Over on the exquisitely named Insolvent Republic of Blogistan, there is a brief round up of who participated in the dog pile on Mr. Raimondo following his much responded to sortie into hostile territory.
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For those looking for some sanity on the issue of Enron Corp’s spectacular fall from grace, take a look at a fine article by Robert D. Kaplan in What next? over on Slate. One of the main things to be drawn from this article was that the top brass at Enron sought to approach not just George W. Bush and his political allies for help, but large numbers of senior Democrats as well. Of course, this will not stop some leftist comentators from trying to tarnish Bush and co with the Enron affaire. January 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 I have flu and the world hates me, even the rascal Dawson does not like me any more. My dog is at my mother’s house and my cat took one look at me as I started to fall ill a few days ago and sodded off. It seems he has decided not to come back so I have stopped looking out of the window for him. Bastard. Typical guy. There is about half a metre of snow on the ground and my heating only works when it feels like it, so here I am, blogging to the world with my laptop under the duvet with me. Only my ‘editor’ in London calls me so I am starting to wonder if there is anyone left alive and unfrozen in all of Croatia… except for the idiot who lives next door. Why do some people feel the need to rev their cars for 20 minutes before driving off? If the damn thing starts, drive it!!! I was going to write about our idiot mayor in Zagreb (naughty boy), cretin provincial journalists in the USA who see the world through the narrow prism of their own country and why if I had met a certain much commented on ‘libertarian anti war’ Internet writer in 1991 here in what used to be Yugoslavia, I would have put a 9mm bullet between his eyes. However I have realised that all these things pale into insignificance compared to my own personal misery at the moment. Irritable? Me? Nah. January 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries. January 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
On Saturday night, 3 men were shot in Palmers Green, North London. One was killed, the other two are in serious condition Last night, a man was shot and seriously wounded by an armed intruder in Brixton, South London The Metropolitan Police have announced a London-wide campaign to tackle the growing problem of gun-related crime January 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I can’t quite make my mind up about this Undoubtedly one of the primary driving forces behind the EU has been post-war German guilt and the desire not to be Germans anymore. So perhaps this should be welcomed On the other hand… er… January 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
The traditional bestiary of belligerency is inhabited by two feathered beasts: the Hawk and the Dove. However, that is a very crude and misleading way of looking at things for there is a third beast to be found. The Ostrich. The Dove constituency is essentially pacifist: whilst such folks are largely found amongst the ‘soft’ socialist left wing, there is also a small conservative constituency that is profoundly dovish on religious grounds. A few libertarians also fall into one or both of those categories of dove as well, though actually very few libertarians are true pacifists. Hawks can be found on the left, particularly the communist left. Many of the anti-war left are far from pacifists, they are just opposed to all American use of force, rather than objecting to force per se. On the conservative right there are also many hawks of several different sub-species, such as the Jeffersonian ‘aggressive defender’ who was quite prepared to send the US Navy to shoot it out with Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean, and Teddy Roosevelt style ‘predators’ who dream of Pax Americana and an American Imperium. Most libertarians fall into the ‘aggressive defender’ category despite what antiwar.com would have you believe. The Ostrich is largely found within both the paleo-conservative right and the surrealist areas of libertarianism. This is a school of thought which is certainly not pacifist but regards the instances under which force can be legitimately, at least by America, Britain and Israel, used as being so narrow and constrained that many make the mistake of calling them doves, but this is quite incorrect. Amongst conservatives Pat Buchannan is a member of this flock and he is joined by quasi-surrealist libertarians like Lew Rockwell and full-blown psychedelic surrealists like the totally barking Justin Raimondo. Rockwell is a largely pukka and worthwhile commentator but who seems to become unhinged when the issue turns to military matters. Mr. Raimondo on the other hand is more florid in his views generally: imagine a version of Noam Chomsky but with at least some grasp of how economics actually work. The essence of the ostrich is that of huddling behind national borders and refusing to use force against anything short of a homeland invasion of Pittsburg. The more florescent surrealist ostriches like Raimondo also take this view but adds some interesting touches, such as a fondness for authoritarian and totalitarian regimes under which he does not live himself, provided they dislike the United States. I must confess I have occasionally wondered if he is ‘for real’. He is a peculiar sort of libertarian, as he seem to view mass murder as being just fine provided it is confined to within national borders. Raimondo is an apologist for the Chinese massacre in Tiananmen Square, contending that in fact it was a triumph of capitalism over communist counter-revolutionaries. The non-Euclidian geometry of his logic is hardly worth the effort of trying to follow; suffice to say Occam’s Razor does not feature prominently in his thinking. He also seems to be of the view that the press in China is as free as in the west, so I look forward to someone directing me to the Chinese publications and websites within China taking critical views of Chinese policy in Tibet and towards Taiwan (I have a Chinese reading friend). As for his contention that:
