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]
|
Hell’s own cabaret comes to town There is an excellent VICE News report from Lebanon on how things are continuing to spill over the border from Syria, with a good range of local views presented. I like how the VICE team mostly just lets things speak for themselves rather than doing excessive editorialising. They really do make CNN look like Disney’s Mickey Mouse News Network. Also there is a rather splendid clip from an anti daesh Islamic State musical performance.
When Hezbollah starts to sound measured, you know things are messed up almost beyond the ability of sane minds to comprehend. Recommended.
|
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.
|
Sadly both the Sunni “extremists” (actually just those Sunni who take the teachings and the LIFE of Mohammed seriously) and the Shia “Hasteners” (those who wish to bring forward the coming of the “Hidden One” by covering the world in “fire and blood”) are not nice – not nice at all.
[There are at least three sorts of Shia – my comments are only concern at “12er” Shia, indeed only at the “Hasteners” among them]. The “Hastener” rulers of Iran (and their followers “The Party of God” in Lebanon are quietly spoken – but they are just as committed to the crushing of the “infidels” (all over the WORLD) as the Sunni “extremists” (not “extreme” at all in the context of their philosophy-theology) are.
However, they are both sane – they reason logically from their philosophical starting point. This starting point is the mainstream Islamic position that (unlike Scholastic, Aristotelian, Christians – both Catholic and Protestant, and Talmudic Jews also) good and evil can not be independent measuring standard to interpret scripture by.
To the Islamic mainstream (both Sunni and Shia) good and evil is what God commands and what God forbids – it is not (can not be) an independent measuring stick (from human reason) to judge what scripture (or deeds of the man Mohammed himself) do. There was a powerful faction within Islam that said that reason could be used to judge scripture and so on – but they were crushed (more than a thousand years ago).
“Raise your hand” the early Muslims called out to the Talmudic Jews of Arabia (before eliminating them) – this was not a request to surrender, it was a demand that these Talmudic Jews stop putting their hand over passages in the Torah (the law books of the Christian Bible also) that called for the death sentence for such things as adultery – no these things should be read aloud and acted upon.
When Western “liberals” (such as my dear friends the Economist magazine) point out there are horrible parts of the Bible they are correct – but they miss out the “little” point that for many centuries both Jews and Christians have been using reason to interpret what God really wants – holding that scripture was written by human beings (divinely inspired – but still just human) who may not have understood the natural law correctly.
As the Catholic Scholastics used to say “natural law is the law of God – but if God did not exist natural law would be exactly the same” and their work is marked by REASON. The Anglican Richard Hooker (no follower of the Pope) did exactly the same (the German tradition of denouncing “that whore reason”, in the words of Martin Luther, need not detain us), and Selden (the great Common Lawyer asked for a copy of the Talmud during his imprisonment – NOT because he was a Jew (he most certainly was NOT), but because he understood the similarity between it and the reasoning of the Common Law.
It is true that some Western thinkers have imitated parts of the mainstream Islamic position. Thomas Hobbes with his position that law was simply a matter of the “commands” (the WILL) of the ruler – and that reason that could not be used to judge whether these commands were good or evil, and his position that people could not really choose to do good and resist evil because everything was predetermined anyway (by the way this is NOT the position of Shia Islam – which rejects determinism), David Hume with his mockery of reason as the “slave of the passions” (not an independent standard to judge the passions, see Martin Luther “that whore reason”, not, I hope, a position that the modern Lutheran Church would endorse) and his denial of the human “I” (the person – the agent who CHOOSES his or her conduct) – this (logically enough) leads to the “euthanasia of the constitution” (after all if there are no human agents, persons, then their freedom does not matter – because it does not exist), but this is not the mainstream of the Western position.
The central Jewish teaching that humans are beings – who can (if they make an effort) choose good and reject evil, and that they can use their reason to understand what good and evil are (independent of any ruler – including the divine ruler, although God is good and wants people to choose good He is NOT the same thing as good and He does NOT predetermine all human conduct – like some computer programmer in the sky), this is also the mainstream Christian position.
And it is the mainstream Whig legal position whether of proto Whigs (before the term was used) such as Sir Edward Coke, or the great Whigs of the 1688 period such as Chief Justice Sir John Holt, or the 18th century Common Sense philosophers (Thomas Reid and so on) and Edmund Burke (most definitely Edmund Burke – I did not spend many years studying him for naught, and those who would falsely claim Burke for the cause of evil, as Woodrow Wilson tried to do, can be refuted without vast effort), and the American Founding Fathers, and such great American legal figures as Salmon P. Chase in the 19th century, and Justice Butler in the 20th century (the lone dissenter in “Buck versus Bell” and one of the “Four Horsemen” of the Supreme Court who opposed the attack on the Constitutional idea of limited government presented by the Mussolini like policies of the “New Deal”).
