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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The question of why the US is gearing up to fight Iraq and not North Korea has been explored at length, mostly by those who would like the US do nothing about either. The reasons given here are convincing but there is an even more likely scenario. North Korea’s power to blackmail the rest of the world by threatening or invading its neighbours is correctly put into perspective.
The maximum damage North Korea could inflict on the world, even with tactical nukes, would be to destroy the economy of South Korea. Certainly, a tragedy for the South Koreans but its catastrophic impact on the country and its population is not likely to spill over to the rest of the world to the extent Iraq’s success would, as I argue below. This scenario, of course, assumes rather vaguely that the South Korean army would not annihilate the 1950s-style North Korean army in the first encounter. Tactical nuclear devices are horrendous, however, with so much at stake, South Korea would put everything it has into defending its territory and ultimately free existence. Further, it is likely to be a one shot event, so to speak. Yes, the destruction of the South Korean economy would plunge the world economy into recession but ultimately even if Seoul is destroyed, it could be rebuilt just as the Japanese rebuilt their cities.
The point I want to make is that the same kind of ‘local incidents – global effects’ reasoning should be used for thinking about Iraq. My conclusion is frightening and adds an extra urgency to the removal of Saddam and disarming of Iraq. This is because Iraq armed with nuclear weapons, tactical ones that is, could not only destabilise the Middle East, it could hold the Western world to ransom for the foreseeable future. I am pretty sure it would. Here’s how: → Continue reading: It’s all about oil, after all
Dave Barry (whose blogzistence I was reminded of by Diane of Nobody Knows Anything) links to this fine young fellow. In keeping with the Samizdata policy of explaining links, I will tell you now that his site is called Rent My Chest. If you do, he puts your choice of slogan on the said organ, and sticks a photo up on Rent My Chest.com, but from now on, we don’t say dot com, we say “nipple com”. My favourite slogan of the ones up there so far is: “MajorGeeks.com – Geek it ‘Til It MHz”
The consensus seems to be now that advertising on the internet has been a disappointment. That may have to be revised. This guy isn’t just someone who likes to show off his nipples; he’s actually done some thinking. He has a blog, and it’s a typographical first for me. He has a job. In short, he has a brain. Each slogan will cost you $20, and the most recent twenty stay up, so as the site gets more popular, the messages cost the same but for less time, i.e. the price goes up automatically. Smart. Seriously, watch this guy.
Last night I attended a political fundraising dinner where the speaker was a Conservative MP. Because he deals with defence issues, he was quizzed (often heckled) by members of his party about the Iraq war. Last November I heard an American ‘informed source’ give an explanation as to why war with Iraq was just and necessary.
The problem I have is that there was no common ground at all between the case presented by both speakers. According to one, the hunt for Al-Qaeda is the background goal. According to the other, Al-Qaeda will be cheering when that secularist Saddam falls. One said that nuclear, biological and chemical weapons were the single jusification. The other said it was a smokescreen to get UN backing. One said that there was eidence that Saddam had financed Al-Qaeda. The other said there was no such evidence, but he was financing Hezbollah instead (which is bizarre given the long-standing Iranian connection).
So we are left with this conclusion, the politicians haven’t a clue what they are talking about, and the intelligence services are playing their pet theories off against each other.
If the war against Iraq is about the right of one country to disarm another I am against it. Today Bush thinks Iraq should be disarmed, who will President Hillary or President Gore pick on? Switzerland? Israel? The United Kingdom? If it is to overthrow tyrants then why not start with North Korea? If the war is supposed to install a pro-American government in Iraq then how will bombing Iraqi cities help?
A couple of days ago I noted it is not unusual for the USAF to use the landing shuttle as a test target for their space defense optical systems. They did so this time as well and are reported to have seen major wing damage.
I’d love to see those photos, but I would say there is a fair chance it would take a security clearance to do so unless they were taken by something non-black and not even “grey”.
ANOTHER ONE: While I was not the one to first note this, I did report it early on. Insulation hits began causing tile damage after NASA switched to an “environmentally friendly” (read that as Astronaut killing) non-CFC based material.
EXTRA! Reader GK Elliot pointed me to this Craig Covault article on the story.
