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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Last year I suggesting it was time to think about pulling out of Afghanistan as one has to balance the positive effects of Western forces on the security situation with the negative effects on Afghan opinion of having foreign troops there for so long that they start looking like occupiers rather than allies.
However the Taliban has shown that it is not quite ready to lay down and die, as the various reports over the last few days have demonstrated the fighting is far from over. Nevertheless there is no real prospect for a Taliban return to power and in most of the country the security situation seems tolerable.
And yet… I worry what the actual objectives are in Washington and London. If the main strategic goal is to produce a stable Afghanistan (by local standards) in which the Taliban has no significant chance of being more than a minor insurgent irritant, then that is almost certainly an objective well within reach. That will leave the bulk of the country divided up between sundry (narco-)warlords and the ‘government’ of Hamid Karzai (or the ‘Mayor of Kabul’ as many call him), which in Afghanistan seems to be the natural order of things and, most importantly from a western view point, is hostile to the Taliban.
But if the objective really is a unitary nation-state run from Kabul, with a strong central government capable and willing to eradicate Afghanistan’s large drug cash-crop economy, then the planners in the Pentagon and Whitehall are, to put it bluntly, out of their collective geo-strategic minds. To recap the obvious, unlike Iraq which was invaded by large US/UK forces without any local allied elements, Afghanistan was largely ‘liberated’ by an alliance of Afghan warlords with massive US air support and an important but numerically small force of US/UK/Canadian/Australian spec ops and light infantry units… in other words the great majority of the manpower to overthrow the Taliban was provided by the same warlords who now run most of the country in loose feudal vassalage to Kabul.
Whilst Afghanistan is hardly a human rights paradise (the Abdul Rahman apostasy case comes to mind), it is still a great deal better off than it was under the Taliban. Provided the western objectives are not really ‘nation building’ but simple ‘tyranny wrecking’, I see no reason why this cannot all end up going down in history as a highly successful episode just so long as the dementing influence of the unwinnable ‘war against drugs’ is not allowed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
The Libertarian Alliance is highlighting the disgraceful way Belgium has been trying to intimidate people who hold politically incorrect views. Put an article up that the powers-that-be do not like and they will order you to take it down or face prosecution. But then what can you expect from a country which simply bans established political parties they dislike?
Support the right to home school your children? Advocate the right to self-defence? Want to express your views about Islamic culture? Prepare to be criminalised by the Belgian state.
I have been watching the Wikipedia story unfold with great interest. I know that many turn their noses up at this ‘militia encyclopedia’ because of its inherent problem: sometimes contributors either do not know what they are talking about or they are not entering information in good faith.
And yet I often find it is my first port of call when I want some information on a non-critical subject because it is just so damn usable. True, I often tend to cross check data with other sources but if it is regarding a subject I already have some knowledge of (say I want to jog my memory about some detail of the war of the Spanish Succession) or fairly trivial (such as what is Eliza Dushku’s ethnic background (and the answer is Albanian)) I usually just use Wikipedia rather hunt for a book or look elsewhere online.
I have no idea how Wikipedia will develop in the long run but it is already an astonishing example of user-generated content that explodes so many long held notions of value exchange and ‘commons’ that I have a feeling that looking back in twenty or thirty years we may see this experiment as one of the internet’s ‘Gutenberg moments’.
The Israeli state appears to be doing the same thing that the British state does when it accidentally shoots the wrong person. The latest horror in which a Palestinian family were hit by a shell whilst on a beach is a case in point. The Israeli military is now claiming that it was not a naval shell that had caused the unintended deaths but rather some unexplained mine or old buried shell in the sand which just happened to go off at or about the same time as an Israeli gunboat was shelling a terrorist target in the Gaza strip.
Well that story is coming unravelled and it is a marvel that they thought any reasonable person would believe that during a bombardment from the sea over the heads of the innocent victims, this explosion just ‘happened’ by complete coincidence.
Any critical observer should realise that the Israeli military had no interest in killing the hapless Palestinians who died when one of their rounds went short, so why not admit it was a terrible error and move on?
All concocting fairy tales does is confirm the prejudices of those who see the official Israeli line as being fundamentally untrustworthy. Hamas and their useful idiots in the west will not believe anything done by the Israeli state is not done out of pure malevolence regardless of the facts, so they can be ignored. Israel’s ethno-nationalist cheerleading squad will just assume anything Israel does under any circumstances is completely justified regardless of the facts, so they too can be ignored. However between those two poles of mindless unreason exists a large group of people who tend to judge things on the basis of ‘reasonableness’ and the likely facts.
What the Israeli military spokesman should have said was: “Whilst firing on a legitimate terrorist target, one of our shells went short. It is unclear if this was due to a firing error or a defective round, and as a result some innocent bystanders were killed. We are truly sorry that happened and we wish like hell that the sons of bitches we really were trying to kill did not keep putting us in the position of having to do things like this”.
Mistakes happen and in war, mistakes cost lives. Admit the truth and move on because in the long run it actually helps your cause if people have reason to believe what you say.
This takes some beating for an alarming sub-header for an article:
As Wednesday morning dawned, northern Norway was hit with an impact comparable to the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima
Blimey! At least it happened in the middle of nowhere rather than downtown Oslo.
Still, we all know it was really caused by George Bush capitalism McDonald’s global warming!
Here is a sight calculated to warm the hearts of anyone who has been bitten by the state’s fetish for surveillance.