The rejection of the position of such Catholics as Erasmus and such Protestants as Richard Hooker – the attack on reason and the REASONER (the human person) is fatal to Classical Liberal politics. Contra Hayek, one can NOT reject “Whig” philosophy (thousands of years older than the Whigs of course) and retain “Whig” politics of putting limits on government. If humans are not “beings” (not agents) and if good and evil are not real things (not just the “will” of the ruler – not an independent standard with which to judge the commands of the ruler) and humans can not choose between good and evil anyway (because everything is predetermined) then the whole Classical Liberal idea collapses (it collapses utterly and completely).
One is left only with the “will of the ruler” – either secular ruler as with atheist Marxism, or with religious rulers such as the Sunni I.S. or the Shia “Party of God”.
Indeed, almost an understatement in fact. When Hezbollah… HEZBOLLAH FFS!!!!… are one of the ‘reasonable’ sounding players, oh good grief things have truly gone off the deep end.
In one scenario I can imagine Hezbollah getting their arses handed to them by ISIS in southern Lebanon and turning to Israel for help in staving off extinction. Now wouldn’t that be ironic?
I imagine Israel would reply by air-dropping Hezbollah some ham sandwiches wrapped in pictures of Bar Refaeli in a bikini holding a sign saying “good luck guys!”
Poor Lebanon. From a Syrian satrapy in the past to a jihadist battleground now.
Indeed, Tim. What’s more ironic (in a rather macabre sense of the word), is that I can see some very serious people in Israel telling us that we should jump at this opportunity. ‘You don’t make peace with friends’, don’t you know.
And yes, Vice are excellent, and are getting better all the time. Very refreshing.
Yes Perry, I’d like to imagine that too :-/
I’ve always found debates on Jewish law to be as clear as Talmud.
There’s a reason two thirds of Lebanese Christians think Hezbollah is defending their country.
And it’s not because Hezbollah has suddenly become tolerant and friendly to Christians. Compared to IS almost anyone seems like the lesser evil.
Paul is as usual bang-on. Without agency we are nothing and I can’t believe we are nothing. That is not wishful thinking. Strict Qua’ranic interpretation which came about around 800 years ago holds that “Allah’s hand is not fettered”. Allah can defy logic. Allah can make black white or oranges into apples. This is the entire point of Sura 5. And when it gained traction in the the Islamic World about 800-ish years ago the Islamic Golden age (which is highly over-rated – it was proto-science at best – it was stamp collecting rather than system building not there is anything wrong with that per-se – we call it “chemistry” these days and it was a start. A good, decent start but the minute you get the Allah’s hand is not fettered nonsense as Holy Writ it all stops. It took the realisation (pregnant in Christianity and Judaism) that somethings exist external to God/Allah/Marduk/Whoever… 2+2=4 regardless of Allah’s will.
Don’t believe me? Try Robert Spencer. http://www.jihadwatch.org/2007/09/blogging-the-quran-sura-5-the-table-verses-61-120
Or consider the fact that maybe 1/5 to 1/4 of the global population are Muslim and the have garnered 2 Nobels in the hard sciences. And of those one, Abdus Salam (physics 1979) belongs to a sect of Islam that is officially (according to the Pakistani Government) heretical.
Here is a list of Jewish Nobel winners… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates
Of course coming from a much smaller base. Allah’s hand is fettered. By reality. Fortunately some of us know this.
Lebanon is being besieged by ISIS, but the US won’t help arm them. Tough. Try playing nice with your neighbors for a change (formally recognize Israel’s right to exist, stop harboring and enabling terrorists, etc.) and that might change. You made you bed and now you have to lie in it.
Personally, I am quite enjoying the spectacle of various Islamic sects systematically slaughtering each other. We should be arming both sides. The only ones I feel any empathy toward are the poor Kurds, stuck in the middle of all this otherwise welcome carnage. They really need their own country, but no one (no state player, that is) seems to have any interest in helping that to come about.
I may be playing a devil’s advocate here Laird, but Lebanon’s case is not as simple as that. It has never been a truly sovereign country, or at least not since the 70s, when it was occupied by Syria – first under protection and with full support from the Soviet Union, and later with the latter having been at least partially replaced by Iran. Make no mistake, I am not relieving them of all or even most responsibility, but still Lebanon is a case that is rather different from the other Arab states in general, and those bordering Israel in particular.
