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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I am slowly matching velocity with the world after an absence due to technical problems, something I may expostulate on later. So much has happened I hardly know what to comment on first. So I’ll just pick one…
There seems to be quite an interesting discussion circulating the blog world about The Meaning Of Life, The Universe and Everything and Our Place In It. As I have not yet seen anyone tell it as I sees it and I’ve not much else to do with a Friday Night Sniffle (as opposed to a Saturday Night Fever), I have all the excuse I need.
A reader of Patrick Ruffini pointed out blogs are not newsgathering organizations. I agree with that. Of course if the phenomenon continues to grow that may become less and less true. I live in Belfast for example. If blogs existed ten years ago, my reportage would have been first-hand man on the scene calibre. I once posted a report to a mail list while watching the fires of Unionist rioters springing up all over the city while I was stranded in a 6th floor office in the middle of a “no man’s land” between neighborhoods in North Belfast. I watched the pall of smoke grow thicker and thicker until I could no longer see the lights of the city centre less than a half mile away. Someday when there is a blog on every block they may well become the primary source for raw news. But for now that is not why blogs exist and it is not why they are a force to be reckoned with all out of proportion to their size and readership.
Most of what we call “the news media” is simply the infrastructure that gathers facts, photos and documents. It is the mundane and sometimes extremely dangerous collection of raw data. Doing this well requires global resources. It used to be one of the primary functions of news before the advent of the Superstar TV Newsman. In the early stages of this transformation there were newsmen like Walter Cronkite who were respected because they were good at what they did and were clearly part of their own culture.
It didn’t take the network news long to discover the power they could wield by deciding what would be reported with what slant. Some say the turning point was the Kennedy/Nixon debate. A change in camera angle, a slight difference in which images are selected and which are not… and you can pick the winners and losers, the innocent and the guility and set the national and perhaps even the global agenda. If one major outlet pushes a story as the lead, all the others typically follow it or find related stories. While it is true that print media and radio had done the same with considerable success for many decades, they did not have the profound subconscious story telling ability of imagery on their side. Although we laugh at the what if satires of CNN and D-Day or Pearl Harbour, we should perhaps be profoundly grateful that they did not then exist.
Over time the star system led to a more paternalistic news system. It became more about deciding what the news was to be. If the newsmen are Stars and know what we should consider important then we inevitably end up with their beliefs and prejudices buried in that selection. Intentional or not, the effect is equally bad. It has reached the point where the relevance of a story to the public is of less importance than the relevance to the political beliefs of the media personnel. Of course all bets are off if there is a human interest story of no importance whatever (such as the OJ Simpson Trial). It will be the lead simply because it is an extremely profitable form of entertainment. Media is a business and there nothing wrong with that. Many millions of people love soap operas. But this is not an effective way to keep a citizenry informed.
That is where the blog revolution comes in. Blogs are anarchic. The entry cost is low and falling so anyone who wants can jump in. If the new blogger has ideas and communicates well they will collect a readership; if they grow tired of it someone else with similar ideas will take up the slack and the readership. Any thought that can be thought will be written, rewritten, torn apart and reassembled a hundred times. The better the idea, the more relevant and interesting and important it is, the more widely it will spread… regardless of to whose interest or detriment it is. That is the glory of Chaos.
If we look at the current war we see time and again that the Media Formerly Known as Major have been called to task over their spin and over the central framework of the Story they decided to tell. A decade or two ago, I and others would have grumbled to our mates in the local and said they were getting it wrong. But we would have left it at that because we had no voice in the matter. After enough repetition of the Story, we might come to agree with it or at the very least begun to argue within the designated framework of the Story. That is what classical rhetoric is all about for those who know what it is. It is also what Marxists called the Dialectic.
Now don’t get me wrong. I do not believe that the global media is going to shrivel up and die. It serves a purpose. Journalism was once and can once again be an honourable profession if it goes back to its’ roots and forgets the Star thing. Someone has to go out and collect the raw data. What has changed is who makes the decision on what the data means, what is important and to what use it should be put. That is now the niche of the blog.
All Hail Eris!
I’m nursing an oncoming cold and sitting back with a hot cuppa (coffee not tea) whilst I do a bit of hardcopy reading. I’m rather seriously hooked on aircraft in general and warbirds in particular so my sneezetime reading material is not surprisingly on that subject: FlyPast. It is one of two very fine UK magazines about the world wide warbird scene I read every month.
