Recently in Anglosphere Issues Category

The Dissident Frogman is actively maintaining and updating a blog entry with "Support Denmark" graphics in multiple languages. Translations in additional languages are forthcoming (Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Farsi, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Korean, to the best of my knowledge.)

Oh, yeah: go out and stock up on Havarti cheese... it's not only a show of support contra the recent Islamist boycotts and violence against the Danes (and random others in their neighborhood) but it's also damned fine cheese.

My friends Chris, Sean, and Tom, in London, are safe and accounted for after today's murder bombings. Chris lives near Russell Square, where I too lived a number of years ago.

Year by year, a third of the [American] labor pool emerges with a college degree. Most of these degrees are in the humanities and social sciences.

Meanwhile, China produces over 450,000 college graduates a year in science and engineering – as many scientists and engineers as the United States has, total. Then, next year, China will do it again.

Gary North

Walking past a newsstand near my office yesterday, I saw the banner headline "Tube Bosses Buy Parts on eBay". The accompanying story told us, in faintly mocking tones, how engineers working on the London Underground system have resorted to using the online auction firm because the parts they need are so old that they cannot get the pieces they need from regular stock.

Now it may at first appear a terrible thing that our metro systems are so old that the folk running them have to resort to an online auction set up by those vulgar American geeks from their Silicon Valley offices to get the stuff they need. But (drums roll!) I have a certain admiration for the Tube staff who had the entrepreneurial savvy to make use of the amazingly successful eBay platform. If the power of the internet can make my journey to work a bit smoother, I ain't complaining.

Johnathan Pearce

Yesterday, I attended Dale Seago's "Return from Japan" seminar in San Francisco. I'm reminded that my friend Monica attended a Bujinkan seminar in London, and had some good things to say about her training experience.

This just in from my distant friend James Bennett: his announcement today of the website supporting his new book "The Anglosphere Challenge." This seems like a very enticing book, and I plan to read it during winter school break.

Monica White comments on L. Neil Smith's "Captain Bligh’s Revenge," in which he informs us (I'd not known) that the British government is intent on wrecking the tiny society of Pitcairn Island: stealing their guns and imprisoning those who don't conform to their standards of marriage practice.

If we have learned anything over the past 18 months it is this: that the first rule of politics - power must never be trusted - still applies. The government will neither regulate itself nor be regulated by the institutions which surround it. Parliament chose to believe a string of obvious lies. The media repeated them, the civil service let them pass, the judiciary endorsed them. The answer to the age-old political question - who guards the guards? - remains unchanged. Only the people will hold the government to account.

They have two means of doing so. The first is to throw it out of office at the next election. This works only when we are permitted to choose an alternative set of policies. But in almost every nation, a new contract has now been struck between the main political parties: they have chosen to agree on almost all significant areas of policy. This leaves the people disenfranchised: they can vote out the monkeys but not the organ-grinder.

George Monbiot

Many have heard the now-famous quote by H.L. Mencken, "Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Well, here's another instance of it in action, reported by The Guardian: "Britons caught on camera as shots of cruise ship orgy shock Cyprus."

The success of a party can be determined by the number of gatecrashers. And we do have friends who've been knocking away on the virtual doors of the cartel. MadMan is devising a logical test of libertarianism. Get ready to jump through the hoop and clear the hurdles!

Any more wanting to join us in the battle against the evil forces of socialism, illogic, and unfreedom? Drop me a line.

Yazad Jal

It is a shame that the precautionary principle is not applied to government regulation: in the absence of any overwhelming proof that it will work, such regulation ought to be prohibited.

Antoine Clarke

I remember the odious BBC television licensing fee from my days in London long ago, but had thought the fee had been repealed. Not so, reports UK-resident Australian Monica White:

For those of you who don’t live in the UK, you may be interested in the phenomenon that is the TV License – I was truly surprised by it a year ago. Essentially, if you have a TV or receiving equipment, you are obliged to pay the government £121 per year to view the BBC channels.

