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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I’ve just discovered, while reading a Guardian piece about and against censorship by Nick Cohen, that Salman Rushdie has just published an autobiographical work about what his life has been like for the last decade or so, while being subjected to the calculatedly frenzied threats of the Islamist hordes following the publication of The Satanic Verses.
I have never regretted for a single second purchasing my copy of The Satanic Verses, and I still have it. But like many others who voted thus with their wallets, I soon gave up with actually reading the thing.
Joseph Anton, on the other hand, looks like it might be quite a page turner. As a general rule I far prefer reading autobiographies by award-winning literary novelists to reading their award-winning literary novels. Whether I enjoy reading Joseph Anton or not, I won’t regret buying that either. Which I just did.
I have yet to discover why it is called Joseph Anton, but I’ll find out soon enough. And … I just did. While inserting that “page turner” link above, I found myself reading this:
Rushdie’s new memoir, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, takes its title from the name he used while in hiding – which was a combination of the first names of two of his favourite writers, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.
So there we are.
Bloody hell, I also just found out: 656 pages! That’s a lot of pages to be turning. Maybe just bits of it, eh?
A favourite occasional source of LOLs for me is the Top Tips section at Viz Magazine. This morning I found one that makes a distinction that is more than merely humorous, I think:
HOUSEWIVES. Look in the dictionary to find the difference between the words ‘need’ and ‘want’ then carefully choose the right one to use when talking about buying new dresses.
‘Need’ suggests some kind of objective truth about what is, well, needed. It can thus be used to disguise the whimsical nature of a decision, as above.
It makes very good sense, when you are discussing some project which you both agree you want, to speak of this or that contributory item or procedure being accordingly needed.
The problem is that discussing ‘need’ can be an exercise in disguising or misrepresenting the degree to which we all want something which then means we also need this particular extra, by simply not engaging in that prior discussion.
Collectivists regularly use ‘need’ to disguise what they want, and want often for very dishonourable reasons.
Perhaps I am being naïve and starry-eyed (as I often am) in believing that the kind of argument which makes clear what I – and I hope you also? – want, as well as what that project will consequently need, is the one that will triumph in the long run, because the logic of what I am saying may be needed, to get what I want and think you should want also, is presented with greater honesty and completeness.
Let us salute the heroic secret agent at the Guardian who subverted this quietly sinister article by giving it a brazenly sinister title and undid most of its power to persuade at a stroke: Don’t give climate change heretics an easy ride.
Fun as it is to play Galileo, the author, an Oxford academic called Jay Griffiths, is not calling for the Holy Office to resume work against climate “deniers”. Oh no, she’s far too nice and British for that sort of thing. She reveres democracy:
One more thing is required of academia: to play its role right at the heart of democracy. Being adequately informed is a democratic duty, just as the vote is a democratic right. A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy. Society needs the expertise of academics in the most important issues: climate science above all.
And
I would propose a system of certification for media articles in which there is a clear issue of social responsibility – a kitemark of quality assurance. It would be awarded by teams of academics, and be given to the article, not the journalist, recognising the facts, not the sometimes spurious credibility of being a “personality”. It would be awarded when the article is accurate, using reliable sources and peer reviewed studies. There already exists the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, which answers journalists’ questions to help them achieve accuracy. A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy.Accuracy must not only be achieved, but be seen to have been achieved.
The certification should be voluntary.
I am relieved that she saw fit to add that it should be voluntary, but even with that, there is a whiff of early Dolores Umbridge here. “A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy.” The modern tendency to make a god of democracy has its own dangers, but it is still the least worst form of government – and a democracy is not denatured by a misinformed electorate, or any other sort of wrong electorate. That’s the point of democracy, actually.
In so far as Jay Griffiths’ proposal is not merely the class interest of an academic talking, I suspect that it is another eddy in the same current of opinion that has led Michael Mann to sue Mark Steyn for libel.
Whenever someone says that “things were better/worse in my day, or back in the year Zog”, it is always good to ask for specifics. And over at the Volokh Conspiracy blog, which focuses on legal issues, they ask this:
“….–can you think of other things (along the lines of marriage and indentured servitude) where things used to be for sale (expressly or implicitly) and today they are not?”
Some of the comments are hilarious. One guy points out that you cannot pay to watch dwarf tossing any more, at least not legally. I guess not.
“In all of this, something has been forgotten: that real-life rape, unlike sex, is always a serious business. If a man is falsely accused, it has the power to wreck his life. If a woman – or indeed a man – is the victim, it can do the same thing. We certainly hear a lot about “free speech” from those who will go to the wall for their right to make light of sexual violence. But rape is the opposite of freedom: it means that the victim wasn’t free to say “no” and be heard. I’m not arguing that people should go to prison simply for saying ignorant or unfunny things about rape. Yet free speech also means you can openly deride certain comedians or directors; you can choose not to buy a DVD or go to a show; you can walk out, turn over, or heckle. On this at least, we’ve all got the freedom to decide when it’s time to stop. Maybe it’s time more of us started using it.”
