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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Perry de Havilland raised a point that:
Bush presides over a nation which has a rather squeamish view of war, at least with regard to American casualties
Which is only true within a certain context. Americans don’t really much care to go off somewhere and die for their foreign policy. That is absolutely true. But Americans in defense of America are quite capable of sustaining terrible punishment without flinching. A documentary “The Battle of Midway” aired on the BBC last night and shows the levels of courage of our recruits and the levels of carnage that the home front will endure when we’re really pissed off.
It’s that damn libertarian streak in the country. We just won’t go marching off to die just because some damn fool has a flag and wants a parade.
That is al Qaeda’s mistake. They successfully moved their issues from the foreign policy arena (ho hum) to the personal. We took 9000 casualties (notice that no one in the media is giving casualties in the usual way, total dead and wounded?) in a matter of hours. I think you have to go back to Gettysburg to get numbers like this in a single day. They got our attention alright, but not in quite the way they had hoped for.
With 9000 casualties on our own territory, a few thousand more won’t phase us. We’re even mentally prepared for the possibility they might kill another 100,000 of us with a dirty little nuke. That would be a very bad idea on their part because then we’d REALLY be pissed off. It is not in the best interests of anyone on this planet for us to get that ticked off.
So no. We aren’t afraid of casualties when we are fighting for ourselves and for our right to live our own way in our own place. Those who have made the Japanese mistake are in for a severe lesson. When riled as a people, we are without a doubt the meanest, nastiest, hardest-assed sons of bitches on the planet, bar none.
I’ve been a Belfast resident for over a decade, long enough to be familiar with the sounds of mortar bombs, thousand pound fertilizer based explosions, gunfire… and walking in funeral processions. So I know about war zones, although I would be the first to admit that I missed the worst of it by far. I am an American ex-pat, not so much because I left the USA as that I came to Ireland. In the decade plus that I have lived here, it has become my home. But on September 11, 2001 I could not ignore the fact that my people were attacked and slaughtered by madmen. The killing rage I felt was of a depth that I’m sure was a bit difficult for some around me to fathom. It was distant news to them.
The United States is big. It’s just so mind boggling big you can’t imagine… but at the same time it’s a small town. People travel widely; they don’t stay put so the interconnection of people from one coast to the other is extensive. Probably very few people in the country did not at one point or another entwine their lives with one of our war dead. For myself, the closest I am aware of (so far) are some alumni from my University, one of which I probably knew in my college days: Carnegie-Mellon University was and is a small world.
I grew up in a small town named Coraopolis just outside of Pittsburgh; I studied in Pittsburgh and I was involved in technology startups there before going to Ireland. I often travelled to Washington to lobby for the space program. I lived in Burke, Virginia for the better part of a year while on a joint project with Computer Sciences Corporation at an office just inside the DC beltway. My current companies largest customer, prior to the dotCrash, was in Manhattan. I spent nearly half of my time between 1997 and 2000 there and usually lived in the Lower East Side. I froze my behind off in Time Square for the New Year 2000 celebration. I joked with others about the manhole covers in Times Square being welded shut.
I know Somerset. I had friends out that way. I went to school with people from there. I skied up at Seven Springs every chance I could get.
I know Arlington. I drove by the Pentagon and across the bridge into DC night and day; I worked there, I played there, I had friends who worked for the DOD and in the Pentagon. I drove by it as recently as March because my other major customer is just down the road in Alexandria.
I know Lower Manhattan. I lived there. I sometimes watched the lines of aircraft in the landing pattern for La Guardia coming up from the South past the Twin Towers at dusk while I sat in my flat on Rivington and read after work. Or used the always visible towers to navigate my way home on foot after a night out in a newly discovered pub. My business partner and I walked around the World Trade Center just this last March on the way back from a business trip to Washington DC, before we caught a taxi to the airport for our flight home to Belfast. I was part of the tech staff on an internet broadcast from the Trade Center for the Western Governors University kickoff. I hauled racks of electronic gear in through the basement world of the WTC.
I know the places. I know the people. It wasn’t distant news. Atta and the other war criminals didn’t strike at some distant unknown place. They didn’t strike at my government. They struck at me and mine.
