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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Struggling into the office via the Tube (London’s subway system) this morning, I distinctly thought I heard the following announcement over the public address system. I may have been hallucinating, but I am not sure:
Ladies, gentlemen, buskers and beggars, London Transport regrets to announce that in addition to the Central Line being closed until Hell freezes over while we check to see if the nuts and bolts have been screwed in correctly, the Piccadilly Line has been suspended. So I suggest you suckers get outside and into the fresh air for a bracing walk. Let’s face it, transporting you people is more than our jobs are worth
As I say, I may have been imagining things.
Blix buried a rather critical item deep in his report. He has confirmed Iraq has drone aircraft, probably of the long range stated by Powell.
“Recent inspections have also revealed the existence of a drone with a wingspan of 7.45m that has not been declared by Iraq,” the report said. “Officials at the inspection site stated that the drone had been test-flown. Further investigation is required to establish the actual specifications and capabilities of these RPV drones . . . (they) are restricted by the same UN rules as missiles, which limit their range to 150km (92.6 miles).”
They have the ability to use them to spray chemical and bio agents.
In another section of the declassified report, the inspectors give warning that Iraq still has spraying devices and drop tanks that could be used in dispersing chemical and biological agents from aircraft. “A large number of drop tanks of various types, both imported and locally manufactured, are available and could be modified,” it says.
Confirmation of this kit is really bad news even though we suspected it might be true. In the sense we now know they really do exist, it gives credence to worries such might be used for attack against cities inside the US as well as against advancing troops in Iraq.
PS: Here is another one. And yet another.
I like this posting by Michael Jennings, about portable phone etiquette.
This piece (via slashdot) on how social customs in Japan (particularly amongst young people) are evolving due to near ubiquitous mobile phone use is quite interesting. Amongst the customs discussed is the fact that members of social groups of younger people are contacting one another constantly throughout the day to keep in touch with what their friends are thinking and doing. For doing this, text messaging is a much more important medium than voice. This is interesting, and is an application that the designers of cellphone networks did not anticipate. At all. The same thing has happened in Europe. (The greatest social sin that can be made is now to forget to bring your cellphone, or to allow its battery to run out).
Two other things are mentioned that I have also noticed. Firstly, people no longer have to arrange times and places to meet one another, but plans can be fluid and decisions are gradual rather than at once. Being late is no longer a cardinal sin, as long as you keep people informed about where you are and when you will (or will not) arrive. (I have certainly noticed this. It is probably the number one reason I have a mobile phone). Secondly, people are sending text messages before making a voice call, to check that it is a good time for a conversation. The telephone is a relatively intrusive technology, interrupting you from what you are doing and demanding attention. Sending a text message is much less intrusive, and doing this first is much more polite. (I do this myself, although typically only at times when I think there is a strong chance a voice call will be inconvenient, such as late at night or around meal times. At other times, I will just make the call). Here though is a situation where mobile phones are adding subtlety to etiquette rather than taking it away. Lots of people consider the mobile phone to be a technology that has increased crassness. This does not have to be so, and here is an example.
→ Continue reading: On portable phones and their various uses and impacts
As you may have noticed from the logo’s at the top of the Samizdata blogroll, we officially support the The Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran (SMCCDI). There have been a few small news stories on the Women’s Day march there but none gave the detail and context of the full letter. This may well all be available elsewhere. It may well be longer than anything we have ever posted here. I’ve done it anyway. I want to make sure it doesn’t disappear into some digital gulag.
Read it and see what the current generation of young women in Iran are thinking. While it isn’t libertarian, it is certainly liberal and a tremendous breath of fresh air. I sincerely wish them well.
With all that said, I yield to a young Iranian woman.
→ Continue reading: Iran can take care of itself
I have seen many good ideas put forth about why taking on Iraq is a good strategy, and how different approaches to the other members of the “axis of evil” are appropriate. I think there is something more profound happening in the Bush administration, a policy change whose outlines are now appearing and whose scope is breathtaking in its sweep.
