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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Funny how these things work out. Al-Qaeda sowed the wind, and the people of Iraq are now reaping � a crop! No 9/11, and there would never have been this. Not nearly so soon, anyway.
Looting? Well, according to our TV people it seems to be reasonably well targeted, maybe not exactly laser guided, but heavily concentrated on The Bastards rather than just inflicted on random innocent civilian shopkeepers. Good to see that the UN building in Baghdad has been included in the rampaging. And besides, I agree with Instapundit:
Some people think the looting is bad, but I think that a certain amount is good. It reinforces in people’s minds that Saddam is gone, and that he was unpopular.
I’ll say.
I like silly postings as well as sensible ones, because civilisation consists of harmless fun as well as profound goodnesses like those on TV today (provided you exclude our Chancellor Muhammed al-Brownaf spitting in the face of financial reality in the House of Commons). And a rich vein of silliness is Dave Barry’s Blog, which I heartily recommend, even if you just enjoy his fun writing and ignore all the fun links.
Links to individual items in Dave Barry’s Blog don’t seem to work, so you’ll either have to scroll down or else take my word for these stories.
There’s a nice losing the Drug War item. (Kermit with a joint.)
Mice with herpes isn’t so funny. Says Dave: “This is just what we need.” Although this story is really evidence of extreme human ingenuity in the face of the mouse menace.
And how about the escape of 80 million bees? This happened when a lorry full of them crashed, in Florida.
But what is this? “Another reason why we will definitely win.” That sounds like it could be serious, as well as funny of course. And it is.
Laser guided concrete: → Continue reading: Laser guided concrete – a conjecture about why the Iraqi army “melted away”
It has been liberated.
I have just watched live on TV via SkyNews as US soldiers used an armoured recovery vehicle to pull down the huge statue of Saddam Hussain in the very heart of Baghdad, surrounded by a crowd of Iraqis quite literally leaping about with joy
Thousands of jubilant Iraqis danced in the square and when the statue fell, they rushed forward, ignoring desperate attempts by the US soldiers to keep them back for fear the still unstable structure would crush them… but this was a moment they would not be denied and they quite literally danced on the huge fallen monument to one man’s insane monomania.
The cost in blood and misery must never been forgotten and there will be hardships, disappointments and trying times ahead but now is the time to celebrate what has been achieved. These moments do not come often in life, so savour them whilst they last. Enjoy.
Update: The people at SkyNews’ website are fast! They already have an article up only minutes after I watched it live on television (the article took them 12 minutes to put up (almost as fast as me!)… Way to go, guys!).
Patrick Ruffini is having server or hosting problems and thus has set up a temporary blog at patrickruffini.blogspot.com.
The following entry was put in our comment section by G. Cooper in response to Natalie Solent’s post The Floodgates of Anarchy. I thought it was sufficiently interesting to warrant a post of its own (as it saves me from writing one myself as I was thinking much the same thing):
Watching the scenes of jubilation this morning and the way the liberating troops are being greeted, I find myself experiencing strangely mixed emotions. I am deeply, unashamedly, proud of the coalition’s forces and the restrained and civilised way they have behaved in all this and I am also delighted for the Iraqis. But still there’s a troubling sensation nagging away at the back of my mind. It’s that the greater fight has yet to come. Not with bin Laden, Iran or Syria – the one against a far deadlier enemy, our own corrosive, mendacious Left and its fellow travellers: the Lib-Dems, anti-globalisation clowns, pacifists, religious ‘leaders’, self-styled ecologists and the rest.
Yesterday, even as the British were securing Basra and the Americans preparing to liberate Baghdad, I heard a radio phone-in during which an Iraqi in exile was pouring scorn on the liberation, saying that the people would never welcome our forces. He was, of course, wrong but will he would admit that today? He will not. Nor will the intellectually bankrupt army of Left-liberal academics, ‘experts’, ‘analysts’, broadcasters, politicians and journalists which has done nothing but undermine our efforts to rid Iraq and the world of Saddam’s wickedness.
Nothing will make these people admit they were wrong about almost every single aspect of this war. They will simply move on to criticise something else, not even pausing to reflect on their streams of negativity, lies and hopelessly inaccurate predictions (“millions of dead” “armageddon unleashed in the Middle East”, “ecological catastrophe” “it’s all about oil”).
It wasn’t easy to defeat Saddam. How much more difficult will it be to rout those working from within to tear down the very systems which allowed us to defeat this evil?
Stop Press: Even as I write, a BBC reporter in Baghdad is “sounding a note of caution” as he opens the next phase of the war, predicting a tide of anti-US feeling from Iraqis, weeks more fighting, more civilian casualties. This relentless spew continues, even as Uday’s palace burns and the reporter’s voice-over is broadcast to pictures of Iraqis rejoicing, celebrating and proving him a fool.
