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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Richard Dawkins is someone whom I generally admire in the field of science. He is on the right side of the argument, in my view, in excoriating attempts to portray ‘intelligent design’ (creationism) as science; much of what he says about religion is true and he is a sharp, lucid commenter about scientific issues. But alas, that does not mean his grip on reality is particularly strong when it comes to other matters. Take his recent comments about the supposedly enormous influence of Jews on US foreign policy, which have already provoked a lot of comment.
My own take on all this is as follows: Dawkins is not anti-semitic and it would be pretty outrageous to suggest as such; I don’t think he is trying to say that Jews totally control the foreign policy of the world’s most powerful nation, only that they have a lot of influence in proportion to their numbers. But what Dawkins plainly does not consider – assuming his remarks have been reported accurately – is how the ‘Jewish lobby’ is not some sort of undifferentiated mass. Also, consider some of the main policymakers in Washington: Dick Cheney and Condi Rice. They are not Jews; neither, as far as I know, is Don Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, etc. Nor do I think that the policy of the US/other major nations has necessarily favoured Israel vs other Middle East countries. Arguably, if the Jewish lobby was as powerful as some say, then the US would have sanctioned the ability of Israel – which certainly has the means – to reduce its foes to radioactive dust. Anyway, a desire to protect the state of Israel from annihilation – a threat that is all too real if one takes the ravings of Iran’s leadership seriously – is a noble one. Israel is, with all its faults, one of the few functioning liberal democracies in the Middle East (that is partly what drives its Islamic foes nuts, of course). Even if one subtracts the beneficent impact of foreign aid, Israel’s domestic economic success is a standing rebuke to the theocracies that surround it.
If Dawkins wants to press the claims of atheists, fine (as an atheist myself, I count myself an admirer of what Dawkins has done to challenge religious superstition). But he does himself no favours by repeating the tired mantras about the vast influence of the Jewish lobby.
Classical liberal scholar, Randy Barnett has a long and excellent post (which I came across via Instapundit) spelling out some of the contradictions that occur when libertarians, be they minarchists, anarchists or more ‘pragmatic’ types, get into arguments about events like the war in Iraq (I have been called a lot of names, but hey, I can deal with branded a warmonger and a sappy peacenic, as has happened).
In particular, he notes something that some of us at Samizdata have observed many times, which is that for a certain kind of isolationist libertarian, they almost endow foreign, sovereign governments with the sort of respect that they never have for their own states. Barnett calls this the “Westphalian” attitude (derived from the Treaty of Westphalia in the 17th Century which recognised sovereign state’s boundaries in Europe at the end of the 30 Years’ War). Barnett ends up by making a point that I would make, which is that judging the rightness or wrongness of certain wars cannot be done by simple recourse to a sort of Rothbardian non-initiation-of-force principle, even though that principle is mighty useful as a sort of discussion point (Rothbard is a hero of mine, notwithstanding certain problems I have with his specific views). Judging, for example, whether regime or thug X poses country Y an existential threat, and what to do about it, cannot be done simply by parroting a few principles. One has to judge the facts of the situation and ask questions such as, “is this war prudent”? or “Will it make threats to us worse rather than better?”, or “What are the balance of risks?”. Prudence, as the Greeks knew, is a virtue, although it seems at times a little unfashionable to point that out. With the benefit of hindsight, prudence might have led us to take a rather different view of what to do about Saddam, assuming we had to do anything other than deter him by threatening to nuke him out of existence (but then, that shows that acting in strict self defence can come at the cost of killing millions of innocent people, which is not exactly libertarian. Does this mean “strict” libertarians must be pacifists?).
Anyway, Barnett’s essay is first class. For the more straightforward anti-war line out of the libertarian tradition, Gene Healy of the CATO Institute still has what I think is the best essay on the subject. It reads pretty well in the light of events. Both articles are pretty long so brew up plenty of coffee first.