Prior to 9/11, Bush was considered an isolationist. There were worries about America disengaging from the rest of the world. Folks, that is exactly where the endgame of the current global strategy is leading. President Bush and his advisors are cutting the Gordian knots which tie the US into permanent global deployment.
We’ve got large numbers of troops pinned down in the Middle East. Steven den Beste has already shown how the conquest of Iraq removes the reason for basing large numbers of forces in the Middle East. Troops can be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait, Turkey and god knows where else. Remove Saddam and there is suddenly no need for it. True, it will take some years to get Iraq Inc up and running the way we got Japan Inc going 50 years ago, but it will happen.
With Iran moving towards liberalization; with Iraq a capitalist democracy and with the Russians building a huge new oil terminal in Murmansk for sales to America, we not only get cheap oil… we undermine the very tool which allows Saudi’s to support billion dollar terrorist movements.
And then there are the Cold War leftovers in Europe… Another commentator I’ve read recently – where I unfortuneately do not recall – has suggested Rumsfeld wants to return the US to its classical military stance: a sea power. Maritime powers do not need large numbers of troops permanently based around the world. They only need ports for repair and refueling.
Where else are we pinned down? Korea… 37,000 Americans in harms way on that hellish armistice line. It is a no-man’s land of a half century old war that has never ended. Rumsfeld’s latest move in Korea is telling. US troops are to be pulled back. They will no longer be the Korean’s border canary.
SecDef Rumsfeld has stated in a number of recent public appearances South Korea has an economic capacity over thirty times that of North Korea and should be able to defend itself. He has suggestd it would be better for our soldiers and their families if they were based at home rather than in long overseas rotations.
In each area where there are large permanent American troop deployments, we see disengagement. It might take a war in at least one case to get us extricated. We are getting extricated nonetheless.
There is even a bonus prize. The UN is about to self-destruct. Put it all together and project ten years into the future. We see an America with a powerful naval and air force; with relatively few soldiers based outside the nation. An America looking out for its’ own interests and finally rid of most of the “entangling alliances” brought about by World War II and its’ aftermath.
We’re at the start not of Empire, but of the return to Fortress America… with a global reach via naval and air capacity to handle anyone who comes to our shores looking for trouble.
I think I could live with that.
Here’s a story we didn’t see in 1975:
“The Screen Actors Guild is raising the specter of “McCarthyism” and lashing out at people who urge boycotts of pro-South African wine and krugerand importers. “SAG said suggestions that ‘well-known individuals who express “unacceptable” views should be punished by losing their right to work’ was a ‘shocking development’ which recalled the 1950s House Committee on Un-American Activities,” Variety reports. SAG is especially upset that “hate-mail critics” have demanded the cancellation of wine purchases from South Africa.”
→ Continue reading: The one that got away
At this very moment, a coterie of bureaucrats and politicians are holding an intense round of meetings and negotiations on a matter of great international significance.
In actuality, what they are doing is plotting the destruction of a nation. Several nations, in fact. But the only one that matters to me is the one of which I am citizen: Britain.
No cruise missiles are involved. No smart bombs, no fighter jets, no artillery and not a single soldier will be deployed on the ground. Instead, the Weapon of Mass Destruction to be employed is called the EU Constitution.
Imagine, if you can, a constitutional document that has been drafted by the editorial team of the Guardian. Well, now you have some idea of what it contains. It is currently in the draft stage under the stewardship of former French President (and those words alone should be enough to raise the hackles on your neck) Valery Giscard D’Estaing. Once completed, it is the instrument by which Europe will be governed.
