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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Too old. Too gay. Too rich. Too weird. These are some of the objections raised to Elton John and David Furnish adopting a son born of a surrogate mother.
Is this a good thing? I have no idea. Ask me, or better yet, ask young Zachary in 2028. (Until then, leave him alone.) Should it be allowed? I think so. Even on the most harsh interpretation possible of Mr John and Mr Furnish’s probable ability to give the boy a good start in life, there is no denying that billions of children are born to a worse one.
That was the peg. This is the coat. A great big dirty overcoat that will not hang up neatly and drips over the floor: what objections ought to be enough for the state to forbid people to adopt?
Everyone has heard stories of how social workers seem to actively enjoy seeing would-be parents contort themselves to fit through ever-tinier hoops of social worker righteousness. So you’re a smoker? Shake of the head. I see you are fat. Tut tut, going to have to lose a few pounds, aren’t we? What’s this – you are a Christian who disapproves of homosexuality? I am afraid… oh, you are a Muslim. That’s OK, then.
I read an account by one couple who said that the sight of a four-pack of beer bottles among their shopping on the table was enough to make their inspecting social worker devote a whole paragraph to their incipient alcoholism in her report. I heard of another who deduced from a couple’s dog being overweight that they had a dysfunctional attitude to food. What fun, to be your own Sherlock Holmes and have the consequences your deductions played out in human lives. These are the powers they would gladly take over all parents. Be warned.
Most here will be as angered as I am by the thought of children remaining in council care, becoming more harmed and mentally stunted by it with every month that goes by if the eventual fates of children who grow up in care are anything to go by, while people who would have loved to give them a good if not perfect home are turned away.
But can we dispense with the State altogether?
Without the social workers, how are you going to stop paedophiles, cultists, Fagins, and would-be owners of slaves from adopting children?
Instapundit quotes an emailer (Ed Stephens), on the subject of the TSA and its intrusive gropings at airports:
Remember how not long ago the President was so upset about the possibility of people being stopped and asked for “their papers” while going to get ice cream? It was the height of living in a police state. Yet we’ve not heard a peep out of him while TSA goons grope the general public (including nuns and little kids) on the way to grandma’s house.
If we are expected to put up with this, asking to see “your papers” suddenly seems a less onerous request.
Which was perhaps always the idea? Getting libertarians to beg to have to show only their papers. How perfectly statist is that?
This is how you get what you want in this world, whether you are trying to expand the powers of the state or to chip away at them. Demand something that is, to your enemies, totally outrageous. Then, with a great show of reluctance, settle for something only moderately outrageous. Repeat indefinitely. Sadly, for the time being, the expanders of the state are more numerous and more powerful than us chippers-away.
The secret of chipping away successfully is to continue to discuss the dynamiting of the whole damn mountain. How might that be contrived? How nice would that be? Then settle for dynamiting only half of it …
Remember Paul Chambers?
Twitter joke trial: Paul Chambers loses appeal against conviction
The man convicted of “menace” for threatening to blow up an airport in a Twitter joke has lost his appeal.
Paul Chambers, a 27-year-old accountant whose online courtship with another user of the microblogging site led to the “foolish prank”, had hoped that a crown court would dismiss his conviction and £1,000 fine without a full hearing.
But Judge Jacqueline Davies instead handed down a devastating finding at Doncaster which dismissed Chambers’s appeal on every count. After reading out his comment from the site – “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” – she found that it contained menace and Chambers must have known that it might be taken seriously.
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As for the tweet at the centre of the case, she called it “menacing in its content and obviously so. It could not be more clear. Any ordinary person reading this would see it in that way and be alarmed.”
Has Judge Jacqueline Davies ever met an ordinary person other than in the courtroom? They have usually got over wetting the bed coz he said scawy fings mummy by the age of three.
This particular form of infantile behaviour is everywhere. There is a second example reported in the papers just today.
Tory councillor arrested over Alibhai-Brown ‘stoning’ tweet
Police in Birmingham today arrested a Conservative city councillor who sent a Twitter message saying that the newspaper columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown should be stoned to death.
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The message – now apparently deleted – said: “Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing, really.”
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Alibhai-Brown, who writes columns for the Independent and the London Evening Standard, said last night she regarded his comments as incitement to murder. She told the Guardian: “It’s really upsetting. My teenage daughter is really upset too. It’s really scared us.”
You’ve brought her up to be as big a baby as you are, then.
