Perry de Havilland gets off one of his bizarre 'humorous' posts on Samizdata, this time indulging in a nice bit of stereotyping about the French and the Germans. Predictably all the usual suspects pop out of the woodwork in the comments.
When I first discovered blogging, Samizdata.net was an eye opener - critcal intelligent comment on issues ignored by mainstream media from a truly radical perspective. Now they seem to have lost their way with a succession of whinging and whining posts. Brian Micklethwaite, one of the regular posters on Samizdata has remarked on this trend himself in a Libertarian Alliance pamphlet.
Loser libertarianism says that the world is going to hell and that there’s nothing to be done about this. Loser libertarianism says: I am not free. My life is a failure, but it’s not my fault. My life would work fine, if only taxes weren’t so high, if only the Surveillance State wasn’t spying on me all the time, if only government regulations weren’t so crazy, if only the State wasn’t sending anthrax through the post and blaming it on Arabs and using that as an excuse to fight wars and put up taxes, if only bad people didn’t control the mass media and the schools and colleges and brainwash everybody, if only people in black helicopters weren’t selling my country to evil foreigners, if only, if only, if only. Winner libertarianism is about how to make the world better, and how the world is, at least in some ways, actually getting better.
Winner libertarianism explains how I can make my life a success. I am free. Yes, governments do bad things, as do others, but they can be confronted, resisted, criticised, and sometimes – quite often actually – defeated. They can also be got around or even made use of, if you choose something to do that the politicians are now not ruining, or perhaps even organising quite well, or if you learn better than others what the government is doing, good and bad.
It seems that in Brian's terms there are too many 'losers' on Samaizdata these days. A pity, because what they aim to do (as opposed to what they are doing) is sorely needed.