That is why I want the al Qaeda dead. All of them. Their excuses and complaints are of no interest: my heart is “hardened like a stone and my ears are deaf” to them. I wish them hunted down like the animals that they are, hunted as the Jews have hunted and hounded the Nazi monsters, hunted even when they become feeble dying old men. I will never forgive and I will never forget. An image of 5000 of my own people dying before my eyes on a video screen is seared into my soul and that of 280,000,000 other very ordinary americans. Our government has no choice in the matter. It will comply with our will or else we’ll elect one that will. It is that simple.
Our anger is deep and wide and very, very cold. We will give no quarter. We feel no mercy. We don’t want their surrender, we want them dead. To the last man. Dead.
…it is much, much worse.
Thomas M. Sipos writes from experience. He is an American attorney who has seen it all from the inside. His exposé article How to Make Money in Soft Tissue Injury makes compulsive reading. It is written in a style that rather reminds me of a less stoned version of Hunter S. Thompson: brutally cynical with an air of detached surrealism.
Highly recommended.
Unintended consequence is reality’s most profound joke on us all (but particularly on Marx, something Groucho understood but Karl never did)
– Perry de Havilland, said at a Brian’s Friday gathering
An article in the Sunday Times today suggests that Tony Blair is exasperated that his wish to see a major deployment of ground troops to Afghanistan is being ignored by George Bush.
Meanwhile, Blair has had no support from America in his efforts to increase the coalition forces on the ground. He is said by military sources to have become “utterly frustrated” that the US “cannot see that it can achieve its tactical goals more quickly is the military, humanitarian and diplomatic strands of this operation run in tandem”. Washington is “myopically focused on Bin Laden and the Taliban”, the sources said.
Sorry Tony, but whilst you and your new best friend George make a fine couple at photo opportunities, there is no disguising that there are two fundamentally different world views at work here.
Tony Blair is the leader of a reformed socialist party who regards it as axiomatic that the role of the state is being ‘my brother’s keeper’. By extension Blair wants to take up ‘The White Man’s burden’ in Afghanistan. He wants stout and resolute British soldiers to prevent those messy Afghans from sliding into barbarism in the post-Taliban order. He presides over a nation which has a realistic view of the realities of war and has fought its last few rather well. As a result, the general British public has quite a high tolerance of combat casualties.
George Bush is the leader of a corporatist capitalist party with a significant anti-corporatist and anti-interventionist wing. He has support for a war of retaliation and the destruction of Al Qaeda and anyone who stands between the USA and Al Qaeda. Bush presides over a nation which has a rather squeamish view of war, at least with regard to American casualties, and very little interest in open ended military commitments. Whilst images of women in Kabul walking unmolested without burqas causes Americans entirely justified satisfaction, few seriously think that is why their airforces and special ops teams are killing people in their names.
Blair is not just wrong, he is dangerously wrong. An absolute prerequisite for coherent military operations is having clear and unambiguous goals. The Americans have set themselves exactly that: the destruction of Al Qaeda and any who give them succour. What Tony Blair is doing is applying his fuzzy socialist logic to a very simple strategic question and attempting to turn clarity into ambiguity. This is not a peacekeeping operation, it is not a nation building operation, it is not a humanitarian operation, it is a war against Taliban/Al Qaeda in reprisal for the mass murder of civilians in America: to think anything else is just a dangerous distraction. As I have been saying, we simply have no business trying to civilize Afghanistan at bayonet point, not only it is wrong, it simply will not work. Fortunately it seems that Bush and his advisors are able to see that too.
News can be a remote, impersonal thing. We see stories about outrages in some far off land and we are duly outraged… and then we move on to the the next thing. Although I live in London at the moment, I used to work in the World Trade Centre and I was there briefly last June, so I must say I took the events of 11 September rather hard, but for others who actually witnessed it, the experience must have been altogether more appalling. My ex-girlfriend lives in New Jersey and watched the entire horror unfold from her bedroom window. But even so, eventually life moves on. Jay Zilber on Mind over what matters writes a thoughtful little personal reflection on this subject along with a dramatic photograph that does indeed put it all into perspective.
