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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… Realists are quite right to point to the centrality of the contest for power in international relations, and also to the dangers of imprudence and immoderation that can arise from the pursuit of intangible goals like honor. But dangers of a no lesser seriousness attend the competition for power itself, however rationally calculated. Moreover, power is never pursued for itself, but always for the sake of some value or values.
In modern democratic states, those values tend to be moral in nature, and to involve a peculiarly democratic conception of honor. To attempt to exclude them from consideration is the height of phantasy, and the opposite of realism.
– the concluding sentences of Donald Kagan on national honor (from a list of Iraq related readings supplied by
Oxblog and linked to by Instapundit)
One of the oddities of being a samizdatista is that comments are often attached to things you wrote weeks or even months ago, in a way that no one else is ever likely to see. Usually such comments are of no great note, but two yesterday, attached to a posting on a completely different subject, definitely got my attention. First, there was this, from Victoria Miller:
DEMOCRATIZING BEGAN IN IRAQ
coalition troops set heavy weapons
thousands of marine soldiers,
airplanes, tanks, uniformed lapdogs and bulldogs
open and secret machines of modernized war industry
general Shurk in Pentagon says;
we bring democracy.
meanwhile they systematically bombed
showed fake pictures, Ghurka-media served
massacred civil people of Basra, Baghdad, Mosul
like Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin
on the blood of children, they declared victory
at least, the thieves celebreting everywhere
world witnessed similarly scenes under WW II,
americans saving the plunderers
the Jews, steal wealth of whole Continent
and escaped to Jew York, Sweden, London, Australia
like that, looting continues all over Iraq
general Shurk in Pentagon says;
democratizing continues
And then there was this, from Martin Brandberger:
“I AM AN AMERICAN NOW!”
→ Continue reading: Poetry
The war is winding down into its “this war isn’t over yet – there are still pockets of resistance” phase, and now, I feel, is the time to be talking about soya sauce, and its various occidental rivals. In connection with soya sauce, my blog-enthusiasm of the week, Dave Barry, is right when he says that you need to experience this. This is a catchy tune full of fun, cleverly illustrated by a team of top graphic designers. This illustrated tune both promotes a Japanese brand of soya sauce, and criticises non-Japanese rivals, such as “Worcestershire” Sauce (which I prefer to think of as Worcester sauce but that may just be me).
Is this one of the futures of advertising on the Internet? It’s no good just putting up a sign saying “buy our soya sauce – it’s very nice”, although I’ve seen far stupider slogans. No, you need a bit of wit, fun, pep, fizz, and Dave Barry appeal. That way your stupid advert will stop being a mere advert and become an Internet Meme.
And could it also be one of the futures of pop music? There was a time when advertising jingles were strictly poor cousins to regular non-promotional pop songs. But could the economics of the music business be about to change this? After all, these people want you to listen to this tune for free, and to circulate it to all your friends and internet contacts. They make their money when everyone reveals their increased awareness of the brand to market researchers and when they buy the sauce.
On the subject of non-Japanese rivals, I was at school with a chap called Perrins, whose family were involved with Lea & Perrins Sauce, which is a particular variety of Worcester Sauce. Perrins had unlimited supplies, but we would have preferred it if he had been called Rowntree (like the gruesome Senior Prefect in Lindsay Anderson’s movie If), or perhaps Mars, or maybe Cadbury. The Lea & Perrins website calls its product “Worcestershire” sauce too, I notice. And this site also elaborates on the Worcester sauce theme, although this one calls it “Worcherstershire” sauce, which is definitely wrong. Personally I don’t much like Worcester Sauce, although I quite like Worcester Sauce flavoured crisps. However, I prefer these Marmite flavoured crisps, which are truly excellent, and also greatly to be preferred to Bovril flavoured crisps, in my opinion.
Best of all, saucewise, is surely Hellmann’s Mayonnaise. Who can forget the product placement of this mighty mayo in Woody Allen’s movie Hannah and Her Sisters? Not me, I can tell you that for nothing.
Aaaaahhhh … braaaaaaands.
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”
“Thank you Mr Bush!! We very like Mr Bush!!!”
– celebrating Baghdad citizen just shown on ITV news
Instapundit links to this stirring piece in the Mirror by Tony Parsons, with which I almost wholly agree. Wow, says Instapundit. Indeed. But here’s the one bit I have a problem with.
Yes, there have been deeply disturbing images of dead and burned Iraqi children. But do we honestly imagine that Allied forces, fighting a war unrestrained by political concerns, didn’t kill and maim countless numbers of innocent French, Dutch and Belgian children in the Second World War, never mind the babies we burned alive in Japan and Germany.