Some weapons are marvels of technology, such as laser guided bombs or an F-22 fighter. Other weapons however use much older technology, based on something invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1447. Such a weapon can do more damage to the cause of puritanical Islam than a thousand well aimed bombs.
The Daily Kos has an article about the notion of Libertarian Democrats which attempts top square the circle of favouring government regulation with that of personal liberty. Now before you all snort with derision, at least ‘kos’ attempts to essay a way to avoid the inevitable problems that result from trying to legislate everything.
And that said, the article falls pretty much at the first fence.
The problem with this form of libertarianism is that it assumes that only two forces can infringe on liberty – the government and other individuals. The Libertarian Democrat understands that there is a third danger to personal liberty – the corporation. The Libertarian Dem understands that corporations, left unchecked, can be huge dangers to our personal liberties.
And there you have one of the classical error of the left: the idea that corporations have great power to coerce in and of themselves. Now it is true that corporations often behave disgracefully (no one has ever accused Samizdata of being soft of corporate wickedness or being reflexively well disposed towards Big Biz) but the overwhelming way they do this is by using their vast wealth to manipulate the power of the state in their favour. When the state uses the power of eminent domain to take land from people so a wealthy corporation can profit from it, that is an example of state power. When corporations get subsidies and regulations which make it harder for new market entrants to compete with them, that is an example of state power. When corporations use laws to bust unions and restrict reasonable rights of workers to organise, that is an example of state power.
Large corporations can coerce people because they can manipulate excessively mighty state power. The problem is the amount and scope of coersive power that the state has been allowed to accumulate. Make the state’s power to do things less and you make large corporations less able to coerce people as an inevitable consequence. It is just a variant of the notion that the only way to stop corruption in high places is to get rid of high places. Kos does not have to agree with that (and he surely does not) but then that is one the main notions underpinning what makes a libertarian a libertarian.
And thus it shows that ‘kos’ truly does not understand what ‘libertarian’ really means and so his use of the word is simply a category error. You can coerce a society out from under tyranny (i.e. you can shoot tyrants and hang their retainers) but cannot coerce a society into liberty by just using the power of the state to impose it via state mandates (i.e. the roads and healthcare and all the rest that he advocates, showing that his notion of what ‘libertarian’ means involves large amounts of coercive taxation in no way different to what prevails right now).
In short, ‘kos’ can call himself a Libertarian Democrat if he wishes. He can also call himself a horse if he wishes. However saying it does not make it so.
I am delighted that Google seems to be having second thoughts about collaborating with repression by the Chinese state. I realise that it is not easy for a company to walk away from a huge market but if Google does decide to stop aiding and abetting of a vile regime in a very direct manner, they are to be commended fo their change of heart.
The utterly flaccid David Cameron has balked at even the token gesture of pulling his ‘conservative’ party out of the Euro-integrationist EPP in the European parliament. As withdrawal from the EPP would be little more than a minor token that did nothing beyond offer the tiniest of fig leaves to the now completely naked Euro-skeptic remnants within the Tory party, is anyone under any illusions now of his inclination to ‘stand up for British interests’ in dealing with the EU?
As having the Tories ditch the EPP (whose platform includes ‘ever closer union’) was one of the planks of his pitch to win the Tory Party leadership against David Davies, will conservatives who are not pure Blairite (or perhaps even Heathite) now admit they have been screwed (and not in a fun way) and finally decamp from Cameron’s appalling social democratic party?
Yet again we see on the issue of homosexuals marrying that conservatives and left-wingers are just arguing over whose prejudices the law will validate, rather than should the law validate anyone’s prejudices. Why oh why are people on both sides not calling for the obvious solution to this (non)-issue: get the state out of the marriage business.
We do not require the state to sign off on most contracts between two people, so why should marriage be any different? Sure, let the courts get involved if there are disputes or malfeasance just as it does with any contract (that is what civil courts are for), but by de-politicising the whole institution and treating it as just another civil contract, the whole tedious issue goes away. If religious conservatives choose not to recognise ‘gay marriage’, well fine, that should be their prerogative. If a homosexual couple want to declare to the world they are ‘married’, well how is that the business of anyone but the people involved?
There is yet more evidence of the delusional mind set of those who say David Cameron’s utterances are just a deception to get into office so not to worry, he is really in favour of limited government and real-world economics. The truth is Cameron is New Labour through and through and those who want an unbroken series of regulatory statist policies from Blair’s government to continue should have no hesitation voting for the Tories.
But in our legitimate desire to drive out government waste and improve public sector efficiency, we have sometimes risked giving the impression that we see those who work in the public sector as burdens on the state rather than dedicated professionals who work hard to improve the quality of people’s lives.
So Cameron is now working hard to secure the public sector vote and he most surely deserves it as they need fear no loss of influence under him compared to Tony Blair.
Dedicated professionals, eh? You mean the people responsible for 95% of days lost to strikes in the UK1? The almost un-sackable people who get better pensions that people who work in the productive sector? The people who for some reason seem to get ‘sick’ far more often than people in the private sector?
A vote for the Tory party is a vote for Blairism, pure and simple. The Tories really really needs to be destroyed so that we can get a worthwhile opposition party.
1 = Not that I am really complaining… I would like 90% of Britain’s public sector to go on strike permanently, even if we still have to pay for them, so that people can discover that life will go on without them.
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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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