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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Michael Totten has yet another great article from Iraq, this time about Fallujah, once the scene of such bitter and intense fighting. The article is a condensed version of the material he has published on his web site and if you wanted to really get a feel for the place, this is the article to read
The whole article is interesting (as ever) but in my opinion the ‘money quote’ is to be found in the final paragraph:
That said, Fallujah’s worst days are likely behind it. “The al-Qaida leadership outside dumped huge amounts of money and people and arms into Anbar Province,” says Lieutenant Colonel Mike Silverman, who oversees an area just north of Ramadi. “They poured everything they had into this place. The battle against Americans in Anbar became their most important fight in the world. And they lost”.
Read the whole thing.
There is a deeply revealing article in the Telegraph written by the Chinese Ambassador to Britain, Fu Ying, called ‘Western media has demonised China‘. It is fascinating because it reveals the same psychopathology on display that I wrote about on Samizdata when many Chinese people reacted badly to a ‘disrespectful’ image of Mao (debatably the most prolific mass murderer in human history) which was used in a Spanish car advertisement. The ambassador pains a picture of wounded feelings over the protests launched against Olympic torch carriers…
My daughter, who loves Western culture, must have used the word “why” dozens of times in our long online chat. Her frustration could be felt between the lines. Many who had romantic views about the West are very disappointed at the media’s attempt to demonise China. We all know demonisation feeds a counter-reaction. I do pray from the bottom of my heart that the younger generation of Chinese will not be totally disillusioned about the West, which remains an important partner in our ongoing reform.
And to Fu Ying, the Chinese state and the Chinese people are simply the same thing (a profoundly fascist attitude I might add), so to her, protesting the Chinese government’s policy of maintaining the colonial occupation of Tibet is the same as protesting against the Chinese people itself. She, and a great many other people alas, cannot truly conceive of the notion that hostility to the Chinese state because of its actions does not imply any insult to or hostility to Chinese people simply because they are Chinese, because to any non-collectivist, the Chinese state is a political construct, not some expression of the Chinese soul, or some such metaphysical drivel.
The western media are not demonising China because China’s demons are generally home grown. The Chinese state has moved from full blown communism to a less mundanely repressive nationalistic fascism, but it is still a state which brooks no rival power centres of any sort, be they the Falan Gong, Dalai Lama or Roman Catholic Church let alone any real political movements. Moreover it demands, with considerable success, an atavistic loyalty based on ethnicity that Chinese people see themselves as extensions of the state. As a result Fu Ying’s claims of widespread insult and incomprehension by Chinese people is almost certainly true enough, but the issue here is not ‘us’ understanding China, it is China understanding the rest of the world. Until a critical mass of Chinese people can think their way past mental collectivisation and realise they are not the Chinese state, the genuine modernisation the Ambassador craves will remain an illusion no matter how many skyscrapers they build.
A British court has ruled that there is a ‘right to life’ even under combat conditions and therefore the families of soldiers killed in action can sue the government for not providing suitable equipment.
In a blow to Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, a senior judge said troops in combat zones have a “right to life” at all times, even while under fire on the battlefield. The ground-breaking decision could lead to a flood of cases against the Ministry of Defence from relatives who believe the deaths of their loved ones were caused by poor quality kit.
As I have written before, it is deplorable that British soldiers are sent into action so poorly equipped when the state manages to find money for idiotic sports and ‘cultural’ expenditures. Yet I think this ruling is very dangerous unless it is very tightly defined to only cover equipment issues, and even then, I can hear the sound of cans opening and worms escaping. Inevitably this ‘right to life at all times’ means relatives will sue on the basis of operational military decisions if a decision causes the death of British soldiers.
Were I the government I would do whatever it takes to overturn such a notion and made sure this judgement does not lead to ever wider ‘interpretation’, as such things are wont to do. I am all for properly equipping Britain’s soldiers but this is a potentially disastrous way to ensure that. Wars are, by their very nature, messy and imprecise things and the idea of having civil courts sticking their beaks in is a giant step towards making the military unable to function at all. Even from the perspective of rights and liberty, in a volunteer military clearly prior consent is present to be put in harm’s way within the military context. This ruling has ‘horrendous unintended consequences’ written all over it.
The whole difference between statistics and astrology is supposed to be that statisticians make statements of statistical significance to determine how likely or unlikely it is that an observed outcome could have happened chance, while astrologers are satisfied with merely anecdotal confirmation of their hypotheses.
– Hu McCulloch
Some people I chat with in Indonesia on an almost daily basis have just told me that the Indonesian government have just blocked all access to YouTube, MySpace and Rapidshare. Apparently using proxy servers lets you get to a YouTube page but they cannot actual view the videos for some reason.
Does anyone out there have any technical suggestions to pass on to some freedom loving folks in Indonesia? If so, leave them in the comments here. Quite a few people there want to make a mockery of this blatant censorship, which is being done to pander to the most intolerant Islamist elements in that country.
It is occasionally an accolade when a person’s name becomes a figure of speech, such as ‘Churchillian’ for example. Far more commonly however it is a sign of cultural stigmatisation: a Hitler, a Napoleon, Fisking, Dowdification, Pilgerisation… these are not saying anything nice about the source of the respective terms.