Jenny McCartney, who has been distinctly unimpressed by a recent trend in making light of rape, both of the actual and alleged forms. No-one who is genuinely interested in defending liberty should do so, in my view.
My favourite MP in Britain is Steven Baker, and he has a very interesting take on the Left. His attitude is not: “Wrong answers, you idiots!” It is: “Good question!” The question being, along the lines of: “What the hell is happening?!?!”, and Steve Baker’s answer being variations on the theme of Austrianism. Government-controlled money ruining us. Sort out the money, and take the financial bad news that will come with a return to monetary sanity. Then: progress! Tim Evans has a recent piece up at the Cobden Centre blog in which he adopts exactly this approach:
While such conclusions are wrong, they are at least borne of people starting to try and articulate the right question.
The comments on this are mostly full of scorn (most especially those from Paul Marks). Maybe good question, but bad answers, is their line.
Does it accomplish anything to try to insert Austrianism into mainstream British political debate in this way, on the back of a basically Leftist campaign of anti-capitalist scorn and outrage? My sense is: in Parliament, maybe. When trying to get a hearing on the BBC, definitely. Elsewhere, maybe not. I used to think this was a great tactic. Now, I’m genuinely unsure. Is it really possible to try to hijack someone else’s spiel like this? Well, the answer is: maybe it is possible. Like I say, I am genuinely unsure. Steve Baker and his Cobden centre supporters (I am one) have done lots of media spots, in which they have taken this line. Maybe the Cobden Centre narrative just awaits another bout of British financial turmoil to take centre stage in Britain.
Meanwhile, my eye was caught by a couple of passing remarks about similar arguments in the USA, both of which suggest that a similar tactic in the USA to that adopted by Steve Baker MP, over here, may already be working well, over there.
Exhibit one is from a piece about an economic model of the forthcoming Presidential election, which is almost entirely about the relative fortunes of Dems (very bad) and Repubs (very promising). But right at the end of the report there is this:
Bicker and Berry also did not factor in third party candidates, such as Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson, who Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-affiliated polling firm, has noted could significantly diminish Obama’s chances of winning New Mexico.
Note that. Here’s a libertarian taking votes from Obama. This must be another manifestation of that new and improved two-party system that Instapundit posted about recently.
And then this morning, I was struck by this comment, on this piece, which is about some Democrat supporting interlopers at the Republican convention, one of whom is a Ron Paul supporter. The commenter (comment number 8 by “stmarks” at 9.25pm on Aug 25 – forgive the comment-standard spelling and grammar) says, in among a lot of other stuff about conservatives and liberals, this about Ron Paul supporters:
… And I am convinced 90% of these Ronnies [Ron Paul worshipers] are ex-democrats who are too ashamed to admit so, but still hates GOP with a burning passion.
I freely admit that I may be reading far too much into two tiny snippets of comment. (I am posting this here in order to find out more about that.) But, what these snippets, snippets though they are, tell me is that Austrianist arguments (such as those of the Ron Paul camp most definitely are) are making headway in the USA, and are drawing people away from pro-government and anti-capitalist answers towards anti-government and pro-capitalist answers. Democrats, at least some Democrats, are morphing into Ron Paulites.
A generation of people who regard the Republicans as most emphatically part of the problem are staying anti-Republican, and accordingly pro-Democrat if that’s the only option they are offered. But if someone comes to them, as Ron Paul supporters did during the early stages of the Occupy Movement, saying: “You are right about the problem! The banks are indeed screwed! But let us tell you who screwed them and how to unscrew them. The government screwed the banks, and the way to unscrew the banks is to get the government out of the banking business” … well, that cuts some ice. “We believe this stuff because we believe it. We are only Republicans tactically, insofar as we can push them in our direction. To join us, you do not have to be a Republican.”
Learn more about the Paulist influence on the Republicans by looking at the comments on this recent posting by me here about the Tea Party.
So maybe Steve Baker’s approach is entirely right, and I am just being impatient.
LATER: See also this on the Tea Party, and of course: this on giving libertarianism a ‘left hook’.
LATER (via Guido): In Paul they trust ….
A few days ago I stuck up a couple of postings here pertaining to the forthcoming US Presidential election, one specifically about Paul Ryan, and the other about, more generally, whether it makes sense to worry about which particular lizard is elected Lizard King. Does the fact that the wrong lizard might get in really signify?
My own opinion is that it all depends on the Tea Party, people who I want to believe to be good people with good ideas.