Tyler Cowen notes an unsavoury fact about the Chinese economic miracle:
…of the 3,220 Chinese citizens with a personal wealth of 100 million yuan ($13 million) or more, 2,932 are children of high-level cadres. Of the key positions in the five industrial sectors – finance, foreign trade, land development, large-scale engineering and securities – 85% to 90% are held by children of high-level cadres.
Cowen lifted the above quote from an interesting article that details how the regime in Beijing controls economic data coming out of the Middle Kingdom, which helps to prompt foreign investors to keep funding the great confidence trick that is the modern Chinese economy.
The family connections of China’s super-rich and captains of industry must be considered alongside rosy economic statistics provided that expound China’s development. These filial links between the commanding heights of China’s supposedly private sector and its government betray the fact that China Inc. is the unholy alliance of a dictatorial regime and the application of corrupted ‘free’ market ideals. Such an arrangement will fail in due course, and will probably fail spectacularly since it has come this far.
I would like to draw your attention to what’s happened to The Times’s Law section in the noughties. Once upon a time this was a lively mini-newspaper on a Tuesday, aimed at lawyers, with two or three substantial comment pieces, news, Law Reports and lots of job ads. Now it is a single sheet of newsprint, and found buried inside a growing section entitled Public Agenda.
From an advertisement in last week’s Economist:
Devolution Trust for Community Empowerment (DTCE), a Pakistan based non-governmental organisation funded by a consortium of donors through UNDP, is plannning to undertake a social audit in 110 districts across the country compatible with baseline social audit established in 2001/02 and first annual follow-up application undertaken in 2004/05. The objective of the exercise is to obtain policy feedback on citizens’ views and experience in relation to key public services sectors like health, education, water and sanitation, police, access to justice and engagement in local governance arrangements. The study design should consider the comparison overtime [sic] with the baseline and follow-up applicaions in citizens’ views, use and experience of public services under the devolved local government system in Pakistan with a strong element of institutionalization of the social audit process.
Meanwhile, working the other way round, a flyer reaches me from De Havilland information services [no relation] for a conference on “Embedding the Third Sector in Public Services”:
Third Sector public service delivery is a new, effective and exciting avenue to further revolutionise and modernise service provision as we know it. However, this is no longer an innovation, it is a reality and public money already funds multiple public services through third sector organisations. It is acknowledged that the opportunities, expertise and fresh, grass-roots approach the third sector brings will bring improvement and better value to public services.
Major efforts to reinforce this through building an infrastructure and action planning to rationalize and embed this are underway in te Third Sector Review, recently conducted by the Office of the Third Sector. The final report is due in March [and?] will culminate in summarising the sector’s contribution and propose how this will work in a better, stronger, more resilient infrastructure.
[all sic]
The Office of the Third Sector is very pleased with what has happened to the role of charities, and will be colonising more of British civil society presently..
“Metaphors furnish clues to transformation, but they are not the powers that resist or engender such new realities,” a literary theorist once wrote.
For some reason, my home turf of East Anglia will not stay off the news
For sale: the world’s smallest country with its own flag, stamps, currency and passports.
Apply to Prince Michael of Sealand if you want to run your own storm-tossed nation – even if it is just a wartime fort perched on two concrete towers in the North Sea.
Built in World War Two as an anti-aircraft base against German bombers, the derelict platform was taken over 40 years ago by retired army major Paddy Roy Bates who went to live there with his family.
Sealand, which is based off Felixstowe, one of Europe’s largest container ports, has in its time been raided by the authorities, who have been at their wits’ end to know what to do about the feisty Bates family. The place has even featured as an inspiration for people trying to harness encryption to make new forms of offshore banking possible, although I suspect that after 9/11, it will become impossible for a place like this to carry out totally private banking operations without countries such as Britain taking fairly robust action.
Even so, in his way, Bates has been a bit of a hero. He has established one of the longest-running ‘private nations’ on the planet in recent history. I wish him and his family the best.