For a more detailed analysis of exactly what these people regard as the essential missions of European governance, I recommend this essay for the Cato Institute written by Patrick Basham and Marian L. Tupy (who also blogs splendidly from his University at St.Andrews):
“Conversely, the EU constitution is filled with “positive” rights for Europeans that can only be guaranteed by limiting the freedoms of other Europeans. As Hans Werner Sinn, director of the Munich-based Institute for Economic Research, notes: “The document ignores the free-market economy. There is not a word about the protection of property and no commitment to free enterprise and the division of labor.”
But the EU constitution does vow to protect “social justice,” “full employment,” “solidarity,” “equal opportunity,” “cultural diversity,” and “equality between the sexes.” It claims to desire “sustainable development,” “mutual respect between peoples,” and the eradication of poverty.”
Bear in mind that the precise terms of this document are still in negotiation which means they could conceivably get worse. As it is it condemns every European to a sullen and proscribed existance under the velvet whip of a honeycomb of pettyfogging, authoritarian bureaucracies. Some future!
At this point it is appropriate for me to extend my thanks to Philip Chaston who has painstakingly charted the progress of this melancholy circus and, most importantly, the enthusiastic role being played in it by everybody’s ‘war hero’ Tony Blair.
It does give us cause for a deeply ironic chuckle when we see him being compared to Winston Churchill in the foreign press. Janus is nearer the mark, for while he struts the world stage bleating about ‘freedom’ he is quite knowingly pushing this country towards the trap-door. Oh yes, he is being seen to quibble about some of the details but there is no doubt about his commitment to the project.
I suppose we must take a portion of the blame for the misapprehension. Perhaps we should have made it clearer that this man is not trustworthy. Anyway, for the record, this man is not trustworthy. How ironic that he should be instrumental in liberating the Iraqis from their baleful tyrant whilst simultaneously glad-handing the British people into bondage. Sorry, irony is not the quite the word. Tragedy, more like.
We have taken our eyes of this ball for too long. Maybe mesmerised by the spectacle of this man defying much of his own party to do the right thing on the War on Terror, we have scandalously overlooked the fact that he is also busy writing the final chapter of this country’s glorious history.
Thanks to their miserly and un-blog-friendly policy of charging non-UK readers a subscription, there is no direct link to this article in the UK Times. However it is worth a mention as it may go some way to explaining a thing or two:
Four decades of feminism have turned middle-class French men into miserable creatures who are intimidated by women and losing their way in an increasingly matriarchal society, a study says.
Of course, Groundskeepeer Willy would say that he knew this all along.
Men under 35 in particular felt that they were being treated as sexual objects by predatory young women.
And this is a cause for complaint?
Modern men see women as “castrating, vengeful, power-hungry and obsessed by men’s sexual performance”.
And that’s even before she’s hired a lawyer.
Men blamed advertising and the media for treating them as useless or sexual objects. They had suffered various phases of “destabilisation”. In the Sixties and Seventies they had experienced the moral revolution and the doctrine of female equality.
In the Eighties they had faced “implosion” through an explosion of models, from Golden Boys to gays and the Rambo type. In the Nineties they had been stressed by unemployment, aids, globalisation and the failure of the “masculine” technocratic model of society that had prevailed in France.
Younger men were said to be more unhappy than their elders. The 25-35 group felt that women “consume men and abuse them sexually”. The saddest group seemed to be those aged 20-25, who the magazine defined as “subjugated and feminised”.
It is not rare that they cultivate a gay image in which they find a model for acceding to femininity. Behind the abandonment of their virility there lies another odd ideal: that of ‘homosexual fusion’ with the woman, a loss of differentiation between sexes.
Perhaps this explains all that French obstructionism in the UN. Maybe it’s the result of a deep mistrust of all this Anglo-Saxon ‘virility’.
As a dissent-crusher of some repute, I think I have found a truly inspired means by which this noble art may be perfected.
Perversely, my inspiration was provided by the insistent bleatings of one of our commenters offering his tale of purported woe in response to this posting by Perry.