I would like the Tea Party to make a big and visibly decisive difference to America electing the least worst lizard to be Lizard King. That would mean that they would then really count for something. But what I would really like would be for the Tea Party then to use the clout they thus amass to subject the new Lizard King to political pressures such that, whatever his personal inclinations or past habits, the new Lizard King finds himself obliged to do Tea Party things. By which I mean run the US government less like a sting-the-suckers-for-all-they-have crime syndicate.
To put all that another way, I really want to believe that this (by David Kirby and Emily Ekins for the Cato Institute) is true:
Many people on the left still dismiss the tea party as the same old religious right, but the evidence says they are wrong. The tea party has strong libertarian roots and is a functionally libertarian influence on the Republican Party.
Compiling data from local and national polls, as well as dozens of original interviews with tea party members and leaders, we find that the tea party is united on economic issues, but split on the social issues it tends to avoid. Roughly half the tea party is socially conservative, half libertarian – or, fiscally conservative, but socially moderate to liberal.
Libertarians led the way for the tea party. Starting in early 2008 through early 2009, we find that libertarians were more than twice as “angry” with the Republican Party, more pessimistic about the economy and deficit since 2001, and more frustrated that people like them cannot affect government than were conservatives. Libertarians, including young people who supported Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign, provided much of the early energy for the tea party and spread the word through social media.
Understanding the tea party’s strong libertarian roots helps explain how the tea party movement has become a functionally libertarian influence on the Republican Party. Most tea partiers have focused on fiscal, not social, issues – cutting spending, ending bailouts, reducing debt, and reforming taxes and entitlements – rather than discussing abortion or gay marriage. Even social conservatives and evangelicals within the tea party act like libertarians.
That’s as far as I’ve so far read. There’s another fifty or more pages.
Meanwhile … I wish.
This coming Friday evening (Aug 3rd), there will be a talk, at my home, on the subject of Bitcoin, given by a German libertarian who is now visiting London named Frank Braun.
Frank Braun is an acquaintance of Detlev Schlichter. Detlev wanted London to offer Frank Braun some kind of libertarian welcome, but many of the usual libertarian welcomers are now out of the country, on holiday and fleeing the Olympics. So, I’m doing some Frank Braun welcoming. Which suits me well because I have for some time been thinking of cranking up my Brian’s Fridays, and this will be a good way to see if that really appeals. Plus, any acquaintance of Detlev Schlichter is an acquaintance of mine. Certainly, this particular talk ought to be interesting.
There is a posting up at my personal blog about the event. If you’d like to attend, and are near enough actually to do that conveniently, please email me (follow the link to see how).
Now, back to all the tidying up that I must do before Friday. That has now become urgent. Which was another reason why I said yes to Frank Braun dropping by.
“The assumption of natural rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence can be summed up by the following proposition: “first comes rights, then comes government.” According to this view: (1) the rights of individuals do not originate with any government, but preexist its formation; (2) The protection of these rights is the first duty of government; and (3) Even after government is formed, these rights provide a standard by which its performance is measured and, in extreme cases, its systemic failure to protect rights — or its systematic violation of rights — can justify its alteration or abolition; (4) At least some of these rights are so fundamental that they are “inalienable,” meaning they are so intimately connected to one’s nature as a human being that they cannot be transferred to another even if one consents to do so. This is powerful stuff.”
– Randy Barnett.
This inscription is carved onto the Memorial to those who died serving in Bomber Command during World War II.
The memorial was unveiled by the Queen just under a week ago, on June 28th. It is at Hyde Park Corner, in London, at the western end of Green Park. I photographed it this afternoon.
I found Michael Barone’s piece here (thank you Instapundit) about ideological self-sorting very thought provoking.
Barone mentions a book called The Big Sort, which says that such self-sorting within the USA is bad, because it is “tearing us apart”. The book, says Barone:
… describes how Americans since the 1970s have increasingly sorted themselves out, moving to places where almost everybody shares their cultural orientation and political preference – and the others keep quiet about theirs.
Thus professionals with a choice of where to make their livings head for the San Francisco Bay Area if they’re liberal and for the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (they really do call it that) if they’re conservative. Over the years the Bay Area becomes more liberal and the Metroplex more conservative.
Barone only concerns himself with how such self-sorting might be affecting the upcoming Presidential election, speculating that it causes liberals to live in an ideological cocoon and be bad at dealing with criticisms of their opinions. He instances the claim that Obamacare is unconstitutional, which liberals only took seriously when the Supreme Court suddenly did. Liberals had had months to prepare counter-arguments to that argument, or to rejig Obamacare so that it didn’t clash with the Constitution, but they saw no need to do either.
But there is plenty more to be said about ideological self-sorting. Might ideological self-sorting in due course become a major global tendency, with people choosing not just localities within countries, but actual countries, on ideological grounds? Is that already happening to any significant degree? If not, how likely is it that it might? And if it did start or has started, what might be its consequences?