This website is worth a read for material about offshore communities. And of course do not forget the Free State Project.
Every day or two I visit The Croydonian, and today The Croydonian links to an amazing report. Papua New Guinea is having a row with Australia, about an Australian evildoer who escape in a Papua New Guinea airplane, and Papua New Guinea is now threatening a range of nasty things against Australia, of which this, apparently, is the most nasty:
The most serious step being contemplated is the suspension of significant elements of Australian aid deemed not essential to PNG, the Herald understands.
Yes, you did read that right. Papua New Guinea is threatening to cut off aid, from Australia to Papua New Guinea! Imagine the consternation that must now be sweeping through the Australian aiding classes. They do not want us to help them any more! Worse: Perhaps they do not think we were helping.
Is this an idea whose time has come?
Having given up trying to stay PM and handed over the kulturcampf to Mr Brown, St Anthony now wishes to save the world:
In his strongest warning yet on the environment, the prime minister will tell fellow EU leaders that the world faces “conflict and insecurity” unless it acts now. “We have a window of only 10-15 years to take the steps we need to avoid crossing catastrophic tipping points,” Mr Blair says, in a joint letter with his Dutch counterpart, Jan Peter Balkenende.
I am not interested for this purpose in whether he is right about ‘catastrophic tipping points’. It is entirely possible he is. It is interesting that this is certainly not from his own knowledge. And since actually no one knows enough about climate to say under what conditions, never mind when, a catastrophe, bifurcation, flip, transition… whatever you would like to call it… might occur, then the fact the firm limit of years is reported as as little as 7 in some places, and up to 25 elsewhere, should not worry us.
What should, is the contradiction between the millenarian rhetoric and the irrelevance in its own terms of the hair-shirt policy that we are being exhorted to adopt. If the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause catastrophe at some threshold level, then capping emissions from human activity merely postpones reaching the threshold. By not very much.
If things are that bad either: (1) We should find ways yet unknown to make global human greenhouse-gas emissions close to zero or net negative. (Sorry, no cooked food – except sun-baked and geyser-boiled – until we do.) Or (2) we should enjoy the party at the end of the world. But it seems those in charge do not know the difference between quantity and rate.
Now that is really scary. Reality I can cope with. I am aware I’m going to die, and probably suffer disease and loss first. That the course of my life will be determined not by biology, physics and economics, but by messianic imbeciles with no grasp of any of them, is harder to bear.
For me; the non-exclusive or: technofix plus fun.
For the Head Boy; “Repent, o ye sinners or burn in hell on earth! Go, and sin no more. (Than you did in 1990).”
Work sent me to the Conservative Party conference in last week. It was dull. But I saw the Globalisation Institute had a fringe event so I went along and they gave us all some wine. They had Mark Malloch Brown, the UN’s Deputy Secretary-General, give a speech in which he said this:
After all our efforts at reform, Kofi and I felt let down, if not betrayed, by the UN Human Rights Council’s biased and unbalanced approach to the Lebanon conflict. They focussed solely on Israeli actions, while ignoring the atrocities committed by Hizbollah.
That certainly woke me up. It is comforting to hear someone from the UN be so honest. Perhaps next we will find that he is an avid reader of the website UNisEvil.com. Somehow I think it unlikely.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s national current affairs flagship, the 7.30 Report, ran an interesting piece on Peak Oil theory, which was surprisingly contrarian considering the ABC’s traditional biases (think BBC protégé). The most common manifestation of Peak Oil theory – a belief that at some point soon oil production will peak and then decline, causing spiralling oil prices and a world of chaos – has long been a favourite of environmentalists, leftists and the perpetually gloomy. However, of late Peak Oil’s slip is showing to such an extent that even an organisation like the ABC cannot deny it is distinctly iffy. I would go further; it’s demonstrably false. Mark Nolan, ExxonMobil Australia’s Chief Executive controversially stated earlier this week that
According to the US Geological Survey, the earth currently has more than three trillion barrels of conventional recoverable oil resources. So far, we have produced one trillion of that.