Don’t watch the BBC? I’m afraid that TV Licensing doesn’t believe you. EVERYONE who owns an operational set must watch the BBC. They're compelled to. There’s something in the water.

TV Licensing ‘Enquiry Officers’ also seem to get a hoot out of slapping £1000 fines onto anyone within spitting distance.

Competitive systems can operate to check each other's excesses. Consider the codes governing the relations between U.S. corporations and their shareholders. The fifty states compete to offer standard corporation codes; companies can either use these default terms or tailor specific provisions in their corporate charters. (A company does not have to be physically headquartered in a state to claim it as the corporation's legal domicile.) Agreeable state rules, backed by well-established case law, can significantly cut the cost of doing business. The competition among states for incorporations and the taxes they bring makes legislatures responsive to new ideas and changing business conditions.

Equally important, company managers can't get away with adopting just any code that makes their lives easy. These rules govern a two-way agreement—between the business (essentially, its managers) and the shareholders. Opportunistic managers who try to use state laws to help themselves at the stockholders' expense are checked by another source of competition: the financial markets. So, for instance, when Pennsylvania passed a law designed to make hostile takeovers difficult, protecting managers but making stock less valuable, pressures from falling stock prices pushed most of the state's publicly traded companies to opt out of the law's provisions. Few other states adopted the same law, lest they lose incorporations.

The legal scholar Roberta Romano, who calls this federalist system of competing rules "the genius of American corporate law," writes: "As the Pennsylvania experience illustrates, the federal system provides a safety net against the consequences of harmful state laws. Some jurisdictions will have no or only mild takeover regulation, and this constrains how much other jurisdictions can act in this area and how much firms can take advantage of value-decreasing laws, especially when major commercial states such as Delaware and California have less onerous laws." Having many sources of competing rules, rather than a single, national standard, makes finding good rules—and eliminating or limiting bad ones—more likely.

Virginia Postrel
The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, p145 (from Chapter 5, "The Bonds of Life")

Though we have many words with Latin roots, English is Germanic in origin. Romance-language speaking peoples conquered England from time to time, and injected our language with a few of those words. As a result the less common “Latin” words spoken by our conquerors were treated as superior to our native language because they were often used by the upper class. The big problem was that these words and sometimes even entire systems of grammar were not used by the majority of people and muddied communication exceedingly when they were used. In my experience, the use of Latin words in the place of simple Anglo-Saxon mono-syllables that mean precisely the same thing usually goes hand in hand with intellectual pretension. Language is a way of bridging the gap between people, so you can probably understand why it bothers me when people do this.

Diane Duncan

...Samizdata.net took on a cool new look over the weekend.

My discrete mathematics professor is a very, very bright lady with a PhD in graph theory, and an Englishwoman. I was startled tonight when we were discussing techniques of mathematical proof when she pronounced "corollary" as "coROLLary", quickly. It's not that she pronounced it differently from American standard, it's that after having spent several years in London, some years back, I have no recollection of ever having heard an Englishman say "corollary". That's what startled me.

...although I can only speculate as I do not know the young woman who caught my eye, it is not hard to see the 'domestic compromise' at work here... her family insisting she wear the hijab whilst she insisted on dressing to kill in the manner of her adopted western culture and friends.

This little drama must get played out a million times a year across Europe and North America amongst the Muslim diaspora and in the long run, it is not hard to see which cultural force is going to win. I suspect that one of the reasons that small pockets of western Muslims have become radicalized is that it is they who are most starkly confronted with what happens in the majority of cases when the old ways are confronted by western secular individualism. No civilization based on submission to arbitrary edicts from the Dark Ages can survive contact with a civilization that essentially encourages you to find your own way and do what you will.

Perry de Havilland

The Concorde SST was finally retired by British Airways today, after years of running at a loss. As much of an Anglo-French boondoggle as it turned out to be, I've always been a bit fond of the plane: the idea of a supersonic transport has always been, um, sound; someone will do it right someday.

