Given that ‘Samizdata Illuminatus’ has been posting Churchill quotes lately, it is only matter of time before someone else thinks up this Churchillian reference:
The only traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, bloggery and the lash.
Sorry.
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January 14th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 I was watching the news on the television this afternoon when Bono, the Irish singer for U2 came on to opine on issues of third world debt, AIDS and trade, with reference to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit in Blantyre, Malawi. For one brief shining moment I thought that a universal law of thermodynamics (that when entertainers talk about anything other than the entertainment business, their voices can be heard to emanate from their posteriors) was about to be spectacularly falsified. He remarked that it was appalling that Africans are denied access to US and EU markets due to disgraceful protectionist measures and how this was crippling the entire continents’ ability to develop economically… well, that certainly made me sit up: a singer who actually understands real world economics and genuine liberty? Surely not! Alas cruel reality quickly reasserted itself. He then went on to rail against how banks were putting ‘profits before people’ because of the crippling levels of debt in Africa. Naturally he did not mention that this debt was not forced on Africa’s governments at gunpoint but was freely entered into by the purported leaders of various African nations. Somehow the actions of African borrowers of money result in Western banks ‘putting profits before people’. Interesting. I wonder if Bono also takes a neo-colonialist view that as African leaders are presumably not competent to make sound economic decisions, they should not be allowed to borrow money in the first place? Just curious. And then, Bono deliverers the rhetorical coup de grace designed to impress upon the Western viewers how urgent the situation is:
Now please, will someone out there correct me if I am mistaken, but I was not aware that anyone from Zambia or Congo or Nigeria or Burundi or Mozambique or Senegal or Zimbabwe or Angola or Ghana had hijacked some American airliners and crashed them in to the Pentagon and World Trade Centre towers. What the hell does September 11th have to do with African poverty? Perhaps someone should point out to Bono that the way the US responded to September 11th was not to shower Afghanistan with largess but with an earth shaking hail of 2000 lbs laser guided bombs and the forceful destruction of the Taliban government. Then again… …given that most of Africa’s economic problems are clearly derived from government malfeasance, perhaps my fleeting first impression of Bono as an astute observer was correct after all and that is indeed what he wants for Africa’s ghastly kleptocratic regimes: obliterate most of Africa’s governments, remove all Western trade barriers to African goods and services, declare victory and then go home to leave the formerly oppressed African man-in-the-street to get on with their lives unhindered by the likes of Robert Mugabe or Jose Eduardo dos Santos. Cool, that works for me. January 14th, 2002 | Comments are closed
It seems curious to me that many of the people who were pouring scorn on the US insistence that it was fighting a ‘war’ against Al Qaeda, rather than just treating September 11th as a criminal matter, are the same people now howling about treatment of captive Al Qaeda fighters. So let me get this straight: this is not a war but these pundits want the captives to be treated according to the Geneva Convention? Interesting. Next time I get pulled over for speeding, I will refuse to pay the ticket on the grounds I was not treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. That should work. Also I saw one talking head after another on the television tonight, usually ‘Professors of Middle Eastern Studies’ that I have never heard of before, declaiming that “this treatment of Al Qaeda prisoners is going to ‘inflame the Arab street’ like never before!”. Ah, the good old ‘Arab Street’ again. Earth calling all ‘Professors of Middle Eastern Studies’: no one in the Western world who actually matters gives a damn about the mythical ‘Arab street’. Perhaps these ‘Professors’ need to take a sabbatical and do some ‘American Studies’ before they get in front of a camera and have the opposite effect on US opinion they were probably hoping for. When the average westerner (i.e. not Robert Fisk) hears these people’s warnings followed by a clip of a street full of chanting Arab and burning American flags, what is going through their heads is not “Oh… we’d better get Alan Dershowitz out to Guantanamo Bay pronto to represent those poor Al Qaeda guys.” No, they are thinking “Gee, I wonder how many of those fuckers in that ‘Arab street’ I’m looking at on the TV a single cluster bomb would take out if dropped right about…now.” January 13th, 2002 | Comments are closed
There is a very interesting little article in the Moscow Times by Robert Ware contrasting US success in Afghanistan with Russian military failure in Chechnya.
Ware points out that the contrast is not just one of military success but also of the hugely different political approaches taken. He also correctly highlights the points of difference that make the analogies dangerous in some ways. Nevertheless, there is much to be learned from the vastly different outcomes of these two struggles against extremist Islamic fundamentalism. Fascinating stuff. Lets hope that the importance of the political and social issues to the results so far in Afghanistan are not forgotten if the US decides to get involved in Somalia, as many pundits are predicting. In Somalia the clan based society is not alienated from its leaders and Al Qaeda, if they are even present, are not being supported by a central government (there is no real central government in Somalia) and thus picking a fight with the regional clans serves no purpose other than guaranteeing a fight likely to look more like Northern Ireland than Afghanistan. January 13th, 2002 | Comments are closed
In a nauseating opinion piece by authoritarian paleo-socialist Dea Birkett, writing in The Guardian (naturally), the state is urged to use force to abolish private education altogether in Britain. Birkett wants people to be deprived of even having the possibility of privately educating their children. We are told society must have a common purpose and once private education is made illegal, presumably socialist education police will start locking up people who dare to set up underground schools or educate at home. Birkett urges nothing less than universal forced backed nationally planned state education for all, regardless of what a family actually wants, in order to further national socialist goals.