There is a particular relevance to current events in a series of articles written jointly by the crew of a WWII American B-24 Liberator. The narrative is taken from their collected diaries, scrapbooks and recollections. At one point they say their formation had a very good day and all hit their Magdeberg target with extreme accuracy:
The squadron’s bombs hit right on the MPI (Mean Point of Impact) with 95% within 1,000 feet (300 meters) and 100% within 2,000 feet. The crew could see explosions and flames shooting into the air. Smoke rose to about 8,000 feet and was visible for about 100 miles as the aircraft proceeded towards home.
A very good mission indeed. Now fast forward it to today and imagine the squeals of horror we’d be hearing if 219 bombers hit a target inside an historic city and 5% of their load hit between a thousand and two thousand feet away from the Taliban facility that was being targeted.
I’ve seen some improvement in reporting, perhaps because the news media has been getting thoroughly and justifiably battered during the last few months. They still have some learning to do. Perhaps the biggest story of the war is the wonder of the changes in military capability over the last 60 years. Changes that now allow us to specifically target and kill the SOB’s who done it without leveling an entire city around them. So what if we occasionally miss with one or two bombs? Big deal. “Dog bites man” or “Bomb misses target” is not news.
Now “Dogs don’t bite much anymore” and “Bombs don’t miss much anymore”… that’s news.
I just watched the BBC news and must admit it was an admirable performance. Given that Kunduz has fallen, the Marines are outside Kandahar, and the al Qaeda have been pretty much annihilated… they still managed to come up with a full report of utterly negative tripe.
They dwelled on a precision strike that hit a Northern Alliance position by mistake. Now the US forces have been hitting targets on the mark nearly 98 percent of the time. So the news chose to show one of the two out of the most recent hundred.
They talked at length about 4 British troops that were injured and the possibility of the US now sustaining significant casualties, as if there weren’t already 9000 casualties. The BBC at least had the decency to show workers in the underground of the WTC, although the negativity even came through on that. One got the impression the presenter felt showing the clip was an onerous “fairness” duty forced from on high.
Of course they focused on the mistakes that allowed prisoners at Mazar-e-Sharif to retain weapons, and again to dwell on one known American casualty there. And of course they panned their camera over a burning Red Cross truck.
I have a few choice words for the BBC media. You are spiteful, biased, hateful people and I very much hope the public stops listening to you and instead gets their news through alternative sources.
We are winning dramatically. Weapons targeting has been awesome in its’ pinpoint accuracy. The low level of misses and errors has simply been enough to leave any honest watcher with their jaw hanging. Any honest watcher that is. There don’t seem to be many of those in the media these days. We’ve succeeded in breaking the back of the al Qaeda and killing them off in droves (which makes Mazar-e-Sharif count as a success) while causing incredibly few casualties to innocents. We’ve brought down an oppressive regime in an amazing tour-de-force of military and diplomatic prowess. There is simply very little that one can complain about without being utterly petty. Which they are.
The chatterers are under such pressure they are even making snide comments on the air about it. To paraphrase George W Bush: “We’ve smoked ’em out and we’ve got ’em on the run.” So let’s keep the pressure up fellow bloggers!
The monopoly has ended.
It seems I am getting my wish and I am not the least upset about it. The Mazar-e-Sharif prisoner uprising appears to be accomplishing the best we could hope for. According to an article in Fox News:
Alim Razim, an adviser to Gen. Dostum, said 40 Northern Alliance troops were killed in the fighting. He added that any prisoners still alive wouldn’t be for long.
“Those who are left over will be dead,” he said. “None of them can escape.”
This avoids the messy problem of sorting, trying and executing them: an exercise that would almost certainly lead to freedom for many trained villains. It is much to our advantage they have opted to let Allah do the sorting for us.
I’m still hoping for a futile last stand in Kunduz, followed by Marine Mayhem in Kandahar. I’ll hold judgement until there is confirmation of the Antonov. Even if true, there is nothing to say those aircraft aren’t piles of smouldering wreckage in various remote valleys. Our fighter jocks haven’t had near enough air-to-air practice this last month or two.
It’s only fair.
