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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US Marines were handed an unexpected defeat yesterday and commentators are scrambling to find how this could have been allowed to happen. Reporters interviews dazed survivors at Bagram Airbase, near Kabul. Capt. Hank McHunter, from Dallas, Texas said
I called for support from an AC-130 but it all happened too fast… they got in among us so all our airpower didn’t mean diddly squat. I want my wife, Becky-Sue, to know I’m okay though.
Sgt. Bud Burbacker from Oraldo, Florida added
Our defence was holdin’ okay but then one of them got through and it all went totally down the shitter. Where the hell are them friggin’ Northern Alliance bastards when you need ’em?
A reporter for the Independent attempted to put this question to Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, the foreign minister in Kabul. He replied
Who’s that? Robert Fisk? Shove it, Fisk, I ain’t talking to you, you slimy piece of…
However Deputy Defence Minister with the Interim government, General Abdul Rashid Dostam, promised he would make more information available to the selected members of the Western media later tonight
May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your pubic regions, Fisk. If you want to know what the Northern Alliance position is regarding this incident, then send two bottles of good Kentucky Bourbon and that most excellent Lara Logan chick, you know, that reporter who works for GMTV, to my HQ later tonight and I’ll tell her all about it
During a press briefing at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld was evasive on the exact details but did indicate an enquiry was underway to find out how this could have transpired
Yes, we were quite suprised to hear what has happened… we didn’t even think those bastards knew the rules! It would be fair to say I am pissed as I had ten bucks on our guys to win. Oh well, war is hell and it cannot be refined.
SkyNew showed video of US Marines and British Royal Marines playing American football after a large Christmas lunch at Bagram Airbase. The Royal Marines narrowly won.
[Editor’s note: This would have been posted yesterday but for the intervention of the hacker who disrupted blogger.com… may the fleas of a thousand camels infest his public regions too]
There have been some scorching articles on many worthy blogs this year but over on Transterrestrial Musings, ace blogista Rand Simberg has out done himself with the ultimate take down of the establishment media pundit’s irrational cultural masochist tendency.
Down the hall come blood-curdling screams from an emergency surgical unit. The doctor explains, “We’re low on anaesthetics. We’ve requisitioned supplies, but it’s hard to get anyone to respond. For some reason, there seems to be very little sympathy for these people.”
The cries of agony continue–it is almost unbearable to hear. “Sometimes, the only way to save them is emergency removal of fatally-flawed precepts and paradigms. There’s no time to do it gently.”
Outstanding. This is the perfect article to sum up the genesis of the whole blogging phenomena and it’s non-deferential wrecking-ball ethos. Absolutely stormin’ stuff! Run, do not walk, to Transterrestrial Musings to read the entire sublime article.
As evidenced by the previous post, Samizdata has a new contributor whose name will be familiar to many out there in Blogistan. Christopher Pellerito has long been running the excellent Liberty Blog, and his was the third blog we linked to (after Instapundit and Transterrestrial) when we burst upon the blogging scene. And thus do our ranks grow.
PC meaning Peikoffian Crap.
Okay, I realise it is actually Boxing Day now, but ‘Merry Christmas’ anyway. That’s Christ-mas… as in Christ. Son of God and all that stuff. It does not matter if you believe in Christ or not, because it does not change what Christmas actually is.
Although I am an extremely secular person, I do not hesitate to extend those sentiments to Samizdata‘s Christian readers in spite of the fact religion does not loom large in my life. Yet I think it is important to remember that Christmas is a Christian festival and thus I shall not hedge my Christian greeting with anything like ‘and you have a nice holiday too for those who are Atheists, Agnostics, Hindus, Satanists…’
Don’t get me wrong, I actually do hope any Atheists, Agnostics, Hindus, Satanists, Druids, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddists, Jews, Druse, Shinto, Pagans, etc. etc. who read the Samizdata have a really great and entirely secular couple days off… but then as that is all Christmas is to them, I do not feel any special need to be ‘inclusive’ if they are just hitching a perfectly reasonable cultural ride on someone else’s wagon. I often partake of bhangra-and-booze excesses during Diwali but I certainly don’t expect special ‘Diwali greetings’ from my Hindu friends because I am not Hindu. To me Diwali is just an excuse to eat good Indian food. Likewise I would hope that many atheist (or whatever) libertarians would have no problem with the idea of Christians (libertarian or otherwise) regarding Christmas as ‘their’ day. Yet some people do indeed seem to disagree.