When an oil company representative talks like that, one tends to believe him – oil companies have a natural interest in maintaining a perception of scarcity to maintain upward pressure on the price of crude.
And he’s referring to known oil reserves. Thanks to woeful underinvestment in exploration by – and equally woeful management of – many of the world’s true oil majors, the state owned National Oil Companies (subscriber-only article, sorry), we may have knowledge of just the tip of the iceberg.
Considering the pace of development of alternative energy sources, the famous quote from former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani that “the Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.” is looking more prophetic than ever. Peak Oil chaos? Stuff and nonsense.
Decidedly. This is one of those sentences, from one of those articles, that you read again and again in the hope that it might bear some reasonable meaning on closer inspection. No-one could really think that, could they? Today’s prize for greatest misplaced faith in the state goes to The Guardian’s Hywel Williams:
Middle Eastern tribalism, just like the African variety, is the direct result of colonial interference which frustrated the indigenous development of state-building.
For Mr Williams, the state is by definition good… but only when it is doing what he wants, promoting what he believes is social progress. The state is only the state for him when it is a mid-20th-century north European welfare auction. Otherwise it is a reversion to some more primitive social form, not a real state. If becomes an instrument for evil, then that is because it is not a proper state; someone must have interfered with it.
Nasty states that express tribalism are not in the ‘Western tradition’, but they are caused by colonialism in the Middle East and Africa, while Putin’s Russia on the other hand looks “to its Slavic roots”, and while Bush’s America is (apparently) a tribalism of politicised evangelicalism.
It is perplexing how ‘tribalism’ will stretch to cover everything Mr Willams does not like, but still he purports to think that local states for local people are a good thing (if permitting the English self-government is going too far, tantamount to endorsing apartheid). “Modern democratic states” are what he wants. But to be acceptable they should all be alike in this, in that, and in the other respect. His way of government is best. How is that different from imperial interference?
I am still unconvinced of the isolationist argument vis Iraq that would have had Western militaries – and probably as a result civilians – quit the entire Middle East, and leave Saddam to wreak havoc as he has before, but my goodness, the case for non-interventionist foreign policy has never looked so good at the moment as the insurgency in Iraq gets worse. Jim Henley sums up the “do as little as possible” school of libertarian foreign policy as well as anyone:
If a war is worth years of struggle, billions squandered and thousands or tens of thousands of dead on both sides, why isn’t peaceful change worth as much? Why is it a “bold initiative” to announce a “generational struggle” to transform a region of the world through a war that might or might not achieve its ends, but preemptively absurd to launch a generational struggle to transform the same region through nonintervention, to instill liberalism and justice by exemplifying it? Because people might get killed? People get killed the other way. Because it might not work? Look around you. The other way isn’t working now.
My main problem with Jim’s argument is that setting an example to the dictatorships, thugocracies etc of that region would strike me as a fairly drawn-out, if not rank impossible, endeavour (that’s putting it politely, ed). We are talking about a process that might last thousands of years. And I am afraid that in the meantime, the various despots in that region might not quite get with the Enlightenment programme and develop a continued fondness for blowing infidels up. At best, I would say that such folk might, even at their craziest, be deterrable, which is why I think the libertarian world-view – if I can presume to call it that – should focus on deterrence, and forswear the temptations of what folk called pre-emptive action. But again – and Jim and others have to answer this question – does observing the niceties of national sovereignty always trump other considerations? For me, one of the clearest-cut examples of justified and smart pre-emption was the Israeli airforce’s bombing of the Iraqi nuclear facilties in the early 1980s. No doubt some libertarian “leave-well-alone” foreign policy commenters fulminated about that event at the time, in a way that may have echoes now in what is being written about Israel’s actions in Lebanon (see the posts below).
What to do?
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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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