It seems the reporters in Afghanistan have decided to start a little war of their own. As in all wars, a very high proportion of the correspondents are British and they seem to be itching to take digs at each other. Has someone been denying these guys their early morning cup of tea or something?
John Simpson has naturally attracted more than his fair share of flak after claiming he and the BBC liberated Kabul ahead of the Northern Alliance. Of course Lara Logan from GMTV had actually been in Kabul for some time before Simpson’s portly frame rumbled into town.
And speaking of the truly delectable Lara Logan, ITN’s sour puss Julian Manyon accused her of “exploiting her God-given advantages with a skill that Mata Hari might envy” to get interviews with General Babajan.
But note he does not criticize her reporting, which has been just as sound and professional as Julian Manyon. Time for a reality check: if you were General Babajan, who would you rather chat with, Lara Logan or Julian Manyon? Sorry Julian, no contest.
Somehow I suspect that if it had been Lara skinny dipping in the Salang Gorge rather than Manyon, the locals would have taken a considerably less hostile stance.
And of course, the Guardian cannot resist a little sniping either:
Speaking of Kabul. Has Lara Logan, the GMTV correspondent stationed outside Kabul had her Clarins drop yet? Don’t know about the US airforce plans, but the French cosmetics company is on the case already.
Journalists are a bitchy lot.
John F. Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
Hermann Goering said, “Common good comes before private good.”
Draw your own conclusions.
– Samizdata Illuminatus
I love Star Trek and its’ derivatives as much as anyone else who is a part of (as opposed to accidentally existing in) the Twenty-First Century. I grew up with it. As one of the old space radicals of the L5 Society I highly respect Gene Roddenberry, Majel Barrett and Nichelle Nichols for their pro-space work off stage as well as their marvelous original TV series. I’ve even met some of them at ISDC’s (International Space Development Conferences), the premiere meeting place of the space community.
Tonight I saw my first episode of the newest series. I admit that if I had seen it before 9-11 it would not have grated (as much) on me. I was not expecting a “huggy feely they are misunderstood and are just like us” Political Correctness lesson masquerading as a story line.
I can’t be the only one who shed all semblance of tolerating these inane attitudes two months ago. I watched the story and knew pirates are bad people. You kill them. They aren’t poor misundersood sentients who would be nice if you just sent them a Christmas pudding. Pirates are nasty, brutish scumbags who go out on the spaceways and make a living by stealing. You would rob a vessel in space the same way pirates did it in the 17th Century … and still do in Southeast Asia… you kill people. Pirates don’t pull up alongside and say, “Would you be jolly good chaps and give us your cargo and valuables? We’d be ever so appreciative. Ah, now that’s a good fellow! Would you be so kind as to not tell anyone what we look like? Ta ta now!”
It got worse. I nearly gagged when a black character admitted he knew what it was like being treated as “other” on Earth. This was a total farce. He grew up on a slow cargo ship that spent months and years between the stars. He probably never even saw anyone outside his ship family until he was nearly an adult.
Even that is beside the point. Given another two centuries of global travel, communications and capitalism Earthmen will be a polyglot in race and culture. We’ll all be part African and part everything else as well. Visit New York City and see the future for yourself if you don’t believe me. It would require a victory of “multiculturalism” over human nature to preserve races, let alone racism, that far into the future. The lines were gratuitous and given that a black actor was forced to deliver them, real racism. Why do black professionals have to be singled out for the “victim” mantle? Isn’t the Colin Powell/Condelezza Rice image a hell of lot more positive for kids? Screw the victimhood. Teach kids that they CAN, not that they can not try and then blame someone else.
The traders of the story are supposedly rugged individualists who “solve their own problems”. But the First Officer was just an unlikeable strawman for the PC story line and was certainly no Signy Mallory. The Second Officer was just a wimp who’d have been tossed out the airlock by age 10. He spent most of the episode looking like he needed a diaper.
