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 always knew that something like this would happen, sooner or later, justified by sentiments like this, which are not that different my own. Basically the guy drove his airplane into a tax office, causing his own death in a fireball, and much other damage besides.
This event may mean angst for libertarians like me. So, Mr Libertarian, Do you believe that such acts of violence are justified? Question mark, question mark. And we will prevaricate, like moderate Muslims being challenged to explain Muslim-inspired terrorism. I will, anyway, if asked. No, but. Or perhaps in some cases: yes, but. Personally, I don’t see how you can have tax gathering on the scale that prevails nowadays, and for purposes that prevail nowadays, without violent responses of this sort. Frivolous and somewhat incongruous thought, of the sort that pops into the head at such times: will gadgets like this hexakopter make such attacks easier?
I remember how President Clinton’s political fortunes took a turn for the better following that bomb attack by Timothy McVeigh. He went from looking like a probable one-termer to a two-termer, pretty much from that moment on, because it perfectly illustrated what loons his supporters thought his opponents were. Will something similar now happen for Obama? His supporters will surely have no problem explaining what they think about this, which is all part of the case against such attacks. How will the Tea Party movement be affected?
Further thought, the body count, including the man himself, seems to be low. Maybe, logically, that ought to make little difference, but low body counts are much sooner forgotten. Another thought: the pictures of this are dramatic. Not so soon fogotten, perhaps.
More here, and here.
Obsessed as I now am with Climategate, I first learned about this drama here.
“The Pope? How many divisions has he got?” Joseph Stalin is reported to have said dismissively. And we all know how that turned out.
Ron Paul, the “Dr No” of US politics for his habit of being the only member of the House of Representatives to vote against some measure to increase federal government spending, debt or power, could witness the repeat of such a peaceful realignment.
Tim Evans, writing on the Cobden Centre’s blog, has found that a Google search for “Ron Paul” will find over 28.8 million entries, whereas one for “Karl Marx” will generate a mere 6.26 million. As he concludes: “it is true that these things take a long time to play through, but as a sociologist I am excited by the long-term cultural, political and economic impact of these sorts of numbers” for the cause of a free world.
Presumably, a rise in online interest about Ron Paul, relative to Karl Marx, should translate into tangible results at some point. The election of Scott Brown the Republican challenger in the recent Massachusetts special election to replace Senator Edward Kennedy, was also preceded by a similar gap between the Google ratings of the various political parties’ candidates.
The battle over Google and Bing search engines
Google – Scott Brown has been mentioned 53,200,000 times on Google, while Martha Coakley has been mentioned 50,600 times on Google, the appointed Senator Paul Kirk has more mentions than the current Democrat candidate for that seat!
Bing – Scott Brown has been mentioned 52,800,000 times on Bing, while Martha Coakley has been mentioned 219,000 times on Bing…
It seems that Congressman Paul could put together more divisions than the cause of Marxism. Seems like a cheerful note to end the week.
I see that today’s Samizdata quote of the day spot for today has already been taken. By me, but taken. Had it not been, I might instead have offered this:
The main argument now, increasingly, is between those who view the state as an enabler and those who view it as, at best, a sometimes necessary irritant. To employ a massively oversimplified analogy, statists seem to think that the state should act as captain, coach, physio, kitman, ballboy, PR department, groundsman, ticketing department, FIFA representative, the guy with the half time oranges, agent, translator, WAG, turnstile operator, matchday police, the guy selling the big flags outside the ground and the guy confiscating the big flags on the way into the ground. Libertarians just want a guy with a fucking whistle.
As I often have (or at any rate want) to remind people when I shove up an SQOTD, the fact that I think whatever it is to be a snappy bit of prose doesn’t necessarily mean that I completely agree with it, even as I usually reckon it to have its heart in the right place.
A complaint about the above quote, for instance, is that it omits to mention the most obviously foolish of all state activities, which is that states now routinely insist on striding onto the pitch and trying to play, like that embarrassing games teacher played by Brian Glover in the movie Kes, even as (like Brian Glover) they continue to be the ref.
I recently heard President Obama say on my television that the job of President is (I quote from memory as best I can) “making decisions and helping people”. President Obama thinks that he should be both the referee and a player, in other words. And since he cannot possibly help everyone in the USA, he ends up playing for one side (helping only some people) against the other side (at other people’s expense), and his refereeing gets bent out of shape to reflect his competitive preferences.
Presidents shouldn’t be helping. They should be maintaining and defending the circumstances within which people can help themselves.
