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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Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
– John Donne (1573-1631)
When one embarks upon a war, nothing is ever certain. However if I was a betting man, I would anticipate the mother-of-all-surrenders, at least initially, followed by some nasty but sporadic and isolated fighting in a few key centres… in the end there is only so much that can be done from 20,000 feet and it is the squaddies with bayonets who will end this matter once and for all.
But just as the article Silver Linings earlier today suggests, I have an inkling that it is not just Saddam Hussain and Ba’athist Socialism which will rue the day Al Qaeda changed the world on September 11th. The aftermath of the Cold War ended today in the United Nations and I suspect when we look back in ten years we will realise that a great many things were never quite the same again. I think that NATO, the UN and (to a lesser extent) the EU have all been fatally weakened and thanks to Jacques Chirac, a great many people who matter have finally noticed that the zeitgeist has shifted and we are entering terra incognita: uncharted territory.
We have been hearing about the end of the bi-polar world and the ‘New World Order’ but in reality I do not think people really believed that the old institutions, assumptions and mindsets were really as obsolete as they actually are. It remains to be seen how long the UN and NATO continue to twitch but when the British and American tanks stash across the border of Iraq, they will be cutting the veins of more than just Ba’athism.
Britain too has just had an object lesson in the fact you cannot have your cake and eat it too. We are either an Atlantic nation trading with the world as we always have, or we are within Festung Europe. I do not think he realizes the enormity of what he is doing but Tony Blair is never going to be a ‘Good EUropean’ again… and if he tries to be, the contradictions are going to be impossible to reconcile.
Stay tuned. We live in interesting times.
Colleagues of mine of Guardianista persusations are muttering about how that evil, gun-toting Texan retard in the White House has “probably busted the EU, the UN, and even NATO”. Much gnashing of transnational progressive teeth today.
As Perry might put it – excellent!
The US DOD has a web page with reports and a place to leave a thank you to the troops. I’m sure they must have arsehole filters. There are certainly enough of them out there who would attempt to abuse this.
If soldiers were a registered ‘victim class’, half of ‘the left’ would be in prison for ‘hate crimes’ by now.
The British commander of troops in the Gulf admitted yesterday that he had been forced to borrow a pair of American desert boots because of a foot injury. Air Marshal Brian Burridge, asked how he had come by the injury, replied: “Kicking a journalist.”
The Parliamentary Conservative Party is filled with people who despise principles too much even to see the value of pretending to have any.
– Sean Gabb in Free Life 43
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was shown on TV yesterday afternoon saying something particularly interesting, to my ear. I don’t mean to suggest by this that Straw is normally dull, but this particular thing really got my attention. He used the phrase “Prime Minister Blair”. I’ve never heard a British Cabinet Minister refer to the Prime Minister of Britain in this particular way.
Straw presumably assumes that if he just said “Mr Blair” or “The Prime Minister”, which would be the usual way for a British Home Secretary to talk about a British Prime Minister, a significant slice of his audience might be confused as to exactly who he was talking about. Only by him identifying and placing together in the one phrase both the name and the office can he be confident of avoiding any such muddles among those he is seeking to communicate with. Either that, or he’s been talking so much with Americans in the last few days that their verbal habits are rubbing off on him.
Either way, what I think this shows is how very global politics is becoming. Yes it’s partly that Mr Straw is just now up to his neck in a particular global crisis, but as all we political pundits have been telling each other for as long as any of us can remember, more and more political issues now have a global angle to them, to the point where it makes more sense to speak of them as having local variations.
This is happening because of the continually plummeting cost of international communication. A system of global wires and waves that was once the privileged preserve of millionaires and statesmen, such as Jack Straw, is now available for us all to use at will.
Hence, for example, this weekend’s world wide anti-war demonstrations mentioned just before the report of Mr Straw’s odd little soundbite. Anti-capitalism and (savour the irony of this) anti-globalisation demos have been global ever since e-mail got into its stride. → Continue reading: A verbal straw in the wind – reflections on the globalisation of politics
Patrick Crozier at Transport Blog links to a piece about the perennial tendency of all concerned to prefer railways to cars, except where their own personal travelling arrangements are concerned. Cars take you where you want to go. Trains can’t take you to almost any of the places you want to go. Work is spread out in the suburbs. Trains can’t be spread out in the suburbs, because they only stop at stations. If you could jump off trains at any point, the way you can jump off the old London double decker buses with the wide-open back doors whenever they slow down, and if trains did slow down quite often, then trains would be much more convenient things. But you can’t do any of that.
