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.
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Rand Simberg of Transterrestrial Musings is in exceptional form! Read Administration split on European invasion, Washington, April 3, 1944 (Routers).
Fissures are starting to appear in the formerly united front within the Roosevelt administration on the upcoming decision of whether, where and how to invade Europe. Some influential voices within both the Democrat and Republican parties are starting to question the wisdom of toppling Adolf Hitler’s regime, and potentially destabilizing much of the region.
“It’s one thing to liberate France and northwestern Europe, and teach the Germans a lesson, but invading a sovereign country and overthrowing its democratically-elected ruler would require a great deal more justification,” said one well-connected former State Department official. “The President just hasn’t made the case to the American people.”
This is his best article since his much lauded Media casualties mount (which was for my money far and away the best blog article of 2001).
Run, do not walk, to Transterrestrial Musings.
August 20th 1940, and the fate of western civilisation hung in the balance. As the Battle of Britain was still being fought out between the Luftwaffe and RAF to determine if Nazi Germany would be the uncontested master of western Europe, Winston Churchill gave one of his most stirring of many memorable speeches in the House of Commons:
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few
Given the previous post on the subject of state surveillance, it is good to hear that The Register is reporting that PGP encryption is back in the hands of an independent company.
Although I have never been a huge fan of Statewatch, a civil liberties advocacy group whose membership contains a high proportion of socialists (which I have always thought analogous to a temperance society whose membership contains a high proportion of brewers), the latest Statewatch press release is well worth reading.
They clearly lay out how the European Union is about to take a giant leap towards the sort of total surveillance super-state that the Soviet Union could only dream of implementing. As Tony Bunyan, Statewatch editor, comments in the press release:
EU governments claimed that changes to the 1997 EC Directive on privacy in telecommunications to allow for data retention and access by the law enforcement agencies would not be binding on Members States – each national parliament would have to decide. Now we know that all along they were intending to make it binding, “compulsory”, across Europe.
The right to privacy in our communications – e-mails, phone-calls, faxes and mobile phones – was a hard-won right which has now been taken away. Under the guise of fighting “terrorism” everyone’s communications are to be placed under surveillance.
Gone too under the draft Framework Decision are basic rights of data protection, proper rules of procedure, scrutiny by supervisory bodies and judicial review
The Panopticon super-state ‘of the future’ is now very much upon us.
 When the state watches you, dare to stare back
As Paul Staines mentioned below, the Irish Young Progressive Democrats explicitly state they are not libertarians and just a glance at their agenda reveals that they are not friends of liberty by any stretch of the imagination. This party is just another bunch of statists pushing the conventional theft based ‘welfare’ politics of old, claiming responsibility for:
· Introduction of a minimum wage
This is tantamount to saying it is better for you to not have a job at all than to have one at wages that offend someone else.
· Huge increase in overseas aid
In other words ‘we have been taking money from you by force and give it to people overseas that you did not choose to give it to via one of the vast number of voluntary international charities’.
· Taxi cab liberalisation
Oh right them… I guess at least someone in the YPDs might have read a book review about a book at about some unpronounceable Austrian free market economist
· Increased social benefits especially pensions
i.e. theft by the state
· Increased funding for education
More theft by the state to fund an activity in which the state has no legitimate role whatsoever
I look forward to being invited to Paul Staine’s next garden party with food cooked over a barbecue lit with both his Tory Party and Progressive Democrat Party membership cards.
Just a reminder that our e-mail is still knackered, and has been so since last Friday. Please use our emergency e-mail rather than the one in ther side bar to contact us.
In case anyone who has been observing the Tory Party in Britain has not noticed, they have not been doing very well for rather a long time now. In spite of years of Tony Blair’s less that glorious ‘precedency’, the Conservatives are still trailing a very distant second place in England and are more of less nonexistent in Scotland, riven everywhere by factions fighting over control of the carcass of the Party and quite bereft of any distinctly identifiable ‘Tory’ ideology. In fact there is not even any sign of an intellectual or political ‘wave of the future’ starting to build up… not even a ‘ripple of the future’ really.
Now we are being told by Norman Tebbit, the Dr. Harold Shipman of British politics, that what the Tory Party really needs is a purge of any ‘libertarians’ (i.e. anyone who likes non-white sportsmen or dislikes the state telling them what to do with their genitals or actually has anything resembling a new idea).