Although I have been much influenced by objectivism, I do not actually call myself an objectivist as Karl Popper looms just as large in my philosophical views, probably more so in fact. I have nothing against objectivism per se, which I like to describe as a sub-set of libertarian thought because I know it will annoy certain people. However I do regard the ‘organised’ objectivism of Leonard Peikoff, of the Ayn Rand Institute, as essentially irrational and pathologically intolerant. Peikoff’s historical error riddled article about Christmas did nothing to change my views on the fatal justificationist structural flaw in his brand of dogmatic objectivism (yeah, yeah, send hate e-mail pointing out my ‘errors’ to the usual address). Let Peikoff pick any day he likes to celebrate the adulation of St. Leonard, Intellectual Heir to the Blessed Ayn… but to fail to understand that Christmas without a reference to Christianity is just another Disney theme event, is culturally illiterate and needlessly insulting.
However objectivism without Leonard Peikoff…ah, now that would be something worthy of a festival of its own! For precisely that, go to The Objectivist Center for Peikoff-free objectivism that includes tolerance and ideas that survive contact with reality. Go read what they have to say.
As for me, once I have finished reading the lyrical Sufic work ‘The Rose Garden‘, I shall be re-reading Popper‘s ‘Open Society and it’s Enemies‘.
I have always suspected that most hackers who cause damage were people suffering from a low and probably very accurate self image. They try to prove that they are really cunning and smart by damaging an on-line system but in fact all they prove is something known since time immemorial… it is always easier to destroy something than it is to build it.
So what has the hacker who attacked blogger.com on Christmas done? By changing all the passwords his adolescent psyche craves for us to think he is ‘clever and cunning’ and oh how witty this ‘Robin hood hacker’ is for posting a benign message on Instapundit.
Of course the truth is rather different. Far from demonstrating any of those attributes, the hacker shows us he detests people who actually create things. Thousands of people wanting to post to their newsblogs, diaryblogs or whateverblogs are locked out and have to use the ‘forgot my password’ option on blogger to find out what their password has been changed to. He has said to every person he locked out “you can write an article and help make an on-line community, but why aren’t you paying attention to ME?… I can throw a rock through your window. Aren’t I clever?”
Pathetic actually. He has done the equivalent of breaking into an art gallery at night, not to steal a painting, oh no, that would actually make a certain amount of sense, but merely to scribe a message about how ‘he could have been more evil’ and then shit on the floor so that people next day will come and marvel at his ingenuity at breaking in. Yeah, we are real impressed.
You want us to pay attention to you? Sure. Tell us who you are and you will get your wish big time. We all know how horse-thieves were treated when they were caught.
Whilst still very much an early ‘work in progress’, the Capitalist Chicks< website is starting to take shape and now at least works with MS Internet Explorer 5.0.
I do have one minor quibble though: ladies, do you really need the damn disclaimer on every page? If you think that you actually do, might I suggest you re-word it at follows:
Disclaimer
The term ‘chicks’ is in no way meant to be derogatory towards women. If you insist on taking it that way, let us introduce you to the concept of several property. This is our website, we like the word and that’s all there is to it. If you have a problem with that, you are probably a socialist and thus are likely to find ‘chick’ the very least of many things here that will upset you.
Just a suggestion, ladies.
God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay…
Warmest Christmas greetings to all readers of the Libertarian Samizdata.
Regarding the latest ‘close call’ terrorist mid air incident, News Max reports, with more than a hint of irony:
“[FBI investigators] have turned up nothing to link him to Muslim extremists, like those blamed for the Sept. 11 terror attacks,” reported the New York Times on Monday.
Nothing eh? Now call me churlish, but when a suicidal Islamic person gets on a US civilian airliner, with a three-week-old passport of dubious provenance, and who looks like Osama bin Laden on a ‘bad hair day’… and who then tries to blow himself up over a fuel tank mid-air using his ‘shoes-of-death’ filled not with improvised explosives but with MilSpec C-4 (not something one commonly finds in French drugstores), I would have to say there is indeed ‘something’ rather than ‘nothing’ linking him to what came to pass on September 11.
Does that mean I am convinced he is an Al Qaeda terrorists? No, not completely, but if I were a betting man I sure as hell know where my money would be going.