My ego being suitably gratified by the reactions to my earlier post about SUVs, well, I could not resist linking to this nice story, also by Reuters, about the latest incarnation of the mighty Ford Mustang.
It seems that folk who want us Westerners to cut back on oil as a way of squeezing the Middle East are fighting a losing battle at the moment.
Also in a totally gratuitous vein, here is a story with some picks of the latest Aston Martin, as driven by Pierce Brosnan in his, in my view, largely rather silly James Bond movie. But for this petrol-head, the car is pure eye candy. Aston Martin in my view has made some of the most beautiful cars ever. I used to rank the DB5 as the most aesthetically pleasing, but I think the Vanquish is even better.
We shall know what we go to Mars for, only after we get there. You might as well ask Columbus why he wasted his time discovering America when he could have been improving the methods of Spanish sheep-farming. It is lucky that the U.S. government like Queen Isabella is willing to pay for the ships.
– Freeman Dyson, letter to his parents, 19 May 1958
though it is a pity the US and other governments also crowd out private space business alternatives
It must be something in the air today… couldn’t be the smoke from the controlled explosion across the street from me last night… I doubt that could have wafted over London yet. I was intending to write a longish article on the evils of Saddam. Most of what I wished to say has already been said today so I will just point out why I was going to say it.
I finally found time to read the Home Office report on human rights abuses in Iraq. I knew the Iraqi leadership were truly bad news. I knew they tortured some people, beheaded a few are were really quite beastly. I was totally unprepared for the magnitude of it.
Saddam and family don’t quite make it into the first rank with Adolf, Joe and Pol, at least not with the information we have so far. But give them time. They are working on it.
Read it if you haven’t already. You will be thoroughly appalled and ready to volunteer to release the trap door on them… or more satisfyingly, place a .38 between Saddam’s eyes so he can watch while you pull the trigger the first 5 times.
That would be a memory to treasure for life.
Reading a number of anti-war libertarian blogs such as that of the estimable Jim Henley, it occurred to me that among the various errors in their positions over what to do about Saddam, etc, is a tendency to dismiss or downplay any threat that such countries may pose to us.
Now, I am not going to engage in some long ramble about why I think the case for war is correct (though I think it is). However, what I do want to do is briefly reflect on what I think is an aspect of the anti-war libertarian position which could prove damaging to libertarianism more generally. It is the problem of evasion.
In recent years, libertarians have been aware of a growing threat to our free society, namely, the Green movement. And much time is spent, rightly, dismissing or pulling apart the scare stories (such as the Greenhouse Effect, population explosion, etc) that are offered to justify wholesale government controls over our lives. But a nagging question is – what would libertarians do if the Green case is partly, or even wholly, correct? What if global warming is as bad as they claim? What would we fans of free-wheeling capitalism do about that? It is simply not good enough for us to trash the Green case without at least working out how we would cope with such issues.
It seems to me that the isolationist libertarians who rubbish most government attempts to crack down on terrorists and their state sponsors need to answer a similar sort of question. How can free, minimal state societies deal with serious threats to liberty and life? What sort of measures should such societies take?
I think we owe it to ourselves to pose such questions and come up with a few ideas. Attacking governments for trashing civil liberties and ramping up defence spending is of course a good thing for libertarians to do, and we must continue to do so. But not offering any positive suggestions on how we defend ourselves is not just unwise. It threatens also to make the libertarian movement irrelevant.
And frankly, I don’t give a toss whether such worries make me a ‘neo-libertarian’ or whatever. I am not interested in going to my grave knowing that I died like a good disciple of Murray Rothbard. I want to stay alive with as much freedom as possible. It is about time that we worked on a few ways to achieve that.
Consider the gauntlet thrown on the floor.
Reflections of a former British civil servant on the likely war against Iraq to replace Saddam Hussein. A measured and calm overview of the reasons for and arguments why we should remove Saddam Hussain… and kill the murderous, ruthless son of a bitch!