“You just don’t do this. I have a lot of threats on my life. It’s incitement. I’m going to the police – I want them to know that a law’s been broken.”
She added that she regarded Compton’s remarks as racially motivated because he mentioned stoning.
“If I as a Muslim woman had tweeted that it would be a blessing if Gareth Compton was stoned to death I’d be arrested immediately. I don’t think the nasty Tories went away.”
Waaaah! Make the nasty Tories go away! Hard to believe this is a woman in her sixties talking. The childishness she displays is pitiable, if genuine. However I rather think that along with the hiding-under-the-blankets stuff she is displaying another form of childishness – that of flouncing around in a strop and demonstrating semi-voluntary control of the tear glands.
Many pixels have given their life on this site in discussions about how supporters of constitutionally limited government must ‘compromise’ to achieve their goals. Such people urging compromise are usually ‘sensible conservatives’ but see us wild eyed ‘libertarian’ types as potentially useful ‘fellow travellers’ if only we would learn to be more pragmatic.
And my view is usually to find out if the person telling me to compromise supported Bush or McCain, if American or Cameron if a Brit. And if they did, I try to discover if they are having serious buyers remorse… and if not, I tag them not as a ‘fellow traveller’ but as a political enemy to be opposed at every level.
But as in the USA there is at least a viable opposition movement to the Leviathan State whereas in the UK the now out-of-office Demonic Party and the ruling Stupid Party/Stupider Party coalition agree on all the Important Roles of the State, I will confine my remarks to America-centric ones because the vast majority of folks in the UK seem to rather enjoy the whole ‘circling the drain’ sensation and after all, the NHS is ‘the envy of the world’.
It seems clear that the best chance for ‘small staters’ (which means small-L libertarians, classical liberals and genuine conservatives) in America is taking over the Republican Party and that is exactly what the Tea Party is all about.
However the self identified libertarians, classical liberals and genuine conservatives within the Republican Party over the last 15 years have not been the solution to anything, indeed they have been the root of the problem…
…why?
Because in thinking that they must compromise on even the fundamental core principle of constitutionally limited government, large numbers of ostensibly pro-liberty people have voted for and abetted Big State Republicans like George “I started the bailout” Bush and John “I support the bailout” McCain. If you can ‘compromise’ to that extent, you are either lying about being in favour of limited government or you have no conception of what the word ‘limited’ means. ‘Limited’ does not mean “vast-but-growing-less-than-the-other-guy”.
It is the very fact so many people who want a smaller state refused to ever say “THIS IS A DEAL BREAKER“… and really mean it… but rather kept endlessly holding their nose and voting for The Lesser Evil that made it possible for the state to keep growing remorselessly under Republican governments.
But the Cold War in over, we won, so Reagan’s excuse no longer applies.
I have nothing against compromise with fellow travellers and usually see little value in obsessive purity tests, but the key here is compromise with fellow travellers (such as libertarians compromising with conservatives and visa versa), but what has happened over and over and over again is endless ‘compromise’ with people whose objectives are in fact antithetical.
So in short, what oh so many ‘small staters’ have been calling ‘compromise’ when they hold their nose and vote for a Big State politician just because he is running as a Republican, is not “compromise” at all… it is surrender.
What possible reason did the likes of Bush or McCain have to accommodate the views of ‘small staters’ when they knew they would vote for them regardless of how much they grew the state? No reason at all. None.
You want to know the problem? Look in the mirror and the problem will look back at you. That was the realisation that spawned the Tea Party and I was calling for that before the Tea Party even existed.
Liberty is not a pick and mix free-for-all in which you think government should ban the things you don’t like and encourage you things you do like: that’s how Libtards think. Libertarianism – and the Tea Party is nothing if its principles are not, at root, libertarian ones – is about recognising that having to put up with behaviour you don’t necessarily (approve) of is a far lesser evil than having the government messily and expensively intervene to regulate it.
– James Delingpole, with his obvious typo corrected.
Great essay by Sean Gabb on the UK government and supposed plans to reduce public spending. The article contains a lovely line in relation to Peter Mandelson, the disgraced former Cabinet minister.
Along with Sean and others, I will be at the two-day Libertarian Alliance annual conference tomorrow, held at that ancestral seat of 19th Century liberal politics, the National Liberal Club.