Our esteemed fellow blogista, Adil Farooq of Muslimpundit has been taken prisoner and forced into servitude by his crazed capitalist employer, no doubt driven insane by reams of government regulations and finally unhinged by one EU directive too many… ‘Military sources’ have informed DEBKA that this deranged employer may in fact have links to Osama bin Laden‘s brother’s aunt’s sister’s cousin from Manchester, Hilda bin Laden.
I propose forming a militia of concerned libertarian bloggers to mount a rescue mission… using sound military principals of deception and misdirection:
1. We lure his boss away by burning a pile of tax regulation forms in the street in front of his premises.
2. When he comes out to dance maniacally around the bonfire, a second snatch squad will enter from the rear of the premises, moving with cat-like tread.
3. The snatch squad will stun any lackeys on guard that they encounter with blows to the back of the head with a hardback edition of Murray Rothbard’s ‘Ethics of Liberty’.
4. They will grab Adil, egress from the combat zone and retreat for helicopter extraction at the LZ next to the Fish and Chip Shop down the road, possibly stopping off at a nearby pub for lunch en route before embarking.
I love it when a plan comes together.
Way back when, I pointed out that DEBKA were making some highly questionable contentions about thousands of Al Qaeda soldiers being airlifted out of Konduz before it fell to the Northern Alliance forces of Generals Daoud Khan and Rashid Dostam. World Net Daily has belatedly picked up on this DEBKA theory.
First of all let me lay my cards on the table and say I think DEBKA are by and large a waste of pixels. Almost nothing they say cannot be deduced from open source data that is also available to anyone with a search engine and a working computer. Their analysis ranges from ‘okay’ to ‘wild conjecture’. What is more, to put it bluntly I am not sure I really trust them or their alleged ‘military sources’ given the quantity of dubious calls they have made in the past.
Military sources have solved the mystery: The planes belonged to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida. Under cover of the Pakistani airlift, 3,000 of the group’s fighters were secretly lifted to safety from the besieged towns of Konduz and Khandabad about 15 miles to the south. The double airlift lasted five nights. The planes arriving to ferry Pakistani fighters home were closely shadowed by a phantom airlift extracting al-Qaida personnel.
The rescued Pakistanis were flown to air bases in northwest and central Pakistan. The al-Qaida men were taken long distance to the Persian Gulf emirates, landing, according to Gulf sources, in Abu Dhabi and the Somali town of Baidoa.
My objections to this whole weird scenario remain unchanged from when I first suggested my interpretation of what probably happened in Konduz, which I posted to the Samizdata on November 27th. This section is relevant and nothing I have read has changed my mind since I wrote it
Likewise I think we can assume no pilot is crazy enough to try to land a large multi-engined jet on an unlit cratered dirt strip at night, so we can safely eliminate any of the large multi-engined Antonov jets.
My guess is that the aircraft in question will turn out to be an Antonov An-26. The Pakistani Airforce operates a single An-26 and it would be perfect for a rough strip landing under less than optimal conditions. My money is on that particular one being the specific aircraft involved in ‘The Great Escape’.
DEBKA does not explain where the ‘Al Qaeda’ air assets came from, how they avoided detection by the USAF/USN and how they managed this feat of night time airmanship with the larger Antonov’s than an AN-26 that would be required to get those sort of numbers out of the Konduz pocket. In two other articles on November 28 th, I discussed DEBKA’s view that it was the Pakistani ISI behind it (and I agreed) but pointed out their numbers did not really add up.
In the very next Samizdata article after that, I pondered the views of Tunku Varadarajan of the WSJ, who was saying much the same, only on the basis of sources probably far more reliable than DEBKA’s. Like Tunku Varadarajan, I felt (and still do) that it is hard to believe that the airlift of Pakistanis trapped there was not done with American acquiescence…and therefore indirect observation by sensor (not to mention nearby US and UK Special Forces). Thus it becomes even more fantastical to think a veritable airfleet was going in and out of Konduz unnoticed and unhindered, when all the US was acquiescing to was a limited airlift out of ‘sensitive’ ISI people. I think we can assume AWACS and JSTARS crews are fairly numerate folks. Unless we see some evidence other than DEBKA’s alleged ‘military sources’, I would recommend treating their story of 3000 Al Qaeda folks winging their way to freedom with considerable skepticism, to put it mildly.
Dependable as ever, Peronists in Argentina are claiming that the economic meltdown in their nation is due to the failure of the ‘free market’. Now let’s not mince words, the Peronists are neo-fascists (and not very neo at that) and thus to get a right-socialist critique of free markets from them is hardly a surprise.