Years ago when I lived in London, I had the occasional pleasure of seeing a Concorde crossing over London on its way to or from Heathrow Airport, in climb or descent configuration, far enough away from the airport that its spindly landing gear were retracted and its nosecone was pulled up in its sleek inline (unbent) cruise configuration.

I even got to visit one of the birds, and step inside, ten years ago this autumn. I was part of a small group of people who toured catering operations for British Airways at Heathrow (long story) with a side trip to the Concorde hangar. I have a ton of pics from that trip, and even a couple of cool ones of myself in the Captain's seat in the narrow cockpit of the one plane we were allowed to enter. If I have time soon, I'll dig those out and scan a few to this site.

I really wish that BA would cave in to Richard Branson's attempts to buy a Concorde off its hands: a Virgin Atlantic Concorde might actually make money, as well as keep alive a fabulous piece of aviation history.

Last spring I wrote up a short review of a great Ealing comedy from 1957, "All at Sea", with Alec Guinness. Just last night I finished watching another great British comedy, this one from 1959 by John Boulting, "I'm All Right Jack". It's a great little satire on the dirty politics between postwar British industry and trade unions. Peter Sellers' depiction of a power-mad, USSR-worshipping shop steward alone is worth the viewing. You'll find it on Netflix.

Sean Gabb announces today the publication of "All the Way Down the Slippery Slope: Gun Prohibition in England and Some Lessons for Civil Liberties in America" by Professors Joseph E. Olson and David B. Kopel; an excerpt from this long and well footnoted article:

Is it possible for a nation to go from wide-open freedom for a civil liberty, to near-total destruction of that liberty, in just a few decades? "Yes," warn many American civil libertarians, arguing that allegedly "reasonable" restrictions on civil liberty today will start the nation down "the slippery slope" to severe repression in the future.[3] In response, proponents of today's reasonable restrictions argue that the jeremiads about slippery slopes are unrealistic or even paranoid.[4]

This Essay aims to refine the understanding of slippery slopes by examining a particular nation that did slide all the way down the slippery slope.(p.400) When the twentieth century began, the right to arms in Great Britain was robust, and subject to virtually no restrictions. As the century closes, the right has been almost obliterated. In studying the destruction of the British right to arms, this Essay draws conclusions about how slippery slopes operate in real life, and about what kinds of conditions increase or decrease the risk that the first steps down a hill will turn into a slide down a slippery slope.

Sean Gabb, of the UK's Libertarian Alliance, has himself written a number of superb essays on the RKBA over the years. After reading the piece above, visit the LA's site and look for his work.

Proof that some of us pay very close attention to our server logs: howdy, Australian Survivalist readers! A special hello to "Warrigal".

Just saw this mentioned on Fox News, figured I'd Google for it immediately. I wonder if there's a "Fox News effect" similar to the "Slashdot Effect". Some of this is just plain goofball, some of it's stuff I've seen and done in climbing gyms and on rockfaces. Good fun, in any case: House Gymastics.

Looks like I'm going to need to "bust at least one classic Harrison & Ford move" to get into their gallery; watch this space...

I like to think that we Brits have now added yet another component to the rich tapestry of Middle-Eastern culture and it reinforces my belief that the pithy, seductive quality of this word will continue to fuel its steady but relentless conquest of the Anglosphere, the Middle-East, the World and, who knows, maybe even beyond.

It is at times like this that all the speculation about possible encounters with alien species from other planets comes to mind. I am not sure that such an event will ever come to pass and I am quite positive that I will no longer be around to witness it even if it does. But I am willing to bet green money in the here and now that, within weeks of that first, portentious, epoch-making encounter, said aliens will be calling each other 'wanker'.

David Carr

Patrick Crozier has posted a real winner on Samizdata. You don't often see this kind of openly expressed respect of America on the part of an Englishman... unless, of course, he's a libertarian.

Some years ago, when I was living in London, my good friend and head of the U.K. Libertarian Alliance, Chris Tame, introduced me to the Ealing Comedies produced in the post-war era (40's and 50's, prior to purchase of the studios by the BBC). A combination of subtle parody and broad farce, these predominantly outstanding cultural treasures featured actors now well known across both sides of The Pond, such as Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers, and pop cultural treasures such as the late Frankie Howerd (that's the spelling) - "Oooh! Missus!" - not as well known outside England.