According to the commenter, Mr.Briant, Hollywood celebrities who have engaged in anti-war activism are now being subjected to ‘McCarthyite’ persecution. It has to be said that Mr.Briant is not alone in this view:
“McCarthy is riding again,” declares Glenda Jackson, Oscar-winning actress turned Labour Party member of parliament.”
To all normal people this is, of course, rubbish on stilts. Anti-war campaigners are not being hauled before tribunals or thrown into gulags. All performers trade on their popularity and their worth is measured by the extent to which the public will pay good money to watch them perform. If the public are unwilling to pay as aforesaid, then it is only natural for producers to re-evaluate said performers contract. It isn’t called ‘showbusiness‘ for nothing. I would expect similar consequences to befall any film-star who spoke out in favour of, say, the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Fame has its price.
But I daresay that neither Mr.Briant nor Ms.Jackson will be the slightest bit moved by these distinctions. Neither will anybody else for whom ‘disapproval’ constitutes ‘repression’ and I wholly expect the cry of ‘witchhunt’ to be ringing around the corridors of the Western leftist pantheon for the foreseeable future.
That being the case, I am prompted to propose that we bring back McCarthyism for real. I don’t just mean the regular anti-idiot fisking with which the blogosphere has become so intimately associated. No, I mean a real actual honest-to-goodness UnAmerican Activities Committee complete with powers of subpoena and blackballing. We, in Britain, could have our own version aimed at clearing out the Augean mess of the BBC. We already have the historical precedents to go by so all we need to do is copy them:
“CHAIRMAN: Mr.Sheen, are you now or have you ever been, an apologist for Saddam Hussein?
SHEEN: Well…I…I.. just want to say…
CHAIRMAN: Answer the question, Mr.Sheen
SHEEN: But…but…my rights….
CHAIRMAN: Never mind your rights. Just answer the question.
COMMITTEE MEMBER: Mr.Chairman, I believe Mr.Sheen is being deliberately evasive with this committee.”
The vista is so easy to conjure; the cigar-chomping Chairman, the occasional thwack of the gavel, the murmuring from the public gallery, the flashes from the cameras of the photo-journalists. It isn’t just public affairs, it’s high drama! They could even televise it on pay-per-view thereby enabling the subject film-stars to continue earning a living from the all the legions of people who would tune it to watch them squirming for real. No ‘method’ required.
I realise of course that a lot of solidly anti-idiotarian people might feel a little squeamish at the thought of a proposal such as this but I do urge them to give it serious consideration. Politics is, and always has been, a practical business and resurrecting the legacy of Joe McCarthy is, I submit, quite an elegant solution. Since the Hollywood activists and their supporters sincerely believe that they are being persecuted for their beliefs there is nothing to be lost politically or tactically by actually persecuting them for their beliefs.
Breathing life into a new and serious McCarthyite revival gives the American conservatives a second run at clearing up Hollywood and leaves the radical-chic crowd no worse off than they currently perceive themselves to be anyway. It really is a win-win situation and I thoroughly commend it to the house.
This is quite a story:
A Muslim cleric who urged followers to kill non-believers, Americans, Hindus and Jews has been jailed for nine years.
Jamaican-born Sheik Abdullah el-Faisal, 39, was told he had “fanned the flames of hostility”, as Old Bailey judge Peter Beaumont delivered the sentence.
The judge recommended that el-Faisal, from Stratford in east London, should serve at least half of the sentence and then be deported.
El-Faisal – who said it is permissible to use chemical weapons to kill unbelievers – stretched out an arm to a group of around 12 shocked-looking supporters as he was led away.
I’ve spent many minutes of my life opposing jail sentences like this. Clearly there is a point where words and actions can’t be separated, but I’m not convinced that this man crossed it. On the other hand, if we are to take these people at their various words over the years, they are at war with us, and the usual punishment for being at war against my country and having the misfortune to get captured is imprisonment for the duration, even if you actually did nothing except wear an enemy uniform. So you won’t see me at any demonstrations on this guy’s behalf.
