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.
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Red Herring has an article about Supernova panel moderated by Doc Searls that discusses Fighting networked wars.
John Robb, author: Warfare is changing to an attack on critical points in infrastructures to create damage far beyond the cost of an attack. Al Qaeda sees the West as a system that it must attack on a distributed basis to make the most of its limited resources.
How do you fight these folks? Looking at the size of these networks, what is characteristic of al Qaeda and affiliated organizations looks like a crime network combined with traditional terror. They have mastered terrorist best practices and that has allowed him to unplug the organization from nation-states, which subverts the nation-state system itself. Al Queda is in a new zone. They have no restrictions on behavior.
A distributed problem has to have a distributed response.
Exactly, and that is one of the central arguments of White Rose, if you address a distributed threat such as terrorism by tightening and establishing centrally imposed and managed security, you will produce a sense of false security and ‘crowd out’ the only distributed security – the individual and in the society.
At last. George W. Bush starts telling it like it is, instead of issuing defensive justifications that only reinforce the petty slights and slanders that give rise to them.
We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take.
This is exactly what some of us have been saying for a long time. Finding WMDs was never the point. We knew Saddam had the capability, otherwise he could not have done this. We knew he could not be trusted on WMDs because he kept doing this. We knew he sensed no moral obligation to stay on his own ground because he did this. And we knew Bin Laden had declared war on the West, and we knew Saddam was sympathetic to that cause because… well,
Bin Laden: Any chance you could help out with this next big attack on the States I was thinking about, Mr Saddam?
Saddam: Certainly not! What you are suggesting is immoral! Live and let live, that’s my philosophy!
As if.
So I had a choice to make: either take the word of a madman or defend America. Given that choice I will defend America.
The only reason the game of Hunt-the-WMDs got so much publicity was that America used it in their attempt to appease the United Nations; Saddam’s non-compliance with weapons inspections was supposed to be the legitimate (ie UN-friendly) reason for launching war, therefore, finding WMDs after the event would have “justified” the invasion with hard evidence.
Bad idea. The UN is evil too. It issues terrorism-encouraging statements that inspire people to blow up public-transport users. The UN would not have approved war on Iraq if Saddam had invited the UN and Bin Laden round together for chicken a-la-king, raspberry pavlova and an after-dinner game of launch-the-nuke. It would have suggested waiting a bit longer in case the decimation of California was a mistake rather than a precedent.
No more Mr Nice Guy, please, Mr Bush. The UN is not our friend.
Today, watching television often means fighting, violence, and foul language – and that’s just deciding who gets to hold the remote control.
– Donna Gephart
Silicon.com reports on Japanese authorities decision that tracking is best way to protect kids.
The rights and wrongs of RFID-chipping human beings have been debated since the tracking tags reached the technological mainstream. Now, school authorities in the Japanese city of Osaka have decided the benefits outweigh the disadvantages and will now be chipping children in one primary school.
The tags will be read by readers installed in school gates and other key locations to track the kids’ movements.
Apparently, Denmark’s Legoland introduced a similar scheme last month to stop young children going astray.
I have a problem with Rowan Atkinson. He only has to open his mouth to set me off laughing. Bob.
Maybe we should start taking him seriously. Every few years Mr Blunkett takes it into his head to publicly demonstrate that he is not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican, by making a new law against incitement to religious hatred and Mr Atkinson stands up to argue against him. This is what happened in 2001 and that is what happened again the other day in the pages of the Times, and on Radio 4’s Today programme where I heard him, waiting for a joke that never came.
The joke is indeed a long time coming. Freedom of speech in this country did not merely arise during a period of violent religious divisions but because those divisions were insurmountable by any means other than allowing liberty for all.
We at Samizdata are always happy to awe. When the occasion merits we also do our best to agitate, derange and discommode.
Basically the only tenable defence against our collective awesomenosity is to flatter our socks off. What a very sweet thing to say, Mr Goldberg, and me likey you fine.
A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.
– Terry Pratchett, The Truth
The British Army is getting butchered.
In a rare display of acknowledgment by the mainstream press of what is going on in the British forces, John Keegan lays the blame not only at politicians’ feet but accuses the top military commanders who fail to impress the rank and file, and fail to stand up to their political masters.
We have always had a thing or two to say on the current state of the British Army here, here and here. We tend not to mince words and yet feel that we cannot adequately convey just how serious and harmful the dismantling of the British forces has been since the end of the Cold War.
John Keegan is a measured writer, the Defence Editor of the Daily Telegraph, which means that for him to come out so strongly against both the political and military masters in his opinion piece suggests that the situation is desperate and serious.
Why, then, does the Government contemplate – apparently so blithely – reducing yet further the number of regiments, the only really efficient instruments of power that it controls? All sorts of reasons can be cited. The Parliamentary Labour Party is anti-military, to a degree that prevents it acknowledging the favour done to the Government by the Armed Forces. The chattering classes are also anti-military, as they will remain until some terrible terrorist outrage shakes their complacency. Key ministers are either anti-military, such as Mr Brown, or uncomprehending, as is the Prime Minister. The media, besotted by football and celebrity, are also uncomprehending. The Armed Forces have, outside the constituency of ordinary British people who admire and support their Servicemen, no friends.