Last week, I noticed a strong recommendation in the March 29 mailing of Miss Liberty's Film & TV Update for one of these comedies:

My top TV pick for the week is the Alec Guinness film "All at Sea," airing on Wednesday (4/2) on TCM. This is an absolutely dead-on libertarian comedy about an amusement park operator who overcomes a corrupt and oppressive local government intent on seizing his business. To my knowledge, this film is not available on video and it rarely appears on television. If you don't have time to watch it now, be sure to record it!

The version shown on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which is now safely on my PVR because indeed, the movie's apparently not available on VHS or DVD in the U.S., was the MGM-distributed U.S. release of "Barnacle Bill", erroneously listed in the TCM program guide as having been released in 1958. The Latin numerals read "1957" in the credits, as do several filmographies.

Guinness plays Capt. William Horatio Ambrose, a competent and clever Royal Navy officer afflicted by a ravening case of seasickness ("I shall do my duty, M'am, to the best of my disability"), who buys Sandcastle Pier, a decrepit Blackpool wannabe. When Ambrose discovers that the local Mayor and Council have plans to steal the pier using eminent domain laws, he manages to have the pier registered as a cruise ship at anchor in harbor under the fictitious flag of Liberama: the RMS ("Really Motionless Ship") Arabella.

It's a great little piece, and now I have my own copy. In a similar spirit, I recommend "The Man in the White Suit", if you can find a copy. It's another Ealing comedy featuring Alec Guinness, from earlier in his career (1951): darker, with Randian undertones.

You won't find these comedies on Netflix, by the way: apparently, only Guinness' "serious" roles seem to be worthy of inclusion there. See Guinness's IMDB entry for a much more comprehensive filmography.

I can't help thinking about the Principality of Sealand when Capt. Ambrose recounts, "...hence my family motto: Omnes Per Mare... All At Sea..." when I read: "...Sealand's national motto of E Mare Libertas, or 'From the Sea, Freedom'".

Just saw footage of U.S. troops fighting alongside Kurds in northern Iraq. Looked a lot like northern Nevada mountain country, complete with snow-covered peaks! I wonder if they've got something like mule deer out there too... hmmm... I wonder if hunting is good out there.

Speaking of which, I've heard quite a bit about Iraqis being a hunter culture, and gun ownership being a common thing. I'm not thrilled to hear that British forces have been making a big deal of bringing their own special brand of domestic gun control to the population in Iraq. I sincerely hope the Iraqi people have stashed away all those Kalashnikovs they've supposedly been issued.

Don't take this to mean I'm anything resembling sympathetic to the Iraqis' maddog dictator. I'm simply concerned that we recognize the individual rights of Iraqi people. Innocent Iraqis have the right to own and keep weapons too.

Terry Egan passes this along to me; lunacy from the European Union:

The Adam Smith Institute has denounced the latest batch of EU regulations as yet another example of economic illiteracy. It singles out the new requirement, imposed by EU Safety Commissioner Senator Fapirollo, that the maximum length of knife blades permitted within the EU after 1 January 2004 will be 10cm (approx 4 inches).

Even Stalin and Hitler hadn't thought of that little gem of legislation.

I'm getting really sick of Geraldo/Jerry Rivera/Rivers/Rambo. Looks like he finally screwed the pooch: the Pentagon has him under investigation for having "shared" maneuver plans for the 101st Airborne on air. Ooops.

It'll be good to see the whore get kicked off the Fox Network. I'll bet his cohorts on Fox, who are already going to great lengths to say that Rivers is "...with the 101st but not officially embedded with the armed forces".

A few weeks ago I saw this moron sign off on a live report from Afghanistan, handing off to Fox's Orlando Salinas, saying "gracias, Amigo!". Salinas, a real Latino, was visibly taken aback, but managed to maintain his gentlemanly composure.