We just didn’t see pictures of them.
But I haven’t seen any pictures of dead Iraqis either. Not at any rate on television, which is the news source I’ve been relying on.
Neither has James Lileks. → Continue reading: Where are the dead Iraqis to be seen?
When I was a boy, soldiers communicated by yelling at each other, and with big boxes which they yelled into and also listened to, carefully. Each bunch of soldiers had one box through which all orders came, and through which they sent all their news back to their superiors. Remember those boxes which malfunctioned in A Bridge Too Far, to the disgust of Sean Connery. Those.
Fast forward. On TV I’m now watching our soldiers, and they all seem to be wearing headsets to talk into, like in a Van Damme SF movie. Every infantryman has become like a fighter pilot. Mostly they seem to observe radio silence. I guess they don’t want to be jabbering all at once.
When did this happen? It’s a big change, and surely a big, big step forward and a big, big difference between our guys in this war and the other poor fellows, who do not have headsets unless I’m much mistaken which is of course only too possible.
That’s it. No links, because if I had a link to something on this I’d probably have the answer. Just questions. When did this change occur? What did it consist of? And what does it mean? A lot, I’m guessing. Commenters please let rip.
Since Samizdata, along with the rest of the Anglosphere, seems to be in us-Brits-great-or-what? mode today, please permit me to mention here that over on my Education Blog, I did a piece about the British Army as a teaching organisation, based on a conversation with a friend who is a captain in it. If what you’re now thinking is: “Wow, those Brits, how do they do it?”, well, I think this little piece goes some way towards answering that question.
At the centre of the piece is an accronym: EDIP. This stands for: Explain, Demonstrate, Immitate, Practice.
The other key principle “embedded” – to use this month’s mot du jour – in British Army practice is that the best way to learn something is to teach it. Quite junior officers start the “high powered” bit of their army careers by instructing at Sandhurst, and Sergeants and Corporals do most of the day-to-day training of the soldiers. At the end of it the soldiers may not be completely in command of what they’re doing, but the men who’ve been teaching them have it ingrained into them. Soldiering can be taught, and so can leadership, and this is how.
The thing I remember most vividly about that conversation was, well, how vivid it was. The question “Education – How about that then? – How does the army go about doing that?” is just about the best way for a civilian like me to get inside the head of a soldier that I could possibly have picked. “So, what’s it like killing people?” is useless by comparison. (a) It’s insulting. It makes it sound like that’s the thing they most like doing. (b) Half of them don’t know. (c) Those that do have no way of really telling you. And above all (d) they don’t want to talk about it. But asking them about how they teach is, as I said in my original piece, like taking the cork out of a shaken champagne bottle.
I want to do a lot more pieces like this one, about actual teachers and how they set about it, for my Education Blog, but so far have only done one more, about my friend Sean Gabb. So if any Samizdata readers are doing any teaching, of any sort, in the London area or near offer, and of a sort they wouldn’t mind me sitting in on and/or writing about (I promise to accentuate the positive – almost all teachers are doing some good things), please get in touch.
I have no idea – no idea whatever – whether or how much of this is true, or made up, or what. But here it is, for whatever it may be worth – it being from a website run by something called Bikesport, “Michigan’s largest road and triathlon store”. I kid you not.
I’m guessing that not all of the blogosphere has seen this yet. If it has and I was the last to hear about it, apologies. Thanks to Boris Kupershmidt for the link.
[EMBARRASSING UPDATE: It’s fiction, as commenter number two has just pointed out. Oh well. Maybe something approximately like what follows has been happening. Follow this link for the background to all this, which is definitely a story, if not anything like the story I thought it might have been.]
It’s a big night for Mike. He’s at work tonight. As I mentioned his clothing is wet, partially from dew, partially from perspiration. He and his four co-workers, Dan, Larry, Pete and Maurice are working on a rooftop at the corner of Jamia St. and Khulafa St. across from Omar Bin Yasir.
Mike is looking through the viewfinder of a British made Pilkington LF25 laser designator. The crosshairs are centered on a ventilation shaft. The shaft is on the roof of The Republican Guard Palace in downtown Baghdad across the Tigris River
Saddam Hussein is inside, seven floors below, three floors below ground level, attending a crisis meeting.