Read the whole thing, as they say.
I wonder what that would be in Latin?
Eamonn Butler on the Adam Smith Institute blog makes some interesting points about so-called consumer watchdog groups set up by the state. On one hand the state privatises because markets work better… and on the other it actually refuses to let markets do what only markets can do.
Chris Goodman revisits Waller R. Newell important 2001 article Postmodern Jihad: What Osama bin Laden learned from the Left and looks at from where the Islamists really draw their inspiration
It is noticeable that when followers of Osama bin Laden film themselves cutting off the heads of non-combatants, they seek to extinguish the still small voice of their conscience by shouting out the name of God [‘Allah’]. Either they believe Allah to be Satan or they do not believe that God – in the sense of objective goodness – exists. An act of moral goodness does not require you to blank out your conscience.
You could argue that they exist in such a primitive state of mind that they view the taking of life as worship. Indeed you do not have to go back very far in European history before you find people being burnt as offerings, and it is possible that they view exploding a bomb in a crowded night club, market, or bank as an act of devotion, possible but unlikely.
The people who decided to murder over 3,000 citizens of the world in New York came from the most educated strata of their societies. To seek to comprehend their actions with reference to a medieval religion is to neglect the extent to which they are a product of modernity.
The ideology that motivates the followers of Osama bin Laden is derived more from European Romantic Nihilism than it is in Islamic conceptions of God. I think that Waller R. Newell explains it well in an article that is available on the internet called Post-Modern Jihad: What Osama Bin Laden learnt from the Left which I have just read. → Continue reading: The western roots of Islamism
So the UN says that Israel’s wall is illegal, and demands they take it down.
That would be the same UN that Jacques Chirac is so fond of- the same Jacques Chirac who lately told off President Bush for having opinions about how other parts of the world should run themselves. That would be the President Bush who led the invasion of Iraq which the UN apparently did not approve of very much.
Oh well. Evidently they regard wall-building as a more serious humanitarian issue than Kurd-gassing, children’s prisons or helping out organisations that openly state their ambition to be the total destruction of civilisation and all who sail in it.
The court ruling said the barrier could become tantamount to an annexation of Palestinian land, and impeded the Palestinian right to self-rule.
Oh, the horror. Not to mention that-
…some of it juts into the West Bank, cutting Palestinians off from their farmland and dividing some villages.
Whereas, removing the barrier would only redouble terrorist attacks nine times over, thereby impeding the right of four year olds not to have their arms and legs blown off, etc. Which is irrelevant, because it’s just a vain claim unsupported by factual evidence;
[Israeli officials] argued it has already saved hundreds of lives since building work began.
Well, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs invents statistics for bombings that never really happened, obviously. No doubt they pay actors to lie around in the road covered with blood so there are pictures for the TV screens, too.
Still, could be worse.
At least nobody who works at The Hague has to live in Israel, right?
I do not have Sky Sports TV, because then all pretence of doing anything at all with my life would disintegrate. But I am a sports fan, and I am currently watching a game of cricket, on Ceefax.
You would be surprised how enjoyable this can be. Ceefax is especially good for following limited overs cricket, where each side only has a fixed number of balls to bat against, and where it’s all finished and done with in one day. These kinds of games can fluctuate wildly, and just watching the scorecard tick over can be very enjoyable, and fits in well with performing other tasks.
And there is no kind of cricket of which the above is more true than Twenty20 cricket, where each side has only twenty overs (equals 120 deliveries) to make its runs, and where the whole thing is over in one evening. And as if to emphasise the extreme extremity of this extreme form of cricket, the teams are not called boring old Yorkshire or dull Derbyshire. They are called things like the Yorkshire Hystericals and the Derbyshire Desperados.
These games fluctuate particularly wildly, and as if to make that point, one of the star batsmen of my team, the Surrey Psycho-Killers, just got out, for 32, against Kent Velociraptors. Another dismissal now, and Kent would definitely have the whip hand. More Surrey slogging and they should win. Okay, I would rather be there, especially since the Oval, where this game is being played, is only a walk away form my home. But Ceefax will do nicely, and this way I get to write this.
Last week, I swear I witnessed another game of Twenty20 cricket which was reduced, by our characteristically vile and windy weather last week, to each side only having five overs to bat each. Yes. They each had just thirty balls to score their runs. Northants Something Scary Beginning With Ns versus the Gloucester (inevitably) Gladiators, I think it was. Five5 cricket, you might say. But I can find no trace of this game on the internet. Did I dream the whole thing? No I did not. Here it is!
The point of all this is to emphasise how lively cricket seems to be in England just now, despite the fluctuating form of our national side, and in the world generally.
This guy is extremely down on these guys, just now. But however well or badly cricket’s mere administrators do, the underlying strength of the game is now a world sporting fact, if only because of the rise and rise of India, in the world generally, and as a great cricketing nation in particular.
Twenty20 cricket is already part of the Asian Games. Next, the Olympics.
David Carr will not he happy.
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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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