I am slightly wary of trying to rank the freedoms of different countries according to some sort of benchmark, but these things can sometimes have their uses, if only in conveying movement from good to bad and vice versa. This index of freedom, provided by the US-based Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal, shows that the US has definitely gone backwards in recent years. There will obviously be finger-pointing at Mr Obama and his Democrat allies, but the Republicans under Bush & co bear some of the blame for this state of affairs, also.
As for the position of Britain, I hardly need to read the link to realise that freedoms are declining.
In Scott Brown we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against woman.
– Keith Olbermann, MSNBC host.
To which Mark Steyn responded, under the heading “Homophobic Nude Teabaggers on the March”:
That’s certainly why I’m supporting him. But who knew there were so many of us?
Talking of conviction parties, as I was the other day, how about this shamelessly populist rant, from the leader of the LPUK. Its basic message is very simple:
Join us.
Alas, whenever I hear that phrase I tend to be reminded of a big ugly guy in a hat, beckoning, with a machine gun, to Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon to come over and become bit part players (i.e. corpses) in a gangland massacre that the two soon-to-be cross-dressers have just made the mistake of witnessing. Luckily, the machine gun guys get distracted by the arrival of some cops, or Some Like It Hot would not have been much of a movie.
Mr Devil’s Kitchen didn’t mean it that way. I wish him and his party the best of luck. They will need it. Times have changed since I wrote this, and as I said in my posting yesterday the internet has changed the rules for small political parties hugely. I now think that however difficult and dangerous a British Libertarian political party may prove to be, it simply has to happen. Certainly lots of others think it has to, to the point of joining it in quite promising numbers, and who am I to try to stop them? But many of the warnings in that Libertarian Alliance piece from over a decade ago do still apply.
I wonder how many candidates the LPUK will manage to field in the next general election? The willingness to be (electorally speaking) massacred is unfortunately a job requirement, but as I said in my earlier bit about UKIP, the silly parties might actually soon start doing a bit better, what with the big three parties being so widely despised, and now that the silly parties no longer depend on mainstream media coverage to be noticed at all.
I consider it interesting that UKIP and LPUK have both recently followed the Conservatives in choosing a couple of Old Etonians to be their leaders. Coincidence? Probably, but Etonians have always been good at smelling power. Two further straws in the wind to suggest that the age of the silly parties may now be with us?
So how is Zimbabwe doing these days? According to this article, linked to yesterday by Patrick Crozier, things are actually improving. Patrick quotes this bit:
Price controls and foreign exchange regulations have been abandoned. Zimbabwe literally joined the real world at the stroke of a pen. Money now flows in and out of the country without restriction. Super market shelves, bare in January, are now bursting with products.
While reading this article, I could not shake the feeling that I was really reading a piece of libertarian science fiction. Could they really have done anything so very sensible, and could things really be improving so definitely? The piece does appear to be genuine, so far as I can tell, but if it turns out to be fantasy-fiction, this paragraph will get me off the credulity hook. File under maybe true but maybe too good to be true.
Meanwhile, if the piece really is true, the best bit of all in it is that there is now no “lender of last resort” in Zimbabwe. Could it be that libertarian economic policy – in particular libertarian banking policy – is about to get a serious test, which it will pass, and hence another serious showcase, highly pertinent given the world’s current banking woes, to educate the world with? How will socialism and state-centralism get the credit for that I wonder?
If genuine, this piece reminds me of a vivid British recollection from way back. Someone on the telly asked a City commentator, just after Black Wednesday (the day in 1992 when John Major’s economic policies collapsed in ruins), what the prospects were now for the British economy. Well, he said, now that the government has not got a policy, rather good.
Snapped by me a fortnight ago, at the LA/LI Annual Conference at which Anthony Evans was the final speaker. I’ve straightened and sharpened it as best I could. A copyable, pastable and more readable version of the text from which this is taken may be read here. More photos of the speaker taken that same day can be viewed here.
UPDATE: Anthony Evans website, articles, blog.
Researchers are claiming that there is a link between individualism and depression. Some may take offence to this notion but it does not surprise me at all. That said, I am far too cynical to automatically assume that the ‘researchers’ are not grinding some ideological axe, but nevertheless I find the basic idea quite believable.
Frankly collectivism is a form of mass delusion, an ‘opiate for the masses’ method of replacing profane objective truth with sacred, subjective ‘acceptable’ truth… i.e. ‘truth’ is what the collective wants it to be. Indeed I would say much of the allure of collectivism is relief from the weight of individual responsibility, the sense of moral externalisation that comes from outsourcing choice to a ‘higher power’.