More up-to-the-second analysis from the fourth estate:
Dennis, a wealthy businessman and investor who says he’s been a Republican for more than 25 years, has a strong libertarian streak and supported Rep. Ron Paul in the 2008 presidential race. But ask him how he would have voted on the most important bills that came before the House in the last two years and you’ll get a pretty Republican answer. Obamacare? He would have voted against it. Stimulus? Against. Auto bailouts? Against. Cap and trade? Against. Wall Street reform? Against. He also favors making all the Bush tax cuts permanent.
Byron York apparently does not understand Libertarianism.
(H/t: Drudge)
Errrr… I have news for you, Cato Institute… Barack Obama was lying.
He never had the slightest intention of going about eliminating Federal government schemes or aspects of such schemes, in the hopes of reducing the overall burden of government.
On the contrary his entire political life has been spent trying to increase the size and scope of government – and to do so in the most corrupt ways possible. Only someone who knew nothing about Barack Obama’s time in politics would be surprised by the hundreds of pages of detailed corrupt wasteful schemes in the “Stimulus” Act, and in the Obama Care Act – and in every other Act he has had passed (the details of which written by such old comrades of his as Jeff Jones – a man who repents of his Communist terrorism as much as Bill Ayers does, i.e. not at all).
Let us say I am wrong – and that Barack Obama is not trying to destroy America and the West in general on purpose (as part of the Cloward and Piven doctrines of spend America to the destruction of “capitalism” that he was taught at all those Marxist conferences he went to whilst a post grad at Columbia)…
…Even if the question of motivation is put on one side, the facts of his record both in the Chicago Machine, and at State level, and then in the United States Senate, where he managed to be even more corrupt and wild spending than Christopher Dodd (one of the two main supporters of the ultra vile “Financial Reform Act” that Obama has just had passed – the other being a creature called Barney Frank), something that might be thought to be pretty much impossible… well, it seems pretty damn obvious what to expect from President Obama.
“But they always knew that Paul”.
No, “with all due respect” the Cato Institute (like Reason magazine) contains some people, not all – but some, who really believed Barack Obama in 2008 – people who never bothered to do the slightest research into the record of Barack Obama – and were abusive (very abusive) to anyone who tried to point out their errors. → Continue reading: I see no reason to give a free pass to the Cato Institute
Watching the re-make of Battlestar Galactica I came across a thought-experiment in practical ethics that seems to me far more interesting than the rather trite runaway-train examples I knew from university ethics classes.
The situation for the thought-experiment is this:
The last remnants of the human race are fleeing their robotic exterminators. Owing to what the (human) military commander perceives as a poor tactical decision, the lawfully-elected civilian President has been incarcerated and martial law has been declared. With the support of civilian and enlisted sympathisers, the President has escaped immediate custody and is on the point of disappearing into hiding amongst the populace, supposedly accompanied by her immediate staff and a few abettors amongst the military.
Up until this point, by the nature of television drama, the focus has been on the President herself and senior military officers, both sympathetic and antagonistic. At the last moment, however, it is made clear that even flunkies and acting extras have an independent moral choice, when the President’s principal aide unexpectedly reveals his personal moral dilemma.
“Madam President. I understand what you’re trying to do…but, it’s going to divide the fleet. At the very best it’s going to create an insurgency against [the military commander]; at the worst, civil war. Taking part in that is a line that I will not cross.”
This strikes me as troubling, but far from unrealistic. I am genuinely unsure what is the morally correct action here.
For the sake of this thought experiment, let us accept without question the idea that our protagonist fully believes the President is the rightful and best leader for the human race. Let us assume he is convinced that the best outcome, both morally and practically, would be for the military dictator to quietly step aside and reinstate the President. Let us also assume he genuinely believes that that will not happen, and that internal opposition will materially reduce the prospects of survival for the remainder of the human race.
If we left it at that, most people would agree that he had no choice but to submit to the military in the interests of the survival of our species.
However, this character is clearly thoughtful and reasonable, so let us add in another opportunity for dilemma. Let us suppose, as is strongly hinted at, albeit not explicitly stated in this drama, that although he genuinely believes all the above, he recognises the possibility that he might be wrong.
This creates a genuinely realistic and sophisticated moral dilemma. His best outcome would be for the President’s insurrection to be swiftly and painlessly successful. The worst outcome would be a protracted civil war.
Should he give precedence to his admittedly fallible assessment of the President’s chances, betray her, side with the military dictator he considers illegitimate, in order to swiftly put down the President’s opposition, in the hope of avoiding the total destruction of humanity at the cost of casting humanity into autarky for the foreseeable future?