Two further quotes from the BBC story caught my attention. There was this …
Defence lawyer Jerome Lynch QC, said it was unfair that people such as controversial cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri had been seen by police and not brought to court like el-Faisal.
… which sounds right to me! And then comes this gem:
Mr Lynch said of el-Faisal: “This was a man who, although misguided, was not malicious.”
I love that. He wanted all infidels murdered, but he wasn’t being nasty about it or anything. → Continue reading: On hate-speaking and law-making
Vaclav Klaus has been inaugurated as the new president of the Czech Republic, after several months of wrangling in Parliament. The position is elected by the two houses of the Czech legislature and represents a victory for the free-market opposition.
I first heard of Klaus when he was the Finance Minister of the Czech Republic when Czechoslovakia was a federal state (1989-1993). He was known to have a photograph of Mrs Thatcher on his wall and to be a keen follower of Hayekian economic theory. Vladimir Meciar, the double-agent populist who became Prime Minister of Slovakia in 1992 on promises to restore Slovak honour, demanded more subsidies from the Czech Republic or he would take Slovakia out of the federation. The response of Klaus, by then Czech prime minister was to say “Goodbye!” and not out loud, “Good Riddance!” to the horror of Meciar’s entourage. The episode soured relations between Klaus and Vaclav Havel, the friend of London’s ‘champagne socialist’ set who enjoyed the trappings of the presidency.
I last saw Klaus at the summer university last September at Aix en Provence, where he was awarded a special honour by the town, and guest of honour at the IES event. His election is a blow to the Left in the Czech Republic, to the European Social Democrat consensus (especially Messrs Chiraq and Schroder), and to spin-doctoring. Klaus’s TV debate technique is to explain unemployment by drawing supply and demand curves on a blackboard and drawing a line to show how many more people need to lose their jobs or take pay cuts. With the imminent accesion of the Czech Republic to the EU, I think some entertaining Council of Ministers’ meetings are in prospect.
Jeremy Sapienza wrote in his article called Only Terrorists Kill Innocents on Anti-State.com:
There seem to be many people, even in libertarian circles, who think that America was attacked because of abstract principles like “freedom” and “prosperity” and even “democracy.” And I didn’t want to say it, but so far it has been overwhelmingly true: the libertarians who would otherwise agree with the rest of us on most things but have done complete 180s here are Jewish. They support Israel blindly and fanatically, out of some allegiance to, as one writer put it, his “creed.”
[…]
It is a very easy concept to understand: the US government bombs innocent civilians all over the world, with hundreds of thousands dead in Arab parts, and so they hate us. They hate us because our government exterminates them like mosquitoes. So, in response to our government killing civilians, they kill OUR civilians. It is not right, but it is the only logical sustaining impetus for this utter hatred of Americans and our country.
[…]
Don’t worry, if we carpet-bomb Kabul there will still be Afghanis. I mean, they can still make more, right?
[…]
What the hell is the matter with you people!? Why are you so thirsty for innocent blood!? There has not been any arguments thus far that have convinced me that Muslims or Arabs are innately evil, or innately hate America because it is a prosperous, capitalist country. These are the ravings of people who are either lunatics or are too lazy to apply otherwise-heeded libertarian principles to their knee-jerk emotional reactions. Death is horrible. We should be working to eliminate it, not perpetuate it.
Well I am a so-called ‘pro-war’ libertarian, though 100% Goy, so I assume at least some of what is being written on anti-state.com is being directed at me and those of my ilk. However I do not support Israel 100%… in fact probably rather less that 50% if the truth be known.
