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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Steven Den Beste treads where 100,000 aeropundits have gone before
Ultimately, they switched to the Mustang, which was the prestige fighter of the European theater; beautiful, fast, deadly and long ranged: it was the best fighter the Allies had in Europe, and for bomber escort they needed every bit of it, especially after the Germans began to fly the Me-262.
Best fighter is truly meaningless unless it is stated what specific role it was best for. The P-51 Mustang was without doubt the most effective long range piston engined daylight escort fighter of World War II. Of the mid-to-late war piston engined fighters, it was not the best defensive fighter (Fw.190-D or Spitfire 19) or nightfighter (He.219 or Mosquito, various) or day/night intruder (perhaps Mosquito FBVI) or multi-role fighter (no clear winner).
Comparing fighters with different roles is pointless and thus there was no single ‘best fighter’, just ‘best fighter in some role’. The P-51 had good all round performance, very good cockpit visibility and most importantly had the range to carry out the strategic escort mission that other even higher performance piston engined fighters did not have. But as all combat aerocraft do, it also had its weak points and like all USAAF fighters of the time was certainly under-armed by 1943-1945 standards and had GC issues at some weights. How about “The P-51 Mustang was the most important USAAF daylight fighter of the European Theatre in mid-to-late World War II period”. A much safer contention.
The dependably interesting John Weidner at Random Jottings has a wonderful article on the daddy of all bloggers.
[He] was a lousy writer. At least when he wrote books and articles. His books are cranky hotch-potches; formless and almost unreadable. He was very combative; he was at his best in the quick give-and-take of argument, and was very successful as a lawyer. But he rarely took the time to organize his (often excellent) ideas into reasoned discourses.
However, unknown to the world, he spent much effort writing in a different style. He owned the best library in North America, and the books he read most often were those whose arguments he hated! He would fill the margins of those books with comments and refutations. He would tear them apart line by line. Does this sound familiar?
If you want to know who this mystery proto-blogger was, you will just have to go take a look at John’s article.
But certainly not a site for the weak! The curiously named Rantburg is a tightly focused geopolitical warblog with a robustly anti-idiotarian view of things. I do not always agree with Fred Pruitt’s particular spin, though I frequently do, but it is nevertheless a good and and often quite detailed read. He has a fine grasp of the regional players about which he writes (unlike a few blogs I could mention) and he understand real-world political dynamics (unlike a few other blogs I could mention).
Visit daily.
An article in the Sierra Times describes a Canada sharply at variance with what I had thought existed.
Gordon Campbell and the Liberal government swept to power last year (winning 77 of a possible 79 seats in the BC Legislature) on a mandate to set British Columbia back on the road to prosperity. Prosperity – as the Liberals promised – would be built on a platform dedicated to freeing the private sector from crushing taxes and burdensome regulation. Indeed, this last move by the Liberals to help cut 1.9 billion dollars from the budget by 2004 is just one thing in a list of many that has some wondering if the Liberals are actually Libertarians in disguise.
Well that certainly is one hell of a majority! But call me cynical if you like: talk is cheap… except for political talk, which is usually very expensive indeed. But then when I read what the BC Liberals have actually started doing, I almost fell off my chair! Way to go! Read the Scott Carpenter article and be amazed yourself. Methinks I shall be visiting the Sierra Times and the various Canadian blog sites more often to see what is in the air over there.
I have always felt second to none in my detestation of former NY mayor Ed Koch, who was for me the unalloyed stereotype of pragmatic municipal amorality. And yet, I found the following Ed Koch quote on the sublimely named Communist Vampires Newswire regarding the WTC twin towers:
I think we should rebuild them exactly the same way that they were. They are the symbol of New York. In a way, we crush the terrorists by rebuilding them. They thought they had destroyed us. I think this shows we are crushing them.
– Ed Koch, former New York mayor (1978 – 1989)
Absolutely true. Even better would be to build the largest building(s) in the world. To keep the site as some maudlin garden of remembrance would be a colossal mistake. We must indeed remember the fallen but let us also remember that they fell engaged in World Trade and in doing so made the world a better place more than any ten NGO’s you might care to mention.