And to which must be added, to be ‘a Spitzer’.
There is a magnificent article on TCS Daily called The Universal Spitzer that I strongly commend to everyone:
It is a shame that we only laugh at a Spitzer when his secret sex life is revealed to us. Instead of mocking Spitzers for their private foibles, we should be contemptuous of their public pronouncements. Whether it is “cleaning up Wall Street” or “giving everyone health care,” the Spitzers are making extravagant promises that only result in expanded government power.
Great stuff. Read the whole thing. The article also links to an excellent article by Virginia Postrel about the deeply unpleasant John McCain which I missed first time around.
I realise it is only April, so there is ample time for someone else to win the much vaunted Samizdata prize of ‘oddest remark of the year’, but this has to be a real contender:
However, Prof Rowthorn said the most likely victims were British-born school-leavers who had never had a job, having failed to find the kind of casual work they might have walked into a few years ago. The claim will fuel a political row over the prospects for a generation referred to as “Neets” (not in education, employment or training).
The professor said: “We are looking at the most vulnerable, least skilled and in some ways least motivated members of the local workforce. The problem that eastern European migrants pose is that they are good workers.”
So the fact good workers are arriving in the UK is a ‘problem’ and that employers have them to hire rather than having to try and coax an honest day’s work out of the least unmotivated native born lumpen is… a bad thing for people in Britain overall? Hmmm.
Also as the total number of job has been rising steadily for quite some time, it is hard to hide the fact the children of the British ‘welfare’ state are simply acting as the state has conditioned them to act. Of course the irony is that the people in some part replacing them are high initiative individuals arriving from former communist countries in search of better opportunities. And such people filling jobs grows the economy, so again the advantages overall take wilful blindness not to see.
Locals who cannot compete with Eastern European need to ask themselves why that is. My guess is that they are not really trying to compete very hard because after all, they can always just sign on for the dole. I find it hard to be sympathetic when a person’s poverty is simply a function of a lack of motivation.
Of course one is not suppose to say things like that. My bad.
To hell with constructive engagement. This is a state that imprisons, tortures and kills its political opponents. It is a state that pollutes public discourse with untruths, and that not only seeks to suppress truths, but that seeks to suppress the free exchange of thought between its citizens. It is a state that gives succour to the genocidal regime in Sudan, and has backed itself into the position of casting Buddhist monks as dangerous terrorists.
– Sam Leith, writing in the Telegraph why we should subject China to an Olympic boycott
Now this is something I look forward to seeing, at least virtually:
The Mile High Tower will be double the height of its nearest rival, and will be almost seven times the height of the Canary Wharf tower in London. Visitors will be able to see Africa from the top of the tower, the Sunday Times newspaper reports […] The project will push architecture and engineering to new limits, as the tower must be robust enough to withstand the extremes of temperature and strong desert winds in the region.
What a pity it is going to be in Jeddah as much as I would like to see it up close, not even that marvel could induce me to set foot in that theocratic hell hole.
Over on The Line is Here, they are hosting the Carnival of the Libertarians, where various folks sound off about, surprise surprise, issues to do with liberty.
Check it out.
There is a great little article in Slashdot about a well known German hacker group, Chaos Computer Club, publishing the fingerprints of German Secretary of the Interior as part of their protest against state use of biometric ID.
The club published 4,000 copies of their magazine Die Datenschleuder including a plastic foil reproducing the minister’s fingerprint – ready to glue to someone else’s finger to provide a false biometric reading. The CCC has a page on their site detailing how to make such a fake fingerprint
Sweet. I suppose that is a ‘hardware hack’ of sorts!
From NRO ‘The Campaign Spot’:
The tour will begin at McCain field, named for the family in Mississippi. McCain will note in a speech there that a distant ancestor served on George Washington’s staff, and “it seems that my ancestors served in every conflict this country has fought”. One of the themes in that speech will be how government should support parents, and how it should help, not complicate, how parents pass on their values to their children.
Holy. Crap. And this is the Republican candidate. Read that again: “government should support parents, and how it should help, not complicate, how parents pass on their values to their children”. Just de-construct that for a moment. Is that not a phrase that should send cold shivers down the spines of anyone who thinks civil society has been fucked over by the state quite enough for the last fifty or so years, thank you very much?
Clearly the government does not want any old values passed on to the kiddies, so John McCain must see a role for state approved politically vetted family values. And what if someone want to pass on the values of respecting the property of others and so not tolerating proxy theft via third parties (like, say, the state), is Johnny going help out there somehow? How about atheism? Contrary to the popular perceptions, I know a great many God-Free Americans (almost all of whom are self-described hyphenated Republicans). Will the state give them a hand passing that one on to Junior too? How about utter contempt for the political elite and their army of functionaries? John McCain’s kind offer to ‘help‘ is another manifestation of the baseless arrogance of so many members of the political class who think that civil society revolves around the state and is something for them to tinker with.
So John, let me tell you how to “help, not complicate, how parents pass on their values to their children”… mind your own goddamn business. There is nothing complicated about that.
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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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