Of course Tebbit has quite a lot of experience masterminding Tory party purges. He shut down the Federation of Conservative Students in 1987, thereby guaranteeing the Conservative Party would become an ideology-free zone from then onwards.
Funny how the party has been in decline ever since it eradicated its most radical and highly motivated roots. They don’t call it ‘The Stupid Party’ for nothing.
Although Prague has been hit hard by the worst flooding of the Vltava in a century, at least there has been some good news for the despondent staff at Prague’s zoo. After having been forced to put down several highly prized large animals when it became clear they could not be moved to higher ground in time to avoid drowning, returning zoo employees were astonished to discover Slavek, an 18 year old hippo, waiting for them on the second floor of a zoo building in an exceedingly bad mood.
 Don’t just stand there gawping, feed me, damn it!
It seems our e-mail system is not working properly, with some e-mail sent to us over the last three days not arriving at our end at all. Please use our emergency backup e-mail address and re-send if you did not receive a reply from us to any communications, until our system comes back on-line.
August 17, on this day in 1795 the slave known only as Tula and his friend Bastian Karpata started a violent revolt against their oppressors.
There is a lengthy article on USS Clueless about why the US military is the best practitioner of high initiative warfare, tracing it to the empowering influence of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. I disagree on many levels starting with the fact I do not think the US military is the best (or even particularly remarkable) at ‘high initiative warfare’.
The US military does not achieve its results as Steven Den Beste suggests, by empowering individual soldiers and harnessing their brains and initiative more than any number of armies I could mention, but rather it achieves results by maximising its true advantages: firstly a huge economy and therefore sheer firepower (it can afford to shoot more bullets/drop more bombs) and secondly, its advanced technology (it can make its aeroplanes hard to shoot down and therefore safely drop smart bombs on people they don’t like from 20,000 feet). In simply wins by dumping large numbers of expensive smart bombs and cruise missiles on the enemy where it hurts most, followed by precise massed artillery if required. The job of America’s infantry and tank jockeys is to pick their way through the crater pocked remnants to what gets left over after the aerial (and maybe artillery) bombardment. Factor out the high tech long range bombardment capabilities, which is unique in the world at the moment, and whilst the US army is a fine one, it is not particularly exceptional in the way it fights compared to many other armies.
There are many armies in the world who are better than the US at the sort of small unit tactics that rely on ’empowered’ soldiers at low level (such as Israel, Britain, Germany, Australia, New Zealand). Frankly France’s 2eme REP is probably more optimised for what Steven thinks is a “new approach” to fighting than the much higher firepower US 82nd Airborne, precisely because it has less firepower and thus is forced to rely on élan et cran as well as to fight smart… and with very little help from 20,000 feet. It is in the ‘big stuff’ that no one can match the US, i.e. when it comes to the Godzilla-like ‘grid square removal’ that characterized the Gulf War.
This is not to denigrate the US military, far from it actually: that is a highly rational way to fight if you can afford it. But please realise that the way the USA fights is just the confluence of technology and economy, added to a particularly American political horror of friendly casualties, rather than some emerging ‘First Amendment Powered’ super soldiers. The German Fallschimjägers landing on Crete in 1941 displayed all the characteristics of low level high initiative fight smart upward info-flow empowerment yet it would be safe to say they were not benefiting from the First Amendment of the US Constitution or democracy.
To more or less complete indifference by the so called human rights champions of the left, Robert Mugabe continues the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of white farmers and brutal murders of black political opponents in Zimbabwe.
Insignificant sanctions have not saved a single life from Mugabe’s thugs nor prevented the theft of land than is leading inexorably to mass starvation in that unhappy country.
Yet it is no more a ‘political’ question that dealing with a marauding wolf attacking one’s sheep is. Commentators should not be calling for ‘harder sanctions’ or ‘robust diplomacy’ but rather for the violent overthrow of Mugabe. There is no material difference between the Mugabe’s and Saddam Hussain’s of this world and the more murderous Mafia families of Corleone in Sicily and you don’t see the Italian state negotiating with Mafia dons but rather sending para-military police with guns after them.
There is only one reasonable way to deal with murderous tyrants and that is to kill them. As I have said before, until someone puts a bullet through Mugabe’s head and that of any who would emulate him, Zimbabwe will continue its spiral towards complete societal meltdown. The ‘heads’ of all such governments belong on pikes in a public square and any government who has civil dealing with such people are part of the problem. The world is awash with morally ambiguous issues but this is not one of them. Sic semper tyrannis.
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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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