Nevertheless I think it is clear that America was indeed attacked for abstract principles, just not ones like “freedom” and “prosperity” and even “democracy”. It was attacked for the abstract principles upon which the Islamic fundamentalism is based, which is to say ‘anti-secularism’ and as a corollary, anti-capitalism. You see Islam is indeed under attack in ways that really terrify fundamentalists the world over. However it should be obvious that the people who brought us the latest in Kamikaze tactics that bombing, and violent death generally, is not what frightens and engenders hatred from Islamists… it is an aggressive, global, unbounded secularism, whose carrier wave is a global and God-neutral capitalism which they fear. Not B-52s or F-16s or Tornados or Cruise missiles, but Playboy and Nintendo and banks-which-charge-interests and cheap DVD’s and satellite TV which mullahs cannot effectively control and so on and so on…
The likes of Al Qaeda want ‘us’ to leave ‘them’ alone… and by ‘them’ they mean the world’s Muslim population. But ‘we’ will never ever do that, because ‘we’ not really controlled by any authority who can make us stop making and selling whatever nominal Muslims the world over want to buy. And so out of desperation, the people to whom the very reason for their existance on earth is an imposed morality centred on certain abstract conceptions of God and Man which the secular world cares nothing about, attack us.
But Jeremy Sapienza does not see that, just the fact Iraq has been bombed since the ‘end’ of the last Gulf War, ergo that is the reason ‘they’ attacked ‘us’. And yet on September 11th the USA was not attacked by Iraqis angry at their treatment by the USAF, so I cannot see the relevance of Mr. Sapienza’s remarks about that being why ‘they’ kill ‘our’ civilians … neither was the USA attacked by members of the PLO or Hamas, who regularly get bombed by Israel, so I am not sure what relevance that has either… and just for completeness, neither were the hijackers that day Serbians who were pissed off about losing Kosova due to US and NATO actions, or German smarting over the end of the Third Reich or Japanese lamenting the loss of the South-East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
For the most part they were Saudis… and I cannot off-hand recall the last time the USAF bombed Saudi Arabia.
But then I think the article about which I am commenting is just a litany of misunderstandings and outright fallacies…leaving aside the patently false and positively libelous notion that the USAF/USN intentionally targeted civilians in Afghanistan (or anywhere else in the last decade). I wonder if Mr. Sapienza realises ‘carpet bombing’ is a technical military term which actually has a specific meaning. If Kabul had been carpet bombed, it would look rather like Dresden or Hamburg circa 1945, with tens of thousands killed in each air attack.
So what is the matter with us? Well for a start, we are not ‘pro-war’… we are pro-liberation. If Jeremy Sapienza can come up with a way to end mass murderous Ba’athist Socialism in Iraq by using harsh language and grimaces and singing Kumbayah, then I will quickly become a generous benefactor of anti-war.com. Until that is the case, I do wish he would stop his knee jerk emotional reactions and realise that yes, death is horrible… and the best way to stop the epidemic of state sponsored death in Iraq is to engineer the overthrow of Ba’athist Socialism so that Saddam and Uday, and their coterie of thugs, end up hanging on meathooks in a public square in Baghdad.
You see, some libertarians see the world the way it really is and want to actually see tyranny overthrown with the tools at hand now and replaced with liberty and justice for all. Quaint but there you have it.
Yes we all know that what will follow Ba’athist Socialism will not be some libertarian nirvana, but it will be better that what is there now… if you are an isolationist, then call yourself an isolationist, I have no problem with that. Just don’t think you are taking a moral libertarian position. You ain’t. The article quotes the anti-war.com crowd, who are very willing to contemplate the cost of war and the benefits of peace… but that rather misses the obvious fact that the alternative to war in Iraq, right now, is not ‘peace’ but continued tyranny. So what is the cost of tyranny in Iraq, Mr. Sapienza… year after year after year?
So when he writes “Death is horrible. We should be working to eliminate it, not perpetuate it”… why is he so keen to see Saddam Hussain, the principle cause of unnatural death in Iraq, perpetuated? That may not be his desire, for I have no reason to think Jeremy Sapienza is an evil man, but that is the reality of an anti-war position.
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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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