So, people actually use cars. But what they vote for and politick for is trains. People don’t like cars, in the sense of liking their combined effect. They prefer the train system to the car system.
Why? Whence the train fascination? Why does even Transport Blog obsess about trains, when trains are such economically stupid things compared to cars?
Part of the answer is surely aesthetic. Trains go in those lovely elegant curves. Trains don’t get stuck in train jams and produce nothing but fumes for twenty minutes. (They do get stuck from time to time. But mostly they don’t get stuck.) Above all, trains don’t need huge, huge train parks to park in. They just carry on trundling around.
Cars, on the other hand, have turned a substantial percentage of the surface of the earth into a place whose only purpose is to be purposeful. The biggest bridges and the most intricate motorway interchanges have genuine beauty and grandeur. But most car infrastructure is every bit as dull and clunky and messy and uninspiring as the word infrastructure itself is.
In particular, car parks are an almost total aesthetic negative, in most people’s eyes. Car parks pave paradise. The more exciting a building is, the greater the price that seems to have to be paid in meaningless tarmac expanse surrounding it. And which is now uglier: a full car park or an empty car park? You tell me.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. → Continue reading: The aesthetics of car parks – let’s have some!
Fox News is reporting Saddam “might strike first.” This is hardly a surprising idea. I suggested it myself many months ago. I’m sure other bloggers have done the same.
In military terms, what other choice does he have? He can and has dug in defensive positions, but there is no guarantee US troops will oblige him with a frontal assault. If he has any good generals still among the living, they will have told him to expect the enemy everywhere at once. Their hardened positions will be bypassed and beaten into the ground with ordinance. Only in Baghdad itself can his troops hide among the populace and attempt to lure US troops into bloody fighting. It is hopeless if he tries a set piece defense. He must be creative. He must hit first.
He’ll want to hit US/UK troops with chem and bio while they are still marshalling. He will desire a telling blow to take temporary initiative and damage morale. The next most important move is to goad Israel rash action. The current Israeli administration is seen by Arab states as likely to respond reflexively. If Saddam hits an Israeli town with Sarin or VX…
I do not think he would use Smallpox in the Middle East. Israel has a modern health infrastructure and would survive it… but it would spread rapidly into Palestinian and other poor densely populated areas of the third world with an effect too horrible to contemplate.
If I were in his shoes, I would be working my staff into the ground looking for a way to get at the carriers. I don’t think there is one, but I don’t have his resources at my fingertips either. A one man suicide submarine maybe? A missile pre-positioned in the hold of a cargo ship 100 miles from the formation in the Gulf? I’m sure every one is thinking through the contingencies.
The US ships moving through the Suez after the abandonment of the Turkey represents a target rich environment for a pre-emptive strike. If I were a Captain on one of them, I’d have a prickle in the back and an excessively tight arsehold until I sailed into blue water.
A major terrorist attack in America using Smallpox and the kitchen sink are certainly options, but are tactically a bad idea. The last thing he wants is to kill off some anti-war demonstrators and turn the rest into true believers.
He only has two options. Give up now or fight. Saddam is not a personally suicidal type. Nor is he a coward. If he fights he will use everthing at his disposal. His win condition is high allied casualties and long delays in their war plans. He may hope if he holds on long enough:
- Tony Blair will be forced to withdraw.
- The American public will turn on the war due to terrible scenes of carnage and American’s in body bags.
- His French allies will build up global pressure.
- The Israeli’s will trigger an Arab-Israeli war.
- His agent provocateurs, assasins, saboteurs and suicide bombers in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and else here will cause serious harm to enemy Arab leaders.
It is just blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever done wargaming.
It is taken as read by certain commentators on what is loosely known as the ‘left’ (sorry to use that term for those that hate such crudities) that one of the terrible things about market economies is the inequality of outcomes they spawn. Hence their enthusiasm for steeply progressive tax rates, heavy state spending, positive discrimination in favour of the poor and other preferred groups for things like university admissions, and so on.
A pretty classic demonstration of this mindset appeared in the Guardian newspaper <drums roll!> this week, in a column by Polly Toynbee. Polly is one of the most articulate, if consistently wronghead exponents of the Procrustean view of equality.