Moron. Hope he gets the boot soon. Can't happen fast enough for me.

Whatever the more nihilistic historians may claim, history does reveal certain regularities in our behaviour. One of these is that, whenever large numbers of intelligent people agree that it can only get better, the world takes a turn decidedly for the worse. The poets of the Augustan age saw that the present was better than the past, and thought the good times would continue. Instead, the Roman world got Tiberius, Caligula, Nero and Domitian. When Constantine became a Christian, Eusebius insisted this would herald an age of peace and justice. Within a century, Augustine was having to write at immense length to show how this had only apparently not happened. The Enlightenment is famous for its optimism, and we all know it ended with the Terror and a quarter century of bloodletting across Europe. The Victorian belief in progress was knocked on the head at the Somme and Passchendael, and quietly expired in the extermination camps and the Gulag.

...unlike spots and bad breath, high civilisation is not something that comes about naturally for us. It is a product of depressingly unusual circumstances. These circumstances cannot be created by act of human will, though they can be destroyed; and they cannot be called back once they have gone.

Sean Gabb

Well, it looks as if there is going to be a war in Iraq. While I think libertarian-inclined folk are, and should be rightly hostile to the idea of war - given the wreckage inflicted on life and liberty - it would be wrong for me to let this momentous time in history to pass without wishing a "good luck" to the U.S., British and Australian armed forces and their allies in the drive to deal with Saddam's vile regime. I have two relatives, one British, one American, both of whom serve in these nations' air forces. Come back safe guys.

David Carr of Samizdata directs us to a "fair dinkum" blog for the Australian Libertarian Society.

When I attended the Front Sight firearms academy in Nevada last September, I was struck by the sheer range of what Ignatius Piazza's firm is offering: not just teaching on firearms, but everything about personal safety, right down to avoiding car accidents. What struck me was that in the States, there is more awareness among Joe Public about the need to take responsibility for one's own safety, and this doesn't just include learning how to use a firearm. Even the recent drive by the government to get folk to stock up on duct tape and water, even though it was mocked in certain quarters, bespoke of a certain attitude in the American culture - "We can get through this".

What bothers me is how different this is in Britain. I admit my views are impressionistic and not based on loads of facts, but I just don't get the feeling that learning about survival really bothers the average Briton. Call it our traditional reserve, coolness in the face of danger, or whatever. Even if those cliches about Britons are true (and I have my doubts) I think there is a much greater willingness on the part of Britons to think that well, safety is the State's job, not mine. Maybe 60 years of the Welfare State have contributed to this weakening of civic responsibility.

Of course, I may be proven gloriously wrong if disaster does strike this little island. I hope so.

The single most important thing to know about Americans -- the attitude which truly distinguishes them from the British, and explains much superficially odd behavior -- is that Americans believe that death is optional.

Jane Walmsley

I lived in London the early part of the '90's, and had the opportunity to go shooting with the Imperial College Non-Staff Shooting Club - on campus! - at their indoor range, where I learned some neat tactical tricks from a retired Hong Kong cop. Even then, though, I didn't know there existed an "NRA of Great Britain", but now I know, according to a Samizdata article by David Carr.

I do hope the NRA/GB is not like the crowd of statist wimps which characterize the National NRA of the US, crying out to "enforce the existing laws" of the land. I wonder if there's a JPFO/GB or a GOA/GB... until then, the UK Libertarian Alliance is the closest thing they have.

Speaking of the club at Imperial College, I see that while they apparently still exist, and under the name Imperial College Rifle and Pistol Club, there is no mention other than in name of the word "pistol" on their website. I'm assuming that the nice little underground pistol range that ex-girlfriend Nagako and I trained at a decade ago has been turned into a rimfire range, at best. Ugh.

Another glance at the ICRPC website mentions this sad fact, emphasis mine:

ICRPC only owns one fullbore target rifle so we normally organise our shooting trips in conjuction with the University of London Rifle Club. The rifles we use fire 7.62mm rounds, normally 155 grain.