Individualism on the other hand is a more lonely path without a nebulous ‘them’ to absolve you from consequences and that can be stressful. And so it comes as no surprise to me that some collectivist societies may be less anxious (at least for those who actually buy into the collectivist meta-contextual assumptions) because collectivism depends on a view of the world that filters reality through the comforting, blame deflecting, wilfully ignorant lens of what is politically tolerable… and ignorance is bliss.
Collectivists… happier apparently
There is swear-blogging, and then there is this:
Emily Thornberry MP: a very stupid and thoroughly unpleasant person who should be severely punched in the cunt, and then thrown into the sea.
That’s way too far over the top of the top for me. Maybe I’m getting old. It’s in a posting in response to a posting here by Johnathan Pearce on Saturday, about how giving women rights at work will make them more expensive to employ and consequently cause women to be employed less.
I’m genuinely in two minds about this swear-blogging thing. (See also this blog.) On the one hand, as with the passage quoted above, I think it can be horribly offensive by almost any standard and liable to make a lot of people think badly of something I value, namely the libertarian movement. (If you look under affiliations, you see that DK is affiliated to the Libertarian Party.) I can foresee a time when such passages as the above will be quoted in evidence against us all. If anyone points out that “they” (i.e. us libbos) were writing things like that, and none of “them” complained, well, I did. And if this posting alerts enemies of the libertarian movement otherwise unalerted and it all blows up in our faces, then the sooner the better, I say. Get the argument about swear-blogging over with.
On the other hand, this kind of language does at least communicate just how angry people get about the plundering and bossiness of politicians. If you are similarly angry, read on, Devil’s Kitchen is for you. You are not alone. It libertarianism was only written calmly and dispassionately, something important would be lost.
One thing I do know is that if Devil’s Kitchen was nothing but the above offensiveness, I wouldn’t give a … flip … about him. It is because he writes good stuff about important topics, in among the effing and blinding and sometimes worse, that I now ruminate upon the wisdom or lack of it of how he writes. Whatever I end up thinking about this, I am not now recommending and never will recommend that what I might consider to be excessively sweary swear-blogging should be illegal, to read or to write.
An unusual little back page story…
When they forced their way into Miss Kausar’s home, her father Noor Mohammad refused their demands and was attacked. His daughter was hiding under a bed when she heard him crying as the gunmen thrashed him with sticks. According to police, she ran towards her father’s attacker and struck him with an axe. As he collapsed, she snatched his AK47 and shot him dead. She also shot and wounded another militant as he made his escape.
Sweet. The world needs more people like Rukhsana Kausar.
And an addition ‘bravo’ to all the people across the globe to held up the Mighty Forks and protested the obscene ‘celebrations’ of the sixtieth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party taking power.
Fight the power.
Sometimes when problems need to be worked out, the people trying to work it out keep trying to whack the problem over the head with the very thing that caused the problem in the first place.
Gay marriage… or even gay ‘marriage’ if you prefer… is one such issue. Some argue that if the state recognises heterosexual marriages, then it offends against natural justice for the state to discriminate against homosexual marriages (or ‘marriages’/unions whatever). And of course the people who say that are right.
This naturally does not appeal to people who oppose the ‘morality’ of homosexuality or just feel gay marriage, or gay anything really, is ‘yucky’ and thus dislike the idea of the state they support with their tax money adding its imprimatur, at their expense, to something they find repugnant. And of course the people who say that are right.
So the obvious solution lies in the root of the problem… the state actually has no compelling need being in the marriage business at all as marriage is just a contractually relationship between two people that requires no involvement of the state at all. Stop the state rubber-stamping any kind of marriage and the problem goes away.
And likewise an issue of separation of church and state in the USA…
It would be easy to miss among the yucca and Joshua trees of this vast place – a small plywood box, set back from a gentle curve in a lonesome desert road. It looks like nothing so much as a miniature billboard without a message.
But inside the box is a 6 1/2 -foot white cross, built to honor the war dead of World War I. And because its perch on a prominent outcropping of rock is on federal land, it has been judged to be an unconstitutional display of government favoritism of one religion over another.
OMG!…hmmm… bad choice of exclamation… a religious symbol on state land! The state has no business allowing displays for this or that religious faction showing their symbolic whatnots on state land! And that is indeed right.
But others say that if this is also a object of real historical significance commemorating the dead of the First World War, then it would be Taliban-style barbarism to simply destroy it or even rip it from its historical context! And that is indeed right.
So… stop it being state land. Make the land the private property of someone who will safeguard this object of historical interest. The problem is not the cross, it is that this land does not actually have any business being ‘state land’ at all.
There are some problems that simply getting the state out of the picture will not solve. However for the other 90% of things…
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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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