– Posted by G Cooper at April 9, 2003 10:27 AM
Well Mr. G. Cooper, I suspect very few of the people who found themselves on the wrong side of history, or to be more accurate, on the wrong side of objective reality, will acknowledge that they were wrong not just publicly but even to themselves.
Some who opposed the war on grounds which had nothing to do with Iraq (but rather domestic issues of cost, encroachment on civil liberties at home, etc.) will be unmoved in their views by the success of the war, and that is entirely logical. That ‘the good guys won’ is frankly an irrelevance if the basis of their opposition was an antipathy to the growth of the state at home (a concern which I share in spite of my support for this war of liberation).
However those whose opposition was based on the ‘welfare of the Iraqi people’ or the ‘doomsayers’ (“impregable defences of Baghdad” anyone?)… these people are the willful blind and deaf, walled off from seeing anything which does not fit their distorted subjective world views.
So it falls to you, and us, and everyone else who values the truth, to keep blowing on the trumpets until the walls come crashing down… and then keep blowing a little longer anyway just to be sure!
British troops in Basra are still struggling to impose a degree of law and order and have been in the odd position of rescuing a Saddam loyalist from being beaten to death by a mob of enraged locals.
It seems likely that what the British are encountering in Basra a few days after largely crushing overt resistance will be fairly similar to the situation US forces will find in Baghdad over the next few days as the last vestiges of Ba’athist Socialism collapse. A CNN reporter on the spot was recounting how he saw one man shoot another dead over looting spoils and obviously the US forces will have to get a grip fairly quickly to prevent things getting completely out of control.
It will be interesting to see how the scenes of celebrating Iraqis in the area of Baghdad called ‘Saddam City’ will be reported on local television across the Islamic world. Who knows, maybe a few meta-contexts will actually be shaken loose from their moorings.
…as the last vestiges of Ba’athist Socialism collapse. Sorry, I just have to write that again… as the last vestiges of Ba’athist Socialism collapse. Ahhhh. That feels good.
“Thank you Mr Bush!! We very like Mr Bush!!!”
– celebrating Baghdad citizen just shown on ITV news
After watching the thrilling news from Iraq… back down to earth with a thud:
Chancellor Gordon Brown’s budget… the long version of Brown’s ‘New Labour’ drivel can be found here.
The short form:
- More money for defence and security (the state’s only legitimate role)
- More socialist ‘social fairness’ and less economic freedom
- More regulation and a clamp down on theft-avoidance schemes
- More wasteful public spending and a big injection into the idiotic NHS
- More tax on sinful things because the state knows what is best for you
- Britain’s economy is growing and Gordon is going to continue chucking spanners into the machinery until it ain’t
Oh joy.
Turn on your TV now. If you are in Britain ITV is the right station to watch – never mind missing Bob The Builder on BBC2 – just do it, OK? You have just missed the sight of a Baghdad citizen in traditional Arab dress hitching up his robe to make a universally comprehensible pelvic gesture towards a picture of Saddam Hussein, said picture held up by another guy who has just finished whacking it with his shoe – oops, no, he hasn’t finished, more whacking left to do. They don’t think he’s coming back.
I gather the minders didn’t turn up at the press hotel today; like the rest of the Iraqi state apparatus they have melted away. Now the whole of Baghdad looks like the world’s worst organised car boot sale. Horns honking, people smiling, waving, jumping, shouting and looting every official building in the city. I just saw a lady carrying off a vase almost bigger than she is. Chairs seem to be popular, as do tyres. One practical-minded lad has gone for a large bottle of olive oil. Heavens, is nothing sacred? One reporter said that the mob had nicked all the UN vehicles and were driving them around.
I tell you, it’s anarchy out there!
Only – ahem- not our sort of anarchy. I am a minarchist most of the time, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays I am an anarchist, and I am a little bit worried about our good name. I can certainly cheer on the guys who have doused a mural of Saddam with petrol and set it alight; deconstructive art, I call it. Nor do I begrudge most of the looters their spontaneous redistribution of the ruling kleptocracy’s wealth back to the people. But it’s not all innocent fun: reports speak of shops being cleaned out as well as palaces, and that will be hard for those whose wealth and lives were tied up in those shops. Expect also to see the pent-up anger of the people bursting out into mob violence which will harm the innocent as well as the guilty.
When a drug addict undergoes the “cold turkey” cure, he will sometimes go into convulsions. This is the anarchy of cold turkey.
I’m a very unusual kind of libertarian; I’m an optimist. The fact that libertarians far more impressively credential-ed than I regard positive thinking as little more than a crazed attempt to destroy the last few remains of decency in British culture today, rather like having tea with the Vicar when we should at least be complaining about not having enough guns to shoot him, has never stopped me looking at the full half of the glass.
And listening to the news on the BBC today, I found myself cheering yet again for the greatness of Britain over the dumb arrogance of the rest of the European Union. The Eurozone, we hear, has been forced to halve its economic growth forecast to a miserable one per cent, while the UK, left-wing government and attendant tax hikes notwithstanding, is set to grow by a more-than-double-that two point two per cent.
