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]
|
I was about to just add a comment, but I found myself with things to say that are better said up here on the front page.
Brian indicated my attitudes correctly. I certainly don’t wish things to go down the hell road… but they could. Many seem not to take into account the intensity of feelings amongst American citizens and the ways in which Americans as a people tend to react.
The first WTC bombing, the occasional blown up airliner, even the attack on the USS Cole were just the events of another Evening News. The USA is a huge country. Events of that size are unusual but not enought to impact the average person on a gut level.
The events of 9/11 were quite another matter. It got everyone’s attention. Everyone has friends, relatives, coworkers in New York City. The USA is a very mobile culture. Large parts of the population have worked or studied there at one time or another in their lives. The reaction, if you knew America and Americans was rather predictable: “We’ll find the bastards responsible and make them pay.” I know my business partner could vouch one of the first coherent things out of my mouth after the “OH MY GOD. ALL THOSE PEOPLE!!!” was about what we were going to do to bin Laden/Afghanistan and/or Saddam/Iraq. Others may not have been as familiar with the “intel” as I, but the gut reaction was repeated from one side of the planet to the other, wherever an American stood watching the live events.
The results after a little over one year is bin Laden/Afghanistan are down. He’s most likely roasting over a slow spit in some special deep hellpit along with his pilot friends and Saddam will be joining him shortly. It has been all very controlled and measured. Very careful to not cause too much harm to anyone’s sensibilities in Europe or elsewhere. Very controlled, very directed and undeflectable fury.
It should be quite noticeable the fury hasn’t cooled down very much in 12 months. Why? Because this is not a television media event, as much as media would like to move on to the Next Big Story. It’s real, and people do know the difference.
If someone were to be so foolish as to set off any “Weapon of Mass Destruction” (the weapons formerly known as NBC) the results will be different. If a nuke were to go off in San Franciso, or LA, or Detroit or where ever… the reaction would be extreme. Perhaps the government could restrain the populace and perhaps not. It would certainly risk not being re-elected if it didn’t do something very harsh. And if it happened more than once or if the death toll was in the millions as predicted for a worst-case Smallpox attack on an uninoculated populace… the reaction would be that of a berserker.
It would not be too extreme to say the results of such attack would be the use of methods similar to those of early Islam. Instead of “Convert or Die!” at sword point, it might well be the choice of “Change or die!” for the whole Arab world, guilty or not. And change they would. You don’t argue when 300 million heavily armed crazies are out for blood vengeance.
The lesson that must be drilled into any potential attacker out there is: the more of us you kill, the crazier and more violent we’ll get. If an attack passes some threshold of destruction on the continental USA the results will be exceedingly bad for children and other living things in the Middle East.
Look at pictures of Tokyo in 1945. That is the result of something done on American soil of similar scale (but not to civilians) to the WTC. You really don’t want to scale that up by a factor of a thousand. You really, really don’t.
Everyone wants peace – and they will fight the most terrible war to get it.
– Miles Kingston
So moves are afoot to lock the UK into the EU, sponsored by a man who is by any reasonable definition a traitor, by the name of Andrew Duff.
Pass whatever laws you wish, Andrew dear…as long as Britain maintains its own armed forces, ultimately British society can elect to rid itself of its onerous ties to socialist Europe, at bayonet point if required regardless of your meaningless legalisms… at which point it might be best for all concerned if you decided it would be prudent for you to stay in Brussels rather than come back to what you clearly do not regard as home.
Last night I came upon Steven Den Beste’s piece about the USA conquering and rearranging the Middle East, in the manner of the USA’s conquest and re-arrangement of Japan after WW2.
Like Perry I liked Den Beste’s description of the nature of the contest, but I recoiled somewhat from his proposed solution. I also found Eric Raymond’s supportive reaction to it very thought-provoking.
I wasn’t the only one who was provoked. Commenter Logi Ragnarsson (5.12 pm Thur 19) said, in among saying ruder things: “Why do you want to start a massive assymmetric war in the world I have to live in?” Others with similarly Iceland-like names piled in with similar points. As Dave Roberts commented a bit later (6.14 pm):
Well, you’ve really stirred up everyone with a ‘sson in their name.
There followed an intriguing digression into the question of how much, if at all, my British ancestors imposed civilisation upon the Indian ancestors of N. Srinivasan (7.58 pm). → Continue reading: Let them hate provided that they hear
I am not a huge fan of Steven Den Beste’s blog USS Clueless, as I dislike the style and content on so many levels. I frankly regard his understanding of history, geopolitics and in particular anything beyond the shore of his home country as generally underpinned by misleading stereotypes and ‘Hollywoodized’ history. In particular I dislike his frequent risible saccharine paeans to the transcendent superiority of an imagined United States of America in which in one would scarcely believe Waco, Ruby Ridge, civil forfeiture and Ted Kennedy would even be conceivable, let alone a reality. Such ‘feelgood’ writing is undoubtedly very good for the hit rate but then the Mirror, Sun and Daily Mail will always outsell the Times, Telegraph and Guardian for much the same reason. In short, I regard USS Clueless as a prime example of American neo-conservative thought at its most blinkered and parochial.