…rather misses the point that the ‘patriotic’ catholic church is an adjunct of the Chinese Communist Party (which he thinks is actually a capitalist party)…the real Catholic church operates underground at great risk and I personally know a French priest who is a member of it in China. To put it bluntly Mr. Raimondo does not know of what he speaks. Typical ostrich. Many ostriches are strongly anti-Israel due to its repeated projection of force beyond its borders. Now defending Israel is something of a novel experience for me as I am highly critical of their behaviour: a case in point being the disgraceful bulldozing of 50 Palestinian houses in the Gaza Strip last Sunday as collective punishment for the actions of a few: collectivist Israeli psychopathy at its most typical. And yet, I also argue that just because Israel frequently behaves criminally, Israeli society still has a right to defend itself from the clear and present dangers it faces. To do this effectively requires more than the reactive use of military force within Israel itself. An extreme example being the destruction of the Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad in 1981 by the Israeli airforce. What many ostriches refuse to acknowledge is that if the IAF had not destroyed the Iraqi reactor, Saddam Hussain would have developed either nuclear weapons or at the very least ‘dirty bombs’. Of course I am sure Mr. Raimondo probably refuses to believe that Iraq was in fact ever trying to develop nukes or might have stuck plutonium dust on a Scud. To see an ostensible libertarian acting as an apologist for yet another mass murderous regime is curious indeed. Surreal in fact. One theory I have to explain the ostrich mindset (as found in libertarians, rather than paleo-conservatives) is that they are so reflexively hostile to the American and British states that anyone the American and/or British states opposes must therefore be one of the good guys. Quod erat demonstrandum. Now anyone who has been reading my articles on Samizdata.net for a while can hardly have failed to notice I am hugely distrustful of nation states generally…yet I try to base my views on critically rational analysis and not just reflexive anti-statism. I realise states lie. They lie a lot. But that does not mean that everything a state says is automatically false. Yet I suspect that in reality that is what ostriches think, leading them into pretzel logic apologias for Chinese, Middle Eastern and Balkan tyrants under whose regimes the likes of Mr. Raimondo do not actually have to live and therefore do not reflexively distrust. Keeping ones head in the sand is not conducive to a realistic view of the wider world. January 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I am in the process of moving, from my native Michigan to the western suburbs of Washington DC. When I closed on my current home in April 2000, I financed the loan at 7.75% apr for 30 years. I am currently qualified to borrow at 6.40% for 30 years. The yield on 30-year US treasury bonds has fallen by a similar amount. Why do I bring this up? Remember, back in 2000, American politicians were talking up the surplus. Today, thanks to recession, a flat stock market and post-911 spending, the US will probably finish with a deficit in fiscal 2002. But according to a novel theory recently introduced by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, federal deficits cause mortgage rates to rise! So see, tax cuts would increase the deficit, which would increase mortgage rates, which would make new home purchases more expensive, which would hurt working families. Well then, if that is true, why is my lending rate so much more favorable now than it was when the US budget was solidly in the black? The US does not finance much of its debt with 30 year bonds. In fact, the duration of the national debt (a fancy way of saying the average time to maturity) is just under 5 years. The federal treasury does not contribute very much to the demand for long-term funds. So it should not be surprising to learn that there is essentially no historical relationship between federal borrowing and mortgage rates. In fact, the US did not start to aggressively work down the duration of the debt until the Democrats and Treasury Secretary Rubin came into power! If Daschle wants to pay down the debt, why would he want to do it in a period in which yields on long-term debt were falling? As anyone who stayed awake in finance 101 knows, prices and yields move in opposite directions, so lower yields mean that it would cost more to retire long-term debt from bondholder’ hands. This would amount to little more than a subsidy paid by US taxpayers to bondholders, who increasingly are foreign investors. Politicians used to be smart enough to know that they aren’t very smart about economics. Senator Daschle evidently does not feel constrained by his ignorance. January 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I’ve been hearing a lot lately about an organisation that calls itself ‘Anti-war’ who operate a website called (not surprisingly) ‘Anti-war.com’ wherein a cabal of eminent writers and thinkers campaign vigourously against the foreign policy of the US government and, currently, its choice to respond militarily to the WTC attacks. Making quite a to-do they are Chief among the ‘anti-warriors’, and apparently their poster boy, is one Mr. Justin Raimondo who seems to be postively incandescent with rage at the US government for launching a racist war to further the imperialist aims of the Washington elites. Mr.Raimondo claims that his views are informed by his libertarian, non-interventionist, principles based on which, the US should stop its foreign adventures, stop meddling in other countries, stop ‘putting pins in rattlesnakes, stirring up hornets nests etc, etc (By the way, foreigners are all ‘rattlesnakes’ and ‘hornets’? Just how racist is that?) Nothing reprehensible about that position. Isolationism is not a principle I agree with but, when honestly debated, it is a defensible position. What is reprehensible are insinuations that the US brought this attack on itself and only has itself to blame. Reprehensible because (a) they are factually wrong and (b) brutally insensitive and (c) par for the course with Mr. Raimondo That’s right. He’s flogged this particular ‘blame the victim’ horse before in an article that I’m quite sure he’d like buried now but, alas, it’s too late (thankyou, Google). The link below will take you something that Mr.Raimondo wrote in 1999 as an expression of his ‘libertarian principles’ Now before you go there, I feel it only fair to issue a