All that said but notwithstanding, I very much agree with your second paragraph.
Alisa, you’re correct that Lebanon has never been a real country (or course, none of the current middle eastern nations has any historical validity, either, but that’s another discussion). That’s why I have long argued that if the soi-disant “Palestinians” want their own country they should take Lebanon. No one else is using it.
I am minded to buy some Lebanese wine after seeing that. The head of the village militia clearly knows what needs to be done. Hezbollah seem to understand that an enemy’s enemy can be a co-belligerent.
Despite riding roughshod over property rights, it might make sense for the Christians (and perhaps Druze and Alawites) across basically Egypt to Iraq to move into Sinai/Gaza/West Bank/Lebanon swapping with locals as needs be and for Israel to have a Christian buffer population ina half-doughnut between it and the Salafist/Hamas/Hezbollah types. That could preserve the minorities and the Christian buffer and Israel could co-operate in smiting any aggression from beyond the half-doughnut. Not a proposal, just an observation.
Laird, the same thing could be said about most, modern European states – as most have for the past few centuries been parts of this or that empire, with shifting borders, ethnic and religious populations, etc. That same thing can at least to the same degree be said about modern Israel. So that is well beside the point. The point about Lebanon which makes it different from most other states in the region, is that it has not been truly sovereign – at least not to the degree that other states in the region have been – but rather it has been occupied by a larger and much more powerful neighbor (Syria).
Ed, not sure how I would feel about that, for all kinds of reasons.
Mr Ed – the President of Egypt (or the military dictator of Egypt – it depends on one’s point of view) offered the Muslims of Gaza a wide area of Egypt (including access to the sea) as there new home – away from conflict with Israel. It would be bigger (and certainly better) than Gaza.
However, they turned him down flat (as he knew they would) – Islam must only expand (never contract).
Ditto Jerusalem – free food (and so on) have not mader the problem better (they have made it worse). And, remember, eternal bliss in paradise is open to you – if you drive your car into the nearest Jews (or any infidels come to that).
Same in Canada or …….
“You do not make peace with fiends” – well Israel can indeed have peace with Islam, you just have to submit (“submission to Allah”) do that (absolutely and completely) and Israel can have peace – by no longer existing.
Nick – there was indeed a powerful pro reason (in the broad sense) movement in Sunni Islam – crushed over a thousand years ago
The thing is (from the Islamic point of view) that it was CORRECTLY crushed.
The arguments of its foes were quite CORRECT – it was not what Mohammed was about (not what he taught, not what he did).
And Islam without Mohammed is like Hamlet without the Prince – it is not going to work.
I don’t pretend that I have anything like the depth of ME knowledge expressed in comments here. What was a surprise to me was the massive use of drugs fueling the bravado of the ISIS army.
Infiltrate the distribution network, undercut the supplier and substitute drugs with the opposite effect. Too simplistic?
I’m afraid so…:-) Still, a link about the drugs thing would be interesting to see if you have one handy, nemesis.
I am so glad that he made it so absolutely clear.
Sorry Ailsa, no links – just trying to think of chinks in their armour.
This is very off topic but i like to pick a fight with Paul Marks every once in a while.
Actually it’s not much of a fight. It’s just that, as i understand, Paul presents a stark dichotomy: reason or revelation as the basis for morality. (As i understand his 1st comment.)
What about the moral intuitions/sentiments, Paul? I seem to remember that you defended them. And what better argument for the moral intuitions than Hume’s is/ought dichotomy?
Sure, Hume said that reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions, but (in my understanding) “passions” include moral sentiments/intuitions in Hume’s terminology. In fact, Hume clearly states that, although moral sentiments are “weaker” than the base passions AS SENTIMENTS (i.e. introspectively) they are usually stronger than the base passions when it comes to compelling us to action.
I’d also like to discuss the idea of free will in Hume, but i need to study it more carefully first. But i object to the idea that i need to believe in absolute standards of good and evil in order to fight for my liberty: my liberty is valuable TO ME, by my own standards (moral intuitions). If there are no objective ethical standards, why not follow my subjective standards?
PS: to the list of Westerners believing in Divine Command Theory, Paul can add William of Ockham:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/ockham/#H7
This is sad because in other respects he is one of the most intriguing philosophers that i have not read at 1st hand.
Straight out of the AQI playbook. They used to dope up their suicide bombers prior to attacks. Although with ISIS being ISIS, I’m sure they take it to another level entirely. Al-Baghdadi himself probably needs to snort an 8 ball of ice before he can drag himself out of bed.