The political subtext was so blatent I couldn’t abide by it. The Free Traders are attacked by alien pirates. They beat the shield frequency codes out of one they capture. Fair enough. Pirates are pirates. I have no problems there. They should have dumped him out the airlock after they got the codes. But it was all done as a set up so the Captain of the Enterprise could pontificate about how the pirates were just misunderstood. The Enterprise arrives just in time to save the traders, negotiate a settlement and show that Law’n’Order and the Great State now Rules The Spacelanes. None of that naughty self-defense now! Then everyone gets out their teddy bears and has a hugfest. Roll Credits.
I really hope the producers notice attitudes have changed. Perhaps they should invite Virginia Hienlein to advise them. If they did the Enterprise crew would just space the pirates next season instead of talk to ’em.
Now… the question that might have occured to some of the more observant readers: how did I see this episode in Europe already when it won’t air here for some time? Well kiddies, that’s another bedtime story. In the next chapter Uncle Wiggly will… oops! Wrong lifetime!
I can forgive the fact that our intelligence personnel and police missed the bits and pieces that might have prevented 9-11. Despite the excellent hindsight of some writers, it really isn’t all that easy to put such together. Security and police around the world held pieces of the puzzle; but they did not share them because they did not know there was a puzzle. Some of the kamikaze war criminals crossed paths with law enforcement; but in a free society law enforcement does not breathe down the neck of every “suspicious” individual they run in to. Above all, no one… not me, not you, not the head of the CIA, not even Tom Clancy… could have imagined what was to come.
But my forgiveness has its’ limits. The following is simply beyond the pale, an inconceivable level of incompetence on the part of our public servants:
The Economist In the House of Anthrax
After the September 11th attacks, it was generally agreed that western intelligence agencies had failed through lack of “human intelligence”-men on the ground, as opposed to spy satellites and computers monitoring phone calls and e-mails. This failure was to be rectified. Yet since the fall of Kabul on November 13th, journalists have been fanning out across the city. They have stripped houses such as this one, and others directly connected to the al-Qaeda network, of all sorts of documents and other valuable evidence. These have included the names and addresses of al-Qaeda contacts in the West. For the West’s intelligence agencies, September 11th was Black Tuesday. There may be no words with which to describe their failure in the week since the fall of Kabul.
I would very dearly like an explanation why our multi-billion dollar intelligence service didn’t have anyone in those houses in Kabul before the media. Perhaps we should just replace the lot of them with the reporters. But what are we to do with all the failed spies then? Are any small towns perhaps in need of dogcatchers? Our ex-intelligence people might, just might be on the ball enough to find a lost dog if it’s big enough. And in a safe suburban Beltway neighborhood. In the middle of the street…
…with a dayglo “Stray Dog” sign hung around it’s neck.
I never thought that the US state which gave us the supreme statist elitist mouthpiece of Ted Kennedy would ever be worthy of anything other than derision and contempt, even from a resident of the “Socialist Republic of New Jersey”. Carla’s tea party clearly demonstrates I was wrong and I humbly apologize to the libertarian residents of Massachusets. Hail and well met!
I will be very curious to see how the mainstream media handles this tax revolt. Personally, I think they will treat it the same way they do most of the “Shall Issue” right to carry a concealed firearm legislation so popular in the US. Namely, avoid it as much as possible, then give it very minimal airtime during which you ignore all the great positives, vastly inflate the very small negatives, and spew dire warnings of calamity and anarchy. When the people get the law passed anyway and none of the horrendous predictions comes to pass, just pretend it never happened but work to get the law repealed by publishing every story of gun violence you can find, even if they occur in countries far removed culturally and geographically.
Think I’m making this up? At last count 33 of the 50 states have some form of “Shall Issue” legislation. Another 11 have a more restrictive form of carry laws. Only 6 absolutely forbid it. A show of hands, please, from those who learned that from the big media.
In the case of tax repeal, it will be interesting to see how the self serving career politicians supping at the trough of our tax dollars will argue that we need to keep the status quo. Look for a smoke screen of the beneficial state protecting society’s down-trodden and sheltering us all with its superior security.
It should be very enlightening.
I saw this on Natalie’s blog and it was just too good not to share:
Now I know what “safe mode” is for. An illegitimate code-baby popped out just then, but the tachyonic prophylaxis of blogger software lets me pop it in again. Do not try this in the real world
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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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