product warning: it’s long. It’s long, it’s turgid and it’s full of details about who said what to who at the National People’s Democratic Conference of 1968 (or something). In other words, it reads like a Trotskyite student screed; the kind of thing that is so laboured and coma-inducing that you get the feeling it has been written with a view to bludgeoning you into submission by the sheer weight of it’s paragraphs. Not that I am, for even a moment, suggesting that Justin is a Trotskyite because he clearly isn’t. No, he’s worse than that, he’s a bore But I always say that the truth is worth suffering for so, take some amphetamines, prepare a pot of strong coffee, tell your family you’re going to be away for a while and click here You’re back! Well, brace yourself: it is the year 2025. Men have colonised Mars and… Okay, only joking The article itself though is rather less of a joke and I knew something was iffy right away when I saw this breathtaking assertion:
Really, Justin??!! Perhaps you could direct us all to the URL for the Chinese Anti-War.com then? Better still, take yourself over to Hong Kong and start ranting at the Beijing government in the same manner as you do Washington. Go on, Justin, I dare you. I double-dare you!! But that’s the least of it. Justin goes on to assert just how reasonable the Chinese government is and that the Tiananmen Square protestors were nothing more than a contemptible rabble who were complaining about China’s progress towards capitalism and wanted a return to socialist purity and the true principles as espoused by Mao Tse Tung. Now, I am the first to admit that memory does not constitute history, but I clearly recall that the centrepiece of the protest was something called the Goddess of Liberty, a simulacram of the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps Chinese ways are just too inscrutable for this particular British dunderhead, but that would seem a very strange choice of totem for a bunch of Maoist fundamentalists to rally around But that’s not important. Any public demonstration will invariably attract all manner of folks with all manner of sundry grievances and I wasn’t there so I don’t know. What is important is that they were unarmed civilians and the ‘enlightened’ Chinese government responded by killing them all Or not, apparently. Because in the Gospel according to Justin:
So there we have it. The protestors were a bunch of suicidal nutbags with stupid ideas who brought it on themselves. They were asking for it. Sound familiar? He even goes as far as to suggest comparison with Jonestown. What were all those tanks doing there then, Justin? Shipping in the laced vodka? We all know what happened to those protestors because we damn welll saw it happen and what I’d like to know is where is Justin’s incandescence? His outrage? His grief? His condemnation? His concern? Does he even give it a mention? No. Nothing. Not a word. Not a peep. Must’ve slipped his mind I don’t quite understand how someone can live through one of the most savage and brutal episodes of state repression in post-war history (not to mention the persecution of dissidents that goes on to this day) and not only try to pretend that it didn’t happen but actually try to convince us all that the victims commited suicide! Not only that, but ten years after, he goes on to write a fawning apology for that same regime while turning all his indignant guns on Washington. Some people call that historical revision: I call it being on the payroll. If you ask me, this guy is being given an easy time The fact that he does champion capitalism and free markets, in a way, makes it worse because he clearly has a brain and either he’s delusional or downright mendacious. Either way, if that’s an example of libertarian principles then, damnitall, my application for membership of the Labour Party is in the post I don’t know Mr.Raimondo and I’ve never met him and I daresay he would rather be hung by the thumbs than to consort with a warblogger like me. So perhaps someone would be obliging enough to pass on this piece of advice next time young Justin starts up on one of his ‘anti-war’ rants: Mr. Raimondo, you live in a glass house, old chum. Stop throwing stones Oh and, by the way, be careful what you publish: Google is watching you! January 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
In the side bar it says “lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people”… well tonight it is nothing philosphical or topical or political, it is just a song by the Goo Goo Dolls that we used to listen to.
Someone broke my heart tonight. January 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Whether fried bills raise eyebrows depends on how common they are. I would say the constituency for privacy in everyday monetary transactions is large enough to ensure that at least as high a percentage of fried bills is in circulation at that future date as the percentage of cocaine-positive US $20 bills today. I’m sure we could come up with bulk fryers. Perhaps some enterprising liberty-conscious individuals of the future will find a way to casually blow the circuits in stacks of moneybags as they pass by the bank… January 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Brian Linse has responded to my remarks, sort of, about capitalism and the reality of monopoly on AintNoBadDude, though he does not appear to have actually read the article I wrote, or if he did, he obviously did not understand it.
Brian’s obsession with Enron is revealed for what it is: political rather than economic. My remarks were about the nature of markets and how the effect of regulations is often to cause the very problems they are intended to alleviate, such as monopoly and unsustainable bloated entities like Enron. One does not have to agree with my views but I think they were pretty easy to understand. But clearly Brian is only interested in how Enron’s collapse can be used to hurt the Republicans and thus his eyes glaze over when people like myself, who care nothing for either his precious Democrats nor his detested Republicans, wants to talk about economics. Fine, no problem Brian. Feel free to continue to opine about Enron without having a clue how real world economics work if that is what excites you, but I think I will decline to get involved in that sort of ‘mass-debate’. January 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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