A Christmas Song Since it is that time of the year, I thought to set my keyboard to bits to bring forth some cheering thoughts for the Holiday Season and the New Year. Cheerful that is, for those of us who are not living in caves…
al Qaeda roasting on a mountain road
Rangers shooting off their toes
Broadside blasts coming down through the air
And Taliban in body bags
Everybody knows a JDAM and a laser light
Help to make the bunker bright
Tiny bombs blowing shards all around
Will make it hard to sleep tonight
They know that Sam is on his way
He’s loaded lots of bombs and bullets
On his planes
And the al Qaeda boys
are gonna die and find out
Houris really think they were dumb
And so I’m offering this simple phrase
to all the ones who want us dead
Although it’s been said many times
Many ways: Dear Osama
Fuck You
Perry de Havilland raised a point that:
Bush presides over a nation which has a rather squeamish view of war, at least with regard to American casualties
Which is only true within a certain context. Americans don’t really much care to go off somewhere and die for their foreign policy. That is absolutely true. But Americans in defense of America are quite capable of sustaining terrible punishment without flinching. A documentary “The Battle of Midway” aired on the BBC last night and shows the levels of courage of our recruits and the levels of carnage that the home front will endure when we’re really pissed off.
It’s that damn libertarian streak in the country. We just won’t go marching off to die just because some damn fool has a flag and wants a parade.
That is al Qaeda’s mistake. They successfully moved their issues from the foreign policy arena (ho hum) to the personal. We took 9000 casualties (notice that no one in the media is giving casualties in the usual way, total dead and wounded?) in a matter of hours. I think you have to go back to Gettysburg to get numbers like this in a single day. They got our attention alright, but not in quite the way they had hoped for.
With 9000 casualties on our own territory, a few thousand more won’t phase us. We’re even mentally prepared for the possibility they might kill another 100,000 of us with a dirty little nuke. That would be a very bad idea on their part because then we’d REALLY be pissed off. It is not in the best interests of anyone on this planet for us to get that ticked off.
So no. We aren’t afraid of casualties when we are fighting for ourselves and for our right to live our own way in our own place. Those who have made the Japanese mistake are in for a severe lesson. When riled as a people, we are without a doubt the meanest, nastiest, hardest-assed sons of bitches on the planet, bar none.
I’ve been a Belfast resident for over a decade, long enough to be familiar with the sounds of mortar bombs, thousand pound fertilizer based explosions, gunfire… and walking in funeral processions. So I know about war zones, although I would be the first to admit that I missed the worst of it by far. I am an American ex-pat, not so much because I left the USA as that I came to Ireland. In the decade plus that I have lived here, it has become my home. But on September 11, 2001 I could not ignore the fact that my people were attacked and slaughtered by madmen. The killing rage I felt was of a depth that I’m sure was a bit difficult for some around me to fathom. It was distant news to them.
The United States is big. It’s just so mind boggling big you can’t imagine… but at the same time it’s a small town. People travel widely; they don’t stay put so the interconnection of people from one coast to the other is extensive. Probably very few people in the country did not at one point or another entwine their lives with one of our war dead. For myself, the closest I am aware of (so far) are some alumni from my University, one of which I probably knew in my college days: Carnegie-Mellon University was and is a small world.
I grew up in a small town named Coraopolis just outside of Pittsburgh; I studied in Pittsburgh and I was involved in technology startups there before going to Ireland. I often travelled to Washington to lobby for the space program. I lived in Burke, Virginia for the better part of a year while on a joint project with Computer Sciences Corporation at an office just inside the DC beltway. My current companies largest customer, prior to the dotCrash, was in Manhattan. I spent nearly half of my time between 1997 and 2000 there and usually lived in the Lower East Side. I froze my behind off in Time Square for the New Year 2000 celebration. I joked with others about the manhole covers in Times Square being welded shut.
I know Somerset. I had friends out that way. I went to school with people from there. I skied up at Seven Springs every chance I could get.
I know Arlington. I drove by the Pentagon and across the bridge into DC night and day; I worked there, I played there, I had friends who worked for the DOD and in the Pentagon. I drove by it as recently as March because my other major customer is just down the road in Alexandria.
I know Lower Manhattan. I lived there. I sometimes watched the lines of aircraft in the landing pattern for La Guardia coming up from the South past the Twin Towers at dusk while I sat in my flat on Rivington and read after work. Or used the always visible towers to navigate my way home on foot after a night out in a newly discovered pub. My business partner and I walked around the World Trade Center just this last March on the way back from a business trip to Washington DC, before we caught a taxi to the airport for our flight home to Belfast. I was part of the tech staff on an internet broadcast from the Trade Center for the Western Governors University kickoff. I hauled racks of electronic gear in through the basement world of the WTC.
I know the places. I know the people. It wasn’t distant news. Atta and the other war criminals didn’t strike at some distant unknown place. They didn’t strike at my government. They struck at me and mine.