Will someone please remind me which side won the Cold War? Natalie Solent has described the equality and sense of common purpose Birkett demands as the equality and common purpose of galley slaves. If that ever comes to pass, Birkett and her ilk need to be shown that they are not the only ones who can reach for the stick. January 12th, 2002 | Comments are closed
“Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing on others, he has a right to do for himself… all men have equal rights; but not to equal things.” Edmund Burke was born 273 years ago today. January 12th, 2002 | Comments are closed
A Reuters article has claimed that eating over 400 Euro notes could prove toxic due to the ink… but what I want to know is how do they know that? I will not believe them until someone holds down Romano Prodi and forces 400 Euro notes down his throat (ideally using European Commissioner Chris Patten‘s head as a ramrod). If Prodi croaks, I will freely admit that perhaps I should not always be such a sceptic. January 12th, 2002 | Comments are closed
It is simple really… less, not more, public sending helps the economy. What is so hard to grasp about that? When the government taxes, it allocates resources in a way that would not have otherwise have occurred (and if it would have occurred like that, then why is that aspect of what government does being done by government at all?). If the government had not taken those resources and allocated them, the capital would not have just sat under a mattress… it would have gone elsewhere: that is what capital does. So when the government proudly points to some wonderful things it has built and the alleged economic benefits they will bring, what you do not see is what that self same capital would have done if the state had not appropriated it from its previous owners… what they would have done, what they would have built. So when Gerard Baker at the Financial Times says Bush may have harmed the US economy with his tax cuts, rather than saying he may have harmed the economy by not reducing spending, he is in effect saying that it is only deficits, rather than government spending itself, that hurts economies. By saying High-Tax-Tom Daschle has better economic policies, that must mean that government spending is actually better for an economy than private spending. How does that work? That must be why the many nations whose governments appropriate more of their national resources for spending are wealthier than the United States, you know, nations like…er…um…ah… January 11th, 2002 | Comments are closed
As the focus of events is less and less on Afghanistan, the focus of the blogger punditerati is likewise fragmenting in many directions… one of the interesting things about the many blogs over the last few months has been that many bloggers have been picking up the same news stories and it has been fascinating to see differing interpretations. With the advantage of many probing eyes, obscure on-line reports get picked up from more unusual regional newspapers or some out-of-the-way repository of cypherpunk web documents, and suddenly a new surge of interacting interpretations hits the blogs. I suspect this is what Glenn Reynolds meant when he once described himself as being part of a ‘hive mind’. However as the focus of events becomes more fragmented and regionalized post-Taliban, the stories that get picked up and blogged becomes more regionalized as well. I am fascinated by Glenn Reynolds’ often innovative takes on geopolitics and other issues on Instapundit but when I get to his views on a US plagiarism scandal involving folks I have never heard of, I tend to wander off elsewhere after the third article on the subject, checking other blogs for war news or perhaps something more generally pan-Anglospherical in appeal. Yet I suspect this is a natural process, a cycle rather than movement towards some less interacting endpoint… the ‘hive mind’ will fragment into locally focused clusters only to surge back together periodically as a global story catches the imagination. At the moment the Canadian bloggers are all bouncing off each other in a quite interesting manner over largely Canadian issues. In a similar way, certain blogs seem to hit ‘hot streaks’ and the rest start reacting to that blog’s interesting views rather than just what the established media is reporting, setting up an interesting interblog harmonic for a while. It will be intriguing to see what dynamics take hold in the longer term when the majority of blogs stop thinking of themselves as ‘warblogs’. I suspect blogs, or something like them, are here to stay but they are sure to start mutating over time into… well, good question… into whatever comes next. We will just have to wait and see what that is. January 11th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I am certainly not an Objectivist, though it would be fair to say I have been influenced by Ayn Rand’s works. For me, the conjectural objective epistemology of Karl Popper makes more sense, but I am also of the view that Rand is not without her merits. Thus when I saw Tech pundit Andrew Orlowski writing in an article in The Register that Ayn Rand was a crypto-fascist, that was not something I could leave unchallenged. I must confess I have never been a great fan of Andrew Orlowski, as he also writes for New Statesman, a publication that the excellent Will Quick of DailyPundit described exquisitely as “a haven of fluorescent idiocy”. I e-mailed Orlowski as follows:
January 10th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Samizdata reader Jim Muchow answers my question about why Tony Blair does not do anything forceful in Zimbabwe
He has a point there. January 9th, 2002 | Comments are closed
The US has made it clear that acts of terrorism involving Americans will not be tolerated and will be met with military action. Anyone doubting US resolve has but to look at Afghanistan to see the truth. Tony Blair stands with George Bush on this issue, supporting and indeed participating in US military actions with both Royal Navy sub-launched cruise missiles and Britain’s peerless special forces. Clearly where the US is concerned, tyranny and murder will not be tolerated by Her Majesties Government, and quite right too I might add. What a pity the many British citizens who own land in Zimbabwe are not instead US citizens…because if they were, rather than threatening tyrant and mass murderer Robert Mugabe with expulsion from the Commonwealth, something which no doubt has him quaking in his boots, the UK Government would be planning military action against him. However it appears Tony Blair is only willing to fight for American interests, not British ones. Perhaps Blair will send his precious friend Peter Mandelson to Harare to meet with Mugabe. No doubt he will be invited to join the British government if only he will agree to stop murdering people. After all, that seems to have been the approach favoured by Mandelson in Northern Ireland, so why not try it in Zimbabwe? January 9th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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