Over on National Review On-line, sometimes inspired and sometimes confused Jonah Goldberg describes the new NRO blog Corner for those unfamiliar with the format:
For those of you who don’t “get it,” here’s what it’s about. Various NR editors and members of our extended family get to comment on anything we like, including each other’s comments. We try to keep the posts short and the most recent appear on top.
There are no editors, no rules, and no master plan. Yes, as many, many, many readers have pointed out, it’s very much like a blog along the lines of AndrewSullivan.com or Instapundit.com. The difference, however, is significant. Those guys run one-man operations. If you can’t see the distinction, look at it this way. Sex with one person is very different than sex with more than one.
Someone needs to spank that boy with a rolled up copy of National Review and set him straight on a few things: Firstly “Corner” is not “very much like a blog”… it is a blog. Secondly, it is bad form not to link to Andrew Sullivan and Instapundit if you are going to mention them. We are not competitors, Jonah, we are actually a resource for each other and “Corner” is no different. Unlike dead tree media, which is chasing the same dollar, cross links actually feed readers at the people we comment on and visa versa. In fact, the more of us there are and the more cross links there are, the more readers we all get by virtue of the increased content and broader catchment… people who might not be seen dead with a copy of NR or ever think of typing www.nationalreview.com (i.e. quite a few libertarians) might nevertheless follow a link they find here to NRO just to see what we are talking about, which is surely what NRO would want.
Bitching aside, “Corner” is actually quite a fun blog. We are glad they liked our multi-contributor format so much that they copied it. It is even nicer to know that when Jonah thinks about blogs, he thinks about sex. I’d like to think we can take credit for that too.
We are of course well aware that the cognoscenti like Jonah only come to Samizdata for Natalija’s “go for the throat” articles.
Pakistan has a very large expatriate community scattered across the world, particularly in the UK and the USA. The peoples of the sub-continent also have a deeply engrained and entirely laudable distrust of governments poking around in their affairs, which is why the hawala system of moving money around globally is so popular with people from that part of the world.
In recent weeks there has been a huge inflow of capital from the Pakistani diaspora back to Pakistan due to the scrutiny of US investigators looking ostensibly for Al Qaeda funds. Of course there is widespread and quite justified belief amongst Pakistani businessmen that where the anti-terrorist investigators tread, the IRS will not be far behind looking to see what they can confiscate. Sub-continent businessmen have been on the receiving end of shakedowns like that from potentates, princes and nations for centuries and have well honed cultural reflexes in such matters. The simple solution: move your money where the US authorities cannot see it, by bank transfer if possible or via the invisible hawala system if not.
Networked distributed capitalist systems like this are extraordinarily resilient and are fueled by deep seated and entirely admirable non-deference to state authority. Just as the justified fight against Al Qaeda is also being used to fulfil an unjustified a wish list of civil liberties abridgements, so too are the statist enemies of free trade on both left and right using it to move against the sort of small scale (though large in aggregate) trans-border capitalism at which people from the Indian sub-continent so excel. It is for reasons of control that Big Capitalism and The State get on so well: bureaucrats can meet with a few hundred CEOs of vast companies and reach understandings to their ‘mutual benefit’ (though not to anyone else’s). Hundreds of thousands of small scale truly capitalist ventures with trans-border cash flows however are impossible to even monitor, let alone control: which is of course why they are such a good thing.
Continuing in the same spirit of the last few posts, a tip of the space helmet to Samizdata reader Neil Eden for providing us with two excellent essays located on The Proceedings of the Friesian School website:
The Fascist Ideology of Star Trek: Militarism, Collectivism, & Atheism
Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace, A Response to Critics
I had forgotten how popular critiques of science fiction are, but reader responses via e-mail have just reminded me of that fact following my less than flattering remarks about the politics of Star Trek! Here are some earlier articles on the same subject that produced much the same response:
The trouble with the Federation
Star Trek: the Post-Christian Generation!