The upcoming war to remove Saddam Hussein was planned in the aftermath of the 11th September attacks in Washington and has been supported more-or-less willingly by the British Government. It would appear that London and Washington decided that, for a combination of reasons, the containment of Saddam’s regime was no longer enough, and that he must be removed. As far as an outsider can gather, this conclusion was not reached for any individual reason, but because the cumulative force of a number of individual factors made the risks implied by Saddam’s continuance in office too great. The reasons encompassed Saddam’s past, present and possible future acts:
- Saddam might acquire nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, particularly since the weapons inspectors had been banned from Iraq since 1998. Many of the weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that he was supposed to destroy under UN Security Council Resolution 687, the ceasefire which ended the 1991 Gulf War, are unaccounted for.
- Saddam might pass such weaponry onto terrorists. He has a long pedigree of helping terrorists, such as Abu Nidal, who died in Baghdad, and the PLO, and of sanctioning his intelligence services to commit acts of terrorism when it suits his interests – the murder of Gerald Bull in Brussels, the attempted murder of George Bush senior in Kuwait in 1993 and the assassination of some Iraqi opposition leaders.
→ Continue reading: Let’s do be beastly to Saddam
In the ‘classical age’ of science fiction, most American writers seemed to be limited or even minimal statists (Heinlien, Piper, “Doc” Smith and so on).
Most writers tended to support a strong military defence – but not very much more government (indeed they were hostile to welfare statism).
These days science fiction writing seems to have changed. A minority of writers (such as L. Neil Smith) are actual anarchist (real anarchists – not people who do not like the word ‘government’ but still want a collective power to control everything), but most other writers are welfare state – interventionists writing ‘feminist science fiction’, ‘environmental science fiction’, ‘psychological science fiction’ or even straight science fiction – but with the normal statist slant of main stream literature.
Perhaps the problem started when science fiction began to be ‘taken seriously’ (studied at universities, taught in writing classes and so on). Or perhaps the general statism of our culture just flows in everywhere eventually.
However, whatever the cause the old classical view of science fiction (fairly strict limited statism – tending towards minimal statism) is gone and has been replaced by a few anarchist writers and a mainstream of welfare statists.
This is even getting into fantasy writing. Again I am not referring to modern British writers (I do not expect much from writers beloved by the B.B.C. – such as Mr Pullman), but even best selling American fantasy writers seem to be coloured by statism.
For example Mr Jordan (of the highly successful ten book Wheel of Time series) seems to assume that good government involves all sorts of interventions (hence his hero, oddly enough called Rand, keeps ordering people about in their economic life), and there are the normal signs of mainstream literature – wealthy businessmen are dodgy, the utopian society of the ‘Age of Legends’ was an interventionist welfare-state and so on.
Actually modern fantasy writing in Britain started out as broadly anti-statist. Tolkien (for all his Catholic distaste for people who were obsessed with money making) was no statist – and neither was C.S. Lewis. And the American fantasy writers followed them in the their belief that a good government was one which protected the nation against other powers and did not do many other things.
In short there was similar political outlook among the fantasy writers and the science fiction writers.
This reflected itself in role-playing (when this grow up), the format of most role playing was an individual or group of individuals opposing evil (evil being defined as forces, human or other, who came to rob-kill-control). External invaders, internal corruption, tyrannical government – it was all basically the same thing (force attacking people).
People who were socialists in ‘real life’ never thought of setting up welfare states in fantasy or science fiction games – because that was not the nature of things (and games did have an effect on “real life” beliefs over time).
Sadly this all seems to be ending.
The sports utility vehicle (SUV) is the bete noire of the anti-globalista class, epitomizing much that they hate about western, and specifically American, culture. They are big, brash, consume a lot of fossil fuels and symbolise an almost Wild West ethos (although in my experience many of them are driven by stockbrokers in deepest west London).
I must say that in my more ideologically manic moments, I fantasize about buying a SUV for no other reason than to cock a snook at the flat-earthers. Check out this interesting story for the enduring appeal of these capitalist behemoths on wheels. Vroom!
Sir Humphrey: “Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last 500 years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now when it’s worked so well?”
Jim Hacker: “That’s all ancient history, surely.”
Sir Humphrey: “Yes, and current policy. We had to break the whole thing [the EEC] up, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn’t work. Now that we’re inside we can make a complete pig’s breakfast of the whole thing: set the Germans against the French, the French against the Italians, the Italians against the Dutch. The Foreign Office is terribly pleased, it’s just like old times.”
– Yes, Minister, British comedy series
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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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