As I implied in a piece I wrote for Samizdata a few months ago, a once-great country has been strangling it grassroots culture of weapon ownership at its base. I predict that the ICRPC will eventually lose even that one rifle... unless the students are willing to fight for it.

Commerce with all nations. Alliances with none.

Thomas Jefferson

I first posted my appeal for help for Ronald Dixon two weeks ago, and have to my happy surprise become a bit of a clearinghouse for information on ways to help Mr. Dixon. Here's one posted as a comment by user "Steve", which really caught my eye: a free email-to-fax gateway service which anyone can use to fax the Brooklyn DA!

In late September of last year I attended a highly enjoyable and intense four-day defensive handgun course hosted at the Front Sight training academy in Nevada. It was terrific. I trained using a .40 calibre Glock, learning the basics of safety drill, handling of ammunition, aligning the gun, as well as posture, awareness of one's surroundings, not to mention legal, ethical and practical issues connected to the use of a gun. Front sight runs a pretty tight ship. The schedule did not go slack and we got plenty of warning and help about not getting burned or dehydrated in the Nevada heat. I completed the course with a Certificate of Accomplishment, something I am really proud of. I also felt absolutely shattered on Day Four!

My take on this experience is a bit unusual. I am British, live in London and have had little experience of handling handguns like the Glock, although I have occasionally used a shotgun on my parent's farm and at a skeet range in England. I am not a total rookie, but pretty close. I certainly want to do more courses and do more practice when I get the chance.

Why on earth should a Brit living in Tony Blair's nanny state bother with any of this? Well, it is precisely because handgun shooting is so rare (for law-abiding folk anyway) an experience for your average Brit that I decided to have a go. Also, I hold out the chance of one day working in the U.S. or maybe other parts of the world where handgun ownership is legal, so that's a practical reason.

Front Sight does a great job. My only beef is the price. Fortunately I got a great deal thanks to Russell's generosity in letting me get in as a guest, but from a practical point of view I would really need to be resident in the U.S. and able to pay the costs in full, which might be tight on my current budget.

A post on Packing.org reprints a 12 November 2002 article, from a paper publication, the Ontario Farmer, which would likely never have been seen anywhere outside its original audience; from page 15B of that issue comes this report: "Deadstock operators giving up carrying guns".

Friend and stalwart UK libertarian Brian Micklethwait points to the possible start of an interesting trend: UK homeschoolers fed up with victim disarmament laws. Keep an eye on this one.

Harold O. Koenig today excerpts a much longer Reason Magazine article by Joyce Lee Malcolm detailing just how bad things have gotten in recent times in the UK in respect of the right to self-defense.

The libertarians of the UK's Samizdata blog have amassed a very large archive of self-defense(defence) & security articles worth reading.

Some years ago, very shortly after having moved to London, I was walking down Charing Cross Road late at night when an obviously drunk old man felt compelled to issue me what I thought was a friendly salute: the V-sign, knuckles-out. I returned the salute with gusto, earning surprised grumbles from the geezer as he continued his post-pub stumble down the sidewalk ("pavement" to my Brit friends).

Of course, I learned quickly the meaning of this little gesture, and am reminded of it in an interesting post on Samizdata:

The US gesture of extending the middle finger is clearly just a phallic reference (i.e. "f**k you"), but the English V-sign, which has some similar connotations (i.e. it is not a sign of endearment), has historical roots dating back to the 1400's. If the middle finger is a gesture of anger, the V-sign is a gesture of defiance and above all, a threat. "It is with these two fingers that I use my longbow!"... Up yours, with an arrow!

It is here that I am reminded that we as Americans inherit much of our culture of defiance - such as it still exits - from the Brits. Some of them, at least, still maintain that culture.

Michael Moore manages to piss off our Anglosphere allies too. If you think Mark Morford was bad, check out Moore's film "Bowling for Columbine".

I should add that by "Anglosphere ally", I'm referring to Samizdata, not the BBC's Helen Bushby (reference this typically favorable article of hers on Moore's latest).