing is “successful” politicking and if the ideas don’t help with that, then they must be dumped.
But the important thing is to do the ideas successfully, and if the politicking doesn’t help then the politicking should be dumped.
Politicking makes heat, and you make this heat is to draw attention to the light, which is the ideas. Trouble is, politicking sometimes burns up all the energy that ought to be used making light. All manner of “attention” is thus drawn, to nothing.
These guys don’t seem to be making this mistake. I’m impressed.
My thanks to CNE President Tim Evans for emailing me about this New York Times article, about the Free State project. I usually look at the daily NYT menu. Sod’s Law (and a rugby game – won by plucky little USA) decreed that today I didn’t. First few paragraphs:
KEENE, N.H. – A few things stand out about this unprepossessing city. It just broke its own Guinness Book world record for the most lighted jack-o’-lanterns with 28,952. It claims to have the world’s widest Main Street.
And recently, Keene became the home of Justin Somma, a 26-year-old freelance copywriter from Suffern, N.Y., and a foot soldier in an upstart political movement. That movement, the Free State Project, aims to make all of New Hampshire a laboratory for libertarian politics by recruiting libertarian-leaning people from across the country to move to New Hampshire and throw their collective weight around. Leaders of the project figure 20,000 people would do the trick, and so far 4,960 have pledged to make the move.
The idea is to concentrate enough fellow travelers in a single state to jump-start political change. Members, most of whom have met only over the Internet, chose New Hampshire over nine other states in a heated contest that lasted months.
(The other contenders were Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming. One frequently asked question on the project’s Web site was “Can’t you make a warmer state an option?”)
Once here, they plan to field candidates in elections and become active in schools and community groups, doing all they can to sow the libertarian ideals of curbing taxes, minimizing regulation of guns and drugs, privatizing schools and reducing government programs.
I’ve quoted at some length because the New York Times’ stuff has a habit which I’ve recently learned about of going out of one-click no-cost reach after all while. (Is that recent? Or was I just ignorant about it all along?)
I predict two things about what will happen as a result of this project.
- It will have results.
- The most momentous results will not be what anyone envisaged to start with.
The law of unintended consequences applies, after all, just as much to libertarians as it does to anyone else. Most gatherings of the faithful in the USA seem to result in a bit of spreading of the faith but not a lot, and then, interesting business activities.
One thing already seems likely, however, which the moving spirits of this project did intend. It will stir up media interest in libertarian ideas, not only within the USA but to some extent also beyond it, this New York Times piece being a perfect example of that process.
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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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