That is why I want the al Qaeda dead. All of them. Their excuses and complaints are of no interest: my heart is “hardened like a stone and my ears are deaf” to them. I wish them hunted down like the animals that they are, hunted as the Jews have hunted and hounded the Nazi monsters, hunted even when they become feeble dying old men. I will never forgive and I will never forget. An image of 5000 of my own people dying before my eyes on a video screen is seared into my soul and that of 280,000,000 other very ordinary americans. Our government has no choice in the matter. It will comply with our will or else we’ll elect one that will. It is that simple.
Our anger is deep and wide and very, very cold. We will give no quarter. We feel no mercy. We don’t want their surrender, we want them dead. To the last man. Dead.
I love Star Trek and its’ derivatives as much as anyone else who is a part of (as opposed to accidentally existing in) the Twenty-First Century. I grew up with it. As one of the old space radicals of the L5 Society I highly respect Gene Roddenberry, Majel Barrett and Nichelle Nichols for their pro-space work off stage as well as their marvelous original TV series. I’ve even met some of them at ISDC’s (International Space Development Conferences), the premiere meeting place of the space community.
Tonight I saw my first episode of the newest series. I admit that if I had seen it before 9-11 it would not have grated (as much) on me. I was not expecting a “huggy feely they are misunderstood and are just like us” Political Correctness lesson masquerading as a story line.
I can’t be the only one who shed all semblance of tolerating these inane attitudes two months ago. I watched the story and knew pirates are bad people. You kill them. They aren’t poor misundersood sentients who would be nice if you just sent them a Christmas pudding. Pirates are nasty, brutish scumbags who go out on the spaceways and make a living by stealing. You would rob a vessel in space the same way pirates did it in the 17th Century … and still do in Southeast Asia… you kill people. Pirates don’t pull up alongside and say, “Would you be jolly good chaps and give us your cargo and valuables? We’d be ever so appreciative. Ah, now that’s a good fellow! Would you be so kind as to not tell anyone what we look like? Ta ta now!”
It got worse. I nearly gagged when a black character admitted he knew what it was like being treated as “other” on Earth. This was a total farce. He grew up on a slow cargo ship that spent months and years between the stars. He probably never even saw anyone outside his ship family until he was nearly an adult.
Even that is beside the point. Given another two centuries of global travel, communications and capitalism Earthmen will be a polyglot in race and culture. We’ll all be part African and part everything else as well. Visit New York City and see the future for yourself if you don’t believe me. It would require a victory of “multiculturalism” over human nature to preserve races, let alone racism, that far into the future. The lines were gratuitous and given that a black actor was forced to deliver them, real racism. Why do black professionals have to be singled out for the “victim” mantle? Isn’t the Colin Powell/Condelezza Rice image a hell of lot more positive for kids? Screw the victimhood. Teach kids that they CAN, not that they can not try and then blame someone else.
The traders of the story are supposedly rugged individualists who “solve their own problems”. But the First Officer was just an unlikeable strawman for the PC story line and was certainly no Signy Mallory. The Second Officer was just a wimp who’d have been tossed out the airlock by age 10. He spent most of the episode looking like he needed a diaper.
The political subtext was so blatent I couldn’t abide by it. The Free Traders are attacked by alien pirates. They beat the shield frequency codes out of one they capture. Fair enough. Pirates are pirates. I have no problems there. They should have dumped him out the airlock after they got the codes. But it was all done as a set up so the Captain of the Enterprise could pontificate about how the pirates were just misunderstood. The Enterprise arrives just in time to save the traders, negotiate a settlement and show that Law’n’Order and the Great State now Rules The Spacelanes. None of that naughty self-defense now! Then everyone gets out their teddy bears and has a hugfest. Roll Credits.
I really hope the producers notice attitudes have changed. Perhaps they should invite Virginia Hienlein to advise them. If they did the Enterprise crew would just space the pirates next season instead of talk to ’em.
Now… the question that might have occured to some of the more observant readers: how did I see this episode in Europe already when it won’t air here for some time? Well kiddies, that’s another bedtime story. In the next chapter Uncle Wiggly will… oops! Wrong lifetime!
I can forgive the fact that our intelligence personnel and police missed the bits and pieces that might have prevented 9-11. Despite the excellent hindsight of some writers, it really isn’t all that easy to put such together. Security and police around the world held pieces of the puzzle; but they did not share them because they did not know there was a puzzle. Some of the kamikaze war criminals crossed paths with law enforcement; but in a free society law enforcement does not breathe down the neck of every “suspicious” individual they run in to. Above all, no one… not me, not you, not the head of the CIA, not even Tom Clancy… could have imagined what was to come.