The self-sorting Barone refers to is happening because moving within the USA is now quite easy. But time was when moving anywhere else was far harder, yet some people still did it, to particularly enticing destinations, from particularly abominable starting points. That people tried to hard to get out of the old USSR was one of the most damning and least answerable criticisms made against that horrible place.
The USA itself, all of it, is an exercise in ideological self-sorting, in the sense that most Americans are descended from people who bet the farm, metaphorically and often literally, on life in America being a better bet, even if they started out in America only with what they could carry. Americans are mostly descended from people who took a huge chance to make hugely better things happen for them. The great American exception to this is Americans descended from slaves, or from American natives. African slaves shipped to America placed no bets. They were chips in bets placed by others. Does that fact illuminate the seemingly still rather fraught relationship between black America and the rest of America? I think: yes.
But I am digressing into American history. What of the future of the world?
As a libertarian, I like the idea of ideological self-sorting, partly because it seems to me that there is a huge imbalance, in favour of minimal statism and against maximal statism, when it comes to how well each works out when practised only locally. Remember all those mental agonies suffered by Soviet communists when they started to realise that they were going to have to make do with “socialism in one country”, rather than everywhere? And remember how easy it then became to see which was better, Communism or not-Communism? Most of the world’s collectivists, although there are surely exceptions to this generalisation, are now collectivisms whose entire purpose is to deny “free riders” their free ride, anywhere on earth, thereby denying not only choice but exit. For collectivists, a world in which anti-collectivism flourishes, albeit only in some places, is anathema. They have to have it all, or their ideas won’t work, even in the limited sense of being inevitable and inescapable, and alternatives being hard to imagine because all suppressed. For most collectivists, it’s world government or nothing. But for libertarians, we only have to get a libertarian nation of some sort going, and to protect it from being completely shut down, and we’re in business.
We libertarians also have a big advantage in believing in being self-armed. Any libertarian national enclaves that emerge from the process of self-sorting that I envisage will, I believe, punch above their numerical weight, militarily speaking.
It is tempting to suppose that once ideological self-sorting gets seriously under way, if it does, it will then self-reinforce. As more people of one mind concentrate in particular places, those of other minds will have ever more reason to go elsewhere. This is the process that the author of The Big Sort dislikes, but which I favour for the world as a whole.
And then, when we all get to see which places work well and which work badly, you would at least hope that lessons would be learned. Sometimes that happens, as when many Eastern Europeans fled from Communism to America and then provided the political fuel for what America’s Communists and their useful idiots still describe as anti-Communist “hysteria”, in other words opposition to Communism and the belief that Communists ought not to infest the American government.
However, a big problem with ideological self-selection is that sometimes, having helped to wreck their original home, ideologically stupid people then move to other more successful places, but bringing their own stupid ideological opinions with them. Think of all the Muslims who now run away from overwhelmingly Islamic countries because of Islam’s despotic habits of government, only to bring those despotic tendencies with them to their new homes.
I’ve never been to the USA, but I occasionally read reports (and I seem to recall comments at this blog along these lines) that something similar happens there quite a lot, and is happening now, as “Blue” Staters run away from Blue States, but then vote for more Blue State stupidity in their new and formerly Red State homes. I trust I have the colour coding the right way round there. Personally I think this coding is wrong. How did the damn pinko taxers-and-spenders manage to get themselves coloured blue, and to colour their more enlightened and less parasitical enemies red?
So, to sum up, and hence to enable me to bring this rather unwieldy posting to a close, I think that, although it might not work out as well as I hope, I’m in favour of ideological self-sorting, and especially when it comes to self-sorting between different countries. But I’m sure I’ve missed out a lot of important things that could be said further on this topic, and I look forward to any such things that our commentariat might want to add to this.
One of the things I most admire about capitalism is its willingness to pay attention to what for many are utterly extraneous details, details that many would consider far too insignificant to be concentrating on – even morally rather degraded, but which many others have been begging for someone to sort out. In among solving world peace, imperialism, poverty, AIDS, blah blah blah.
One of the many disagreeable features of tyranny, on the other hand, is that everyone has to obsess about whatever happens to be the dominant obsession, such as world peace, imperialism, poverty, AIDS, blah blah blah. People aren’t allowed to concentrate entirely on their own thing and ignore whatever public mood has been officially decided upon. With the result that very little actually gets accomplished. Progress, which usually takes the form of a large succession of small steps, just does not happen. While everyone is shouting about world peace, imperialism, poverty, AIDS, blah blah blah, nobody is taking care of it, by doing little bits of it.
So, all hail to the team of super-geeks who may (probably a bit early to say for sure yet) have cracked (which is the opposite of the right word) the problem of tomato ketchup getting stuck in the tomato ketchup bottle.
David Thompson has details:
Because the world has been waiting for a low-friction ketchup bottle.
Indeed it has. Not all of it, mind. But, a lot of it.
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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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