Mike’s co-worker Pete (also an Ironman finisher, Lake Placid, 2000) keys some information into a small laptop computer and hits “burst transmit”. The DMDG (Digital Message Device Group) uplinks data to another of Mike’s co-workers (this time a man he’s never met, but they both work for their Uncle, “Sam”) and a fellow athlete, at 21’500 feet above Iraq 15 miles from downtown Baghdad. This man’s office is the cockpit of an F-117 stealth fighter. When Mike and Pete’s signal is received the man in the airplane leaves his orbit outside Baghdad, turns left, and heads downtown.
Mike has 40 seconds to complete his work for tonight, then he can go for a run.
→ Continue reading: Hell’s athletes
Just to say, in my capacity as the self-appointed Senior Samizdata Sports Commentator, that the best Oxford University versus Cambridge University boat race ever has just finished. When it did finish, they were not sure who had won, so close was it. Unbelievable.
Personally I don’t care anything about the Boat Race, or I didn’t until about one minute ago. It just happened to be on the telly while I was composing this for my Culture Blog, which has now gone daily.
Usually it is clear who is going to win the Boat Race in the first twenty seconds, and from then on it’s a procession. In this one the lead changed about four times, including just before or just after the finish because Cambridge were closing so fast.
It was the kind of sporting event where, as the commentators said just afterwards, all eighteen will be brothers for life. But get this: four of them already were brothers, the Smiths and the Livingstones, each pair in opposite boats.
Official verdict: Oxford by ONE FOOT. Closest race ever, apparently, because the “dead heat” they had in 1572 or whenever it was wasn’t really. It was just that the umpire that day was drunk.
I overheard another interesting titbit in among the preparatory waffling. Apparently 90% of these oarsmen go into “banking”, by which I think they meant “merchant” banking. I don’t know what this proves. It could be that rowing is a fine preparation for financial titans. Or it could be that the financial services industry contains a lot of people with more ex-brawn than current brain. A bit of both, I should guess. They don’t get paid anything to be in this race, but it seems that they clean up afterwards. Investment in networking. Speculate to accumulate. Apparently they were racing for the “Aberdeen Asset Management Trophy”. It figures.
Some things the BBC does do well. They had this report up within minutes.
Not everything at or linked to by b3ta.com is fun, but a lot of it is.
I liked their picture of the Dalek on a chairlift. As they say: problem solved. This is a reference, I believe, to a cartoon from years back, in which a Dalek confronts a staircase and says: “There goes our plan for dominating the universe.” And they had a good “What if Hitler had won?” graphics competition. (“Reich Crispies” packet, etc.) But I couldn’t find these any more so you’ll just have to take my word for them. I think part of the idea of b3ta.com may be to make money, or to help some people to make money, or something like that, hence the way things get switched off. Elucidating comment welcome.
But you can always dig back in their blog archives and find links to other things, links which don’t go away. I did, and found a link from this page (lower down) to these rather fine teddy bears. Knock them over and up they get again, every time.
Actually I suspect that children may prefer the teddy bears to adults. Let me try again. I suspect that children may like the teddy bears better than adults like the teddy bears. Of course children prefer teddy bears to adults.
I know what you’re thinking. What have jumping teddy bears (for they do indeed jump) got to do with The War? Well, The War has now got to the stage where irrelevant joking around now seems like an appropriate thing to be doing, along with noting the war’s progress with due solemnity, i.e. some. Well, I suppose there could be a Republican Guard version of these bears, where they march towards you with their paws up as soon as your mouse pointer gets anywhere near them. But then what? Ah, that is the big question. Time to end this post.
There are lots of reasons to hope that this war is nearly over, not the least being that if it does end soon, the civilised world will be able to switch its attention to other bad things now being done by other bad people.
You get the feeling that Fidel Castro, for example, was hoping that this thing would last a lot longer than now seems likely. He’s been rounding up dissidents, and he surely guessed that he’d have two or three months free of major western media interference. But what if Gulf War II fizzles out quickly, and what if the Media then takes a closer look at what he is now doing, say in about a fortnight’s time? Well, we can hope.
The news I’m watching on the TV right now (Sunday breakfast time) is that the British are moving fast into the centre of Basra, days sooner than the media people I’m listening to had been expecting. If they, and the Americans in Baghdad, can make these incursions stick and if there are no big and nasty surprises yet to come, and if they can reduce the whole thing to a few dozen boring little sieges of nutters, the media may soon be toning down its fascination with Gulf War II and be looking for other morsels to feed on. If so, look out Fidel.
How delightful it would be if this opportunistic calculation were to turn Castro into one of the bigger casualties of Gulf War II.
And what’s Mugabe been up to during the last fortnight?
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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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