But my forgiveness has its’ limits. The following is simply beyond the pale, an inconceivable level of incompetence on the part of our public servants:
The Economist In the House of Anthrax
After the September 11th attacks, it was generally agreed that western intelligence agencies had failed through lack of “human intelligence”-men on the ground, as opposed to spy satellites and computers monitoring phone calls and e-mails. This failure was to be rectified. Yet since the fall of Kabul on November 13th, journalists have been fanning out across the city. They have stripped houses such as this one, and others directly connected to the al-Qaeda network, of all sorts of documents and other valuable evidence. These have included the names and addresses of al-Qaeda contacts in the West. For the West’s intelligence agencies, September 11th was Black Tuesday. There may be no words with which to describe their failure in the week since the fall of Kabul.
I would very dearly like an explanation why our multi-billion dollar intelligence service didn’t have anyone in those houses in Kabul before the media. Perhaps we should just replace the lot of them with the reporters. But what are we to do with all the failed spies then? Are any small towns perhaps in need of dogcatchers? Our ex-intelligence people might, just might be on the ball enough to find a lost dog if it’s big enough. And in a safe suburban Beltway neighborhood. In the middle of the street…
…with a dayglo “Stray Dog” sign hung around it’s neck.
Carla Howell’s group in Massachusetts have met the deadline! Over one hundred thousand Massachusetts voter signatures have been delivered to the Town Clerks for certification. The Second Boston Tea Party is brewing up strong and Samizdata will be keeping a close watch on this effort to end the Massachussetts income tax.
Today it’s Massachusetts. Tomorrow it will be other States. Her fire will spread to other states with Ballot Initiatives. Small Government really is a beautiful thing.
Even those of us not in the USA can celebrate a Thanksgiving Day for Carla’s accomplishment.
Some habits are just too hard to break. It seems that the British government has more in mind for Afghanistan than the Americans. From Fox News we hear:
A cabinet minister said: “The Americans are interested only in trying to get bin Laden and push the Taliban further back. Tony’s view is that now is the moment to get in there, both in terms of humanitarian aid and the diplomatic front.”
He really should know better. England, like Rome before it and the Russians after it has already gotten its’ nose bloodied in Afghanistan. You simply cannot go into that place and tell them how to live their lives, even if they are making a total bollocks of it. They’ll stop killing each other long enough to run you out of their hills. Then they will get right back to their millennia old sport… of killing each other.
Every child should read Kipling as a part of their education just so they will understand and avoid remaking this mistake. Afghanistan has long been known for its’ quaint local ways of encouraging foriegn armies to go conquer someone else. I remember reading about the days in which the British took their turn learning the same harsh lesson.
Soldiers were told to keep the last bullet for themselves rather than be captured. In those days the Afghan tribeswomen went out after the battles to attend to the wounded. That attention is rumoured to have been rather unpleasant.
Now true, that is a century past and the world is much more civilized today. Would you believe a teensy bit nicer? How about…
What the Afghans do in their own country is absolutely none of our business so long as they don’t harbour those who would kill members of our tribes. The American’s have got it right. Vengeance against those who kill your own is something the Afghan tribesmen relate to and respect. Our lads will get along just fine riding with them and sharing kills of the al Qaeda foreign devils. However… if we start telling Afghans how to live it will just get us into trouble.
Let’s not go there.
A Normal War Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has commented:
…almost every argument in favor of military tribunals invokes Johnnie Cochran, Alan Dershowitz, and the O.J. trial.
This may be the point of some but it is certainly not my argument. Enemy soldiers and leadership are not tried in civilian courts. The Bush Directive is rather lenient. In wartime a citizen who works for the enemy is tried for treason in a military court and then shot. The same is true for spies and saboteurs unless their continued existence is of use to the war effort. One need look no further than the fate of German agents who attempted to infiltrate England during the war.
They’re dead.
Under normal wartime practice, any al Qaeda found operating within the United States who are not in uniform and are found guilty of espionage or attempted or actual sabotage would be executed after a military trial. If the persons who attempted access to a West Virginia powerplant were caught, they would be tried as war time spies and sabatours. The persons distributing Anthrax in mail would also be liable to war time law and subsequent execution as sabateurs.
War isn’t a nice game. You play it rough and the stakes are your life.
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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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