For her, equality of wealth is regarded as an utterly self-evident good, of no need of further justification or support. And yet surely what these folk ignore is that their view of the world depends upon us thinking that wealth is essentially fixed. For them, there is no such thing as wealth creation, only redistribution. Their mental apparatus is in this sense seriously defective.
It also misses another fairly obvious point. The wealth held by individuals varies through the life cycle. People typically save more and accumulate more capital into their middle age and then begin to draw down upon it as they reach the age of retirement. That is why claims that X own a shockingly high proportion of nation’s Y’s wealth are so misleading. They crucially fail to see how circumstances vary through time.
You might wonder, gentle reader, why I am getting het up about issues which are blindlingly obvious to Samizdata readers. Well, for one thing, it seems pretty obvious that so-called Conservative politicians no longer feel able to argue the case any more for the market. I also think that with Labour seemingly lurching to the left and with Tony Blair in peril of losing his job, the time may come again when we have to spell out the basics. It is never too early to start.
I believe it was the Victorians that set the tone. It was during the age of the ‘Great Philanthropist’ that charities first established their status in the public mind as selfless doers of great good in the world. Understandable really that, in an era before welfare benefits, they were the pious prickers of the public conscience; the saviours of last resort for the needy and woebegone, the kindly benefactors of the benighted poor.
Over the years they have glacially established their reputations as the standard-bearers of humanity and decency to the point where, today, membership of or subscription to charitable organisations is quite the highest badge of virtue. Contributing to their coffers, especially publicly, has come to be seen as the ultimate act of redemption for sins real or imagined.
Perhaps because of this, nobody seems to have noticed that some of these organisations (many world famous) have gradually shifted the focus of their energies to the point where they now energetically pursue policies that are diametrically opposite from those stated.
Take, for example, the British charity Oxfam, set up some 50 years ago by a group of young, idealistic Oxford intellectuals with a brief to help ‘feed the starving’. How very odd then to hear of this kind of thing:
The scientists complained that humanitarian groups such as Oxfam, Christian Aid and Save The Children, backed by EU funds, had frightened African governments into rejecting food aid. They said the groups had also alarmed starving populations. “Some groups have told people that genetically modified products are dangerous and could cause cancer,” said the executive director of industry body Africabio, Prof Jocelyn Webster. Webster and Prof James Ochanda, head of biochemistry at the University of Kenya, led the African delegation.
The scientific delegation said that genetically modified crops boosted yields and could make Africa less dependent on foreign food aid.
Seems that Oxfam’s mission to aleviate starvation has mysteriously morphed into an assidious campaign to cause starvation. → Continue reading: Not great and not very good
Somebody (they have chosen to remain nameless) has posted a comment to one of the posts below requesting a ‘plug’ for their Australian libertarian website.
Our anonymous commenter describes it as a “meagre attempt to create a Samizdata down under” which I think is an undersell. It looks like a fair dinkum site to me.
Anyway, surf on over and crack open a few tinnies with those intrepid (but modest) Antipodean freedom fighters.
I have always taken what I regard to be a classically liberal and ruggedly secular approach to the issue of abortion, a matter which I feel is best dealt with by reference to degree rather than dogma.
It is for these reasons that I have (and still do) lean towards the view that abortion is a matter for the individual conscience rather than the dictates of the state. This does not mean that I think aborting a foetus is a good thing. It simply reflects my belief that a blanket prohibition would be a cure that proves to be worse than the disease.
However, there is abortion and then there is ‘partial-birth abortion’, a process that is conducted between the 20th and 26th week of gestation when the infant is dragged from the womb feet-first before being killed by a blow to the skull. For the life of me I cannot see how this barbaric process can be distinguished from murder most foul.
So I have no hesitation in endorsing British conservative Peter Cuthbertson in his welcome of this decision of the US Senate:
The Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 received a 64-33 vote. It now heads to the Republican-led House, which passed the ban last year before it was stopped in the then-controlled Democratic Senate.
Peter has uploaded some photographic evidence of the horrific aftermath of a partial-birth abortion. He should make no apologies for doing so. That the truth is ugly and unpalatable is all the more reason for confronting it and it is not anti-liberty to protect a small human being from this brutal and undeserved fate.
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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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