More on Star Trek: An amuzing/alarming suggestion
Star Wimps
I am a great fan of both pugnacious blogger Ken Layne and Sci-Fi afficionado King Abdullah of Jordan, as both are anti-idiotarians who have excellent taste in women by all accounts. However both the worthy King and Ken seem to have a misplaced affection for Star Trek.
It’s like Star Trek — and notice that the Star Trek universe is multiracial and multicultural and the whole deal is based on getting it together, exploiting science, taking the good stuff from every culture and leaving behind the stupid, racist, sexist, totalitarian nonsense. (No Saudi science officers in Star Fleet).
Roddenbery’s ‘utopian’ United Federation of Planets is a vision of the future in which society is starkly homogenised, with para-military governance and a total state allocated command economy the likes of which have thankfully never yet come to pass (even the Soviet Union did not completely abolish money as a medium for low level allocation of resources). How many gay characters crop up in Star Trek’s Federation? How many non-conformist extroverts? Any sign of a counter-culture? How often is an internal voice of political dissent heard in the Federation? The only dissidents shown, the Maquis, were forced into armed conflict with the Federation when it betrays them to the fascist Cardassians. The only attempts at political change shown were a couple failed attempts at a coup d’état by elements of the Federation’s own military, neither of which had liberty as their objectives. The Star Trek Federation is a dystopian nightmare: smiley face totalitarianism with a California “liberal” vibe, complete with attractive telepathic political officers (‘councellors’).
A similar vision of a fascist future existed in Babylon 5, but unlike Star Trek, they were the bad guys (and had much cooler uniforms)!
Oh, and Ken is also totally wrong about Spanish food.
The BBC, in its on-line news, reported on Monday: “Roman Catholic lawyers should refuse to handle divorce cases, Pope John Paul has said.”
In fact, the Pope said nothing of the sort and the Telegraph points this out in an editorial after some ‘fact-checking of arses’*. As I have mentioned before, I would be a whole lot less bothered by what the BBC spews out but for the fact that I am forced by law to pay for this mouthpiece of the statist British establishment.
* = Pace Ken Layne: asses are a type of strange donkey and are less likely than posteriors to be repositories of facts and falsehoods.
A gentleman from France wrote in with some questions about what would happen in a society run under libertarian principles. He had some practical questions and I thought an extract form these remarks might be interesting to some Samizdata Readers. The gentlemen who sent the e-mail did not want to be pointed at books which he would find hard to locate, and thus I answered much by pointing him at various Libertarian Alliance pamphlets on the matters in question, as they are short, to the point and available free on-line (in .pdf format, requires Adobe Acrobat or similar to read).
Q: If there is no government/state then who pays the police?
Not all of us at Samizdata advocate full blown anarcho-capitalist social models. We range from ‘minarchists’ (small state libertarians) who see the role of the state as being security and nothing else, to other hyphenated libertarians across the spectrum between neo-conservative to anarcho-capitalist. There have been some interesting things written on the subject, such as:
Private Police and the Free Rider Problem by Max O’Connor.
Q: Who takes care of pensions?
You do. In the USA and UK (and unlike Europe), private pensions are hugely important and are the reason why as society goes ‘grey’, the EU’s state pensions are, in the long run, completely unsustainable whilst those in the US and UK are still financially viable due to [rivate sector involvement.
Q: Who regulates industries?
In the current sense, no one does. That is the whole point of the laissez-faire capitalism that underpins libertarianism. Much as in the USA there is less state regulation but more civil liability litigation, in a libertarian model, people will sue if others impose costs on them to prevent things like building a chemical plant in a residential area. The state is not the only way to achieve sensible results. As that greatest of Frenchmen wrote: said:
Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.
– Frederic Bastiat
Q: Who decides who the judges are going to be?
There are several interesting pamplets on that subject such as:
Restitution: Justice in a Stateless Society by Christian Michel
Privately Produced Law by Tom Bell
Polycentric Law Versus the Minimal State: The Case of Air Pollution by Adam Chacksfield
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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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