Now, I am not advocating that libertarians pack up bags and go home to spend the rest of their political lives sitting on cushions of laurels while eating Pot Noodles. Nor do I think we ought to cease our scepticism of all things state-owned, our campaigning for free maket capitalism, or our advocacy of civil liberties and individual freedoms. Bad things are continually happening in the UK of course: this interference with university admissions procedures, for instance, smells very bad to me, even if it is only going to apply to institutions wanting to increase their student fees.
But on the other hand, looking at the wider picture even in that case, although universities will lose out from the new politically-correct impositions, they will also gain from the extra money: so compared to what they were like say fifteen years ago, when I was at Cambridge on a totally free government grant including rent and pocket-money, I’m not sure there’s an argument that things are horribly deteriorating.
Sure, they’re not exactly perfect yet: but what do we expect? The first ever totally libertarian state on the planet, tomorrow? Improvement is improvement, and, as these people say, the perfect society will have to evolve, whether we like it or not. Indeed, its values and practices already are evolving, in the most civilised countries of the West, and slowly spreading. But they aren’t as easy as just wanting them: the nuts and bolts have to be worked out as we go along. The freedom of our country’s future does not depend on whether its government is left, right, “libertarian” (if there were a libertarian political party anyway, of course) or Monster Raving Loony: the freedom of our country depends on what that government actually does.
And at the moment, the United Kingdom is not signing up to the Euro. British people simply do not want the Euro. Hence our economy is more free than that of Europe, and will continue to grow better than otherwise. I predict that the British people will continue to get what they want until long after the Eurozone has fallen years behind in the economic race and given up begging us to join at any price.
Another important advance was made today in the War Against Terror:
Three men have been found guilty of masterminding a dissident republican bombing campaign in England two years ago which injured several people and caused millions of pounds worth of damage.
Guilty as charged! Whatever the length of their sentence it will not be long enough. Throw them to the dogs, I say. We must give no quarter when dealing with these murderous terrorist scumbags.
Among the targets were the BBC Television Centre in White City, west London.
On the other hand, we should never lose sight of the fact that among the most important characteristics of our civilisation is the quality of mercy and the capacity to forgive.
The crew of the Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier Ark Royal have complained so bitterly about the BBC coverage of the war that the captain has removed the news channel BBC 24 from the selection available on board. Ark Royal is one of the few RN ships that receives TV channels directly via satellite.
And just to add insult to injury… the captain has replaced BBC 24 with arch rival SkyNews. Ouch!
(via Biased BBC)
Yesterday was Ba’ath party anniversary. The Iraq Press, opposition press agency, notes that for the first time in 35 years it was ignored as there were no authorities to force Iraqis to mark the founding anniversary of the ruling party in the traditional manner.
Streets were festooned with ribbons and Saddam Hussein’s monuments, statues and murals, found almost at every corner in Iraq, were decorated and hundreds of thousands of copies of his glossy and color pictures distributed.
Radio and television glared with anthems and songs in praise of the great leader. The festivities were only a harbinger of the nation-wide gala celebrations that took place in Iraq on April 28 to mark Saddam’s birthday.
This year, for the first time in 35 years, Iraqis will be not be “forcibly bussed to his hometown of Tikrit for an orchestrated demonstration to show the world how the Iraqi people loved their great leader.”
I do like the sound of these words:
The whole of April was a period in which the authorities were busy unveiling one statue of Saddam after another, one mural after another and one monument after another.
But now no new statues or murals are erected. Instead they are being pulled down and smashed across the country.
The western public will never understand the full horrific impact of a personality cult. They may see the prisons, torture chambers and hear the disturbing discriptions of individual tragedies. But they will not be able to comprehend just how pervasive propaganda of a regime built around an individual can become. My impression is that people imagine it is more of a public affair and if you do not read the newspaper or watch TV, you can more or less ignore it. A sort of celebrity craze that you can laugh off in the privacy of your home. Or filter it out, like the bias of western media.
But it is not like that, regime propaganda is everywhere, at work, in public and communal life. It follows you home, interferes with all aspects of your life – making sense of the world, relating to your family, bringing up your children. It employs personal and innocuous images, hijacks most wholesome and normal features of your life – celebrating birthdays, dating, having fun, making friends with your neighbours…
The coalition forces and western journalists ought to have in mind, when they encounter the locals, the regime’s ‘mind control’ techniques used on the population and habitually backed by force. They should remember that these people have been subjected to Saddam’s propaganda machine for the last three decades. Their way of thinking is not going to change in 20 days although the reality around them will have done. It will take a long time for them to learn to appreciate the kind of freedom we take for granted. I do not wish to insult Iraqis by suggesting that they will not rejoice at the absence of oppression and appreciate their new found freedom. It is their understanding of individual rights as applied to everyone, not only those who can enforce them for themselves by violence or connections, that may take a generation or two to sink in.
But for me that is the whole point of liberating Iraq.
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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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