Or in the alternative, would it be better to be true to his convictions and back the President, in the hope of preserving a free society, even though he believed that in doing so he was placing the survival of our species at greater risk, but recognised that he might be in error in this assessment? In short, the question is not the commonly poses but simplistic one of “should the moral or the pragmatic choice prevail?” but its more sophisticated child: “Given uncertainty about the future, should we cleave to moral certainty despite grave fears of the likely outcome, or betray our preferences for fear of utter calamity?”
To me, these ten seconds in Battlestar Galactica seem far more interesting than almost anything in my undergraduate ethics course. But if this seems too obscure, or too adolescent, treat this posting instead simply as a comment that there is more serious ethical debate in ten seconds of a popular commercial sci-fi drama than in a month of ‘Newsnight’ interviews.
I’ve known about the Kochs, and about their legendary wealth and about their massive support with some of it for the US libertarian movement, ever since I first became a part of the London libertarian scene in the late 1970s. (Although, I’m still not sure how they are pronounced. Cock? Coke? Kotch? (Coach?)) So the idea that their support for libertarianism is now or ever was some kind of covert operation, rather than just rich people spending their own money trying to do and spread goodness as they saw it, is, to me, utterly ridiculous. One of the Kochs even ran for vice-President, I am reminded here. Was that secret too?
Well, I guess it sort of was. What happens is that you spend two or three decades generally stamping and shouting and raising all kinds of heaven and hell, saying that every bit of sex and drugs and rock and roll and free marketeering that you can think of should be legalised, and they ignore you. Finally you start making some rather big waves, in some way that doesn’t involve them helping in any way, even by them deigning to denounce you, and they then call you “covert”. It wasn’t even that they couldn’t get you on the phone despite trying, twice. No. You couldn’t get them on the phone, ever.
Personally I think it’s a very good sign that they are now attacking libertarianism, pro-capitalism etc., by pointing out that there are these rich capitalists who are in favour of it. This tells me that they feel they are running out of actual arguments. It also tells me that they don’t think that them drawing attention to the libertarian movement, by banging on about how these evil capitalists support it like this, can draw much more attention to this movement than we are now contriving for ourselves. In short, we are now up and running as a force in the real world beyond that of mere ideological intercourse among consenting ideologists, and they know it.
…cos they mix it up with lies to make it all taste good!!!
Frequent samizdata commenter ‘Jaded Libertarian’ wants to ask a question:
After a number of years dwelling on the matter I think I have just about got what I personally believe straight. The guide I have used to get there is what I believe to be both moral and just. I am not particularly well read in this area, but have thought myself to a fairly classical liberalism – nothing that has not been said before. No man has the right to transgress another’s liberty unless he is causing physical harm to another’s person or property – that kind of thing. I now know what I believe and that is great. I never tread on another person’s autonomy if I can help it. So how do I get the rest of society to extend me the same courtesy?
Here’s where I have run up against a wall.
To effect political change that would enshrine the rights of the individual would require imposing this system on a great many people who do not want increased personal autonomy – and what is more they do not want me to have it either. It scares them. Much as I disagree with them, it is not for me to seek to impose upon them a life they do not want, even if they do not extend me the same courtesy. To do so would be most illiberal.
The only way in which some good could come of such thinking would be if someone was willing to degenerate the rights of naysayers in order to enshrine the rights of everyone else. This seems to have been what (partially) happened in the USA, and many still reap the benefits. But it would be unwise to try and repeat the process. First of all it seems morally dubious at best. Secondly, history has shown us that political revolutions almost always result in dictatorships and tyranny. America was an aberration never to be repeated.
My own thinking thus far is that knowing what I believe and how I will act is, for now, enough. Society is after all made up of individuals. If by some bizarre chance every single person resolved to respect one another’s liberty, we would find ourselves in utopia overnight. Of course that is not going to happen, but then everyone else’s motivations are none of my business and it is not for me to criticise.
I try to live by the words of Burns:
Then let your schemes alone, Adore the rising sun, And leave a man undone. To his fate
Sadly although it eases my own heart, it does not get me away from the fundamental flaw in libertarianism. I am compelled to live under collectivist tyranny, something which I would never wish upon another.
How can libertarianism ever be anything more than a nice intellectual exercise to put yourself through if it cannot be acted upon by its very nature?
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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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