And so it is somewhat of a surprise to me to find myself in fairly robust broad agreement with Steven’s article about the fact the war against Iraq is in reality a manifestation of a cultural war. To me that is such a self evident truth that I am astonished that so many people find Den Beste’s essay so controversial.
Now as a libertarian, I am highly critical of the way western nation states are structured. In fact I would say that Continental European and, to a slightly lesser extent, Anglosphere civil society has a deep rooted sickness brought on by a century of creeping statism. And yes, that includes the United States. The degree to which freedoms taken for granted by our grandparents are regulated and circumscribed grows almost daily. As I have often written, the state is not your friend.
Of course the views I have just expressed would not come as any surprise to anyone who has read Samizdata.net for more than a few days: so far, so ‘typically libertarian’.
However the idea that as the state (meaning for me, the British state, and for many of our readers, the American state (USA or Canada)) and the aspects of civil culture which support it, is something to be resisted and undermined until the state has been cut down to size and the culture put back in touch with the classical liberal roots from which it sprang, does not mean that I think therefore ‘western’ culture is not better than the alternatives. I am constantly threatened by the state which makes me its subject and constantly robbed by it under threat of violence. Yet it is not the British or American states which threatens to set off nuclear weapons in London or spread smallpox through the public transport system in New York.
We are indeed threatened by the Islamic culture that is expressed by Wahhabism and Den Beste is entirely correct that we need to understand that what happened on September 11th was just a very visible expression of the kulturkampf that has already been going on for a long time. I strongly suspect it is because Islam is so clearly losing this ‘war’ that Al Qaeda was motivated to do the things it did. For much the same reason that this ‘war’ is so evidently real, I find myself grudgingly supportive of Israel on the basis that the enemy of my enemy is (sometimes) my friend, and also that Zionism is an entirely parochial -ism that will pose no threat to me either now or at any time in the future.
So is Den Beste correct that the entire ‘Islamosphere’ needs to be destabilized as part of this kulturkampf? Yes, but that does not need to be done entirely by force of arms, not even primarily so. We do indeed have to make sure that the short/medium term threat of our literal destruction that springs from the ‘Islamosphere’ is dealt with forcefully by the equally literal destruction of Ba’athist Socialism and eventually (let us not kid ourselves) radical Wahhabism. Once that is done, there is no need to turn the Islamic world into an American province, even if that was possible… in the long run the comfortable banalities and sheer material success of the Western secular capitalist way will destroy the cultural underpinnings of the threat that became impossible to ignore on September 11th 2001.
Glenn Reynolds links to an an article on the anti-jewish riots at Concordia University in Canada. The Board of Governors are apparently gutless wonders who don’t remember World War II. They have not yet (to my knowledge) punished the rioters for attempting physical harm against the persons of elderly holocaust survivors.
I don’t have Windows here (I won’t either!) so I can’t actually view this video myself. Regardless, I’ve heard enough descriptions of the incident to wish I had been there just to kick some Nazi arse like my daddy’s generation did. They may call themselves Palestinian sympathizers: but if it looks like a Nazi and acts like a Nazi… perhaps it is a Nazi. After all, Mein Kampf has been selling briskly in the Middle East…
Am I mad? You bet. Anyone who tries this kind of crap in my presence, will get hurt.
Blimey! It appears I am…
 What Farscape Character are you?…hmmmm. Whilst I do rather ‘admire’ Aeryn Sun (or rather Claudia Black), I’m not so sure I want to be her… I was rather hoping to be ‘Ka D’ Argo’.
Now, this is hilarious! It was linked on Heretical Ideas and deserves further dissemination (so to speak!). By the way, LOR stands for a Letter of Reprimand.
Warning! Can cause serious abdominal injury judging from the comments… I understand that somebody is already suing for replacement keyboard damaged as a result of “coffee spurting precipitiously (and uncomfortably) from one’s nose in the event of abrupt belly laughter”. 
I stumbled across this site by accident. It’s getting almost scary when you can find and order copies of Meet The Press from the 1940’s! The list of names is a who’s who of that period of history.
In the Victorian era a curious belief was prevalent that sovereign states ought to have governments that were reasonably efficient and solvent.
– Byron Farwell
A new poll suggests anti-euro sentiment hits new high. A survey carried out in early August, found 60 percent of respondents said they would vote against joining the euro, if the government held a referendum then on replacing the pound. Only 26 percent of the 2,000 respondents said they would vote in favour of joining the single European currency.
The only problem I have with this news is the old, but true, adage “lies, damn lies, and statistics”. And the sample of 2,000 respondents is far too small for rejoicing. At least it seems to be going the right direction.
|
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.
|