“Now is the time for us to recognize that Argentina and Argentines come first – we must protect ourselves from [foreign] financial interests,” said Sen. Eduardo Duhalde, a key Peronist and a leading candidate to be interim president. “We must abandon this economic model. That is why the people are in the streets today.”
The Peronists are people who are trapped in the 1940’s in their thinking. Yet at the risk of starting to sound like a broken record given my recent posts, the Argentine economy was never, by any stretch of the imagination, a free market…it was just less unfree than under the Peronists, who ran things along full fat, non-diet real McCoy fascist lines. The biggest problem for the economy is not foreign competition but a massive borrowing spree by the Government (surprise, surprise). Exactly how were they expecting to repay its most recent loans, let alone the staggering $132 billion outstanding?
The Argentine Government was quite successful in curbing the hyperinflation that was ravaging the country in the early 1990’s, introducing wide reforms and pegging the Argentine peso to the US dollar.
A useful comparison could be made with Croatia in 1992-3. Croatia found itself collapsing economically due to the Balkan War and it’s currency, the Croatian Dinar, was hyper-inflating as the Government printed money to keep its army running. When I was there in 1992, after having been in the country for less than one month I took my dollars to a bank in Zagreb and found they had gained 30% in value against the local money in 25 days. To prevent complete economic melt-down, the Croatians scrapped the Dinar completely, replacing it with a new currency called the Kunar, pegged to the Deutschmark. As in Argentina, this drastic move rapidly brought things back from the brink. Yet unlike Argentina, Croatia did not embark upon delusionary spending sprees. Whilst I would hardly call Croatia a paragon of fiscal rectitude (I know Natalija is very critical of Croatian economic policies) they were certainly restrained by comparison in spite of having had huge amounts of national infrastructure destroyed during the war.
What Argentina has done was cure the problem of hyperinflation with strong medicine but they kept taking the drug for that particular ailment after the patient had recovered. What they should have done was either re-float the currency again or go the hole hog and dollarize (i.e. simply adopt the US dollar as Argentina’s national currency). The latter was rejected by the ruling Radical Civic Union Party, never staunch ‘free marketeers’ to begin with, as it would take away a powerful tool of economic control from the government, which of course is exactly why they should have done it!
But even just allowing the peso to free float once inflation was at tolerable levels again, say in 1996, would have prevented the build up of pressures that can be seen today, by allowing devaluation of the peso to be spread out over many years. What we will see now is a huge traumatic crash in value of the peso that will take vast chunks of the economy down with it as dollar denominated loans become unserviceable with worthless Argentine money.
The fascist Peronists will reintroduce trade barriers, compel all exporting businesses to submit to de facto state management and simply impose debt restructuring on foreign banks. A measure of stability will eventually return but the Argentina’s first world pretensions will be exposed for the absurdity they are. Only banks run by madmen (i.e. about 20% of them) will even consider lending more money to Argentina for the foreseeable future and therein lies the silver lining to this dark and stormy cloud… no more loans, the economic equivalent of crack cocaine, means eventually reality will reassert itself even through the thick skulls of the Peronists who are about to preside over the third-worldization of Argentina.
I for one shall not be crying for Argentina over what is largely a self inflicted wound, albeit one inflicted with a weapon sharpened by the buffoons at the IMF. Reforms require courage and vision and sufficient social evolution to grasp objective realities. Argentina had none of the above I am sad to say.
Breathtaking, mind boggling, abject stupidity as well.
In today’s London Evening Standard, Labour Members of Parliament Glenda Jackson, Tony Colman, Jeremy Corbyn, LibDem Members of Parliament Jenny Tonge and Vince Cable and Oxfam Campaigns Officer Rajinder Dadry write in to say.
Together with Oxfam, we are concerned that the Government has given permission for the export of an air-traffic control system with military capabilities at the cost of $40 million. […] We are disturbed that one part of the Government has, rightly, played a full part in the cancellation of debt for Tanzania, but that another part of the Government has played a part in increasing the debt on an unnecessary project…
So let us analyse what is being said:
- The statist MPs and their NGO cheerleader applauds the British Government for cancelling foreign debts on behalf of the Tanzanian Government… debts that the Tanzanian Government freely entered into in the first place by borrowing money from western banks.
- The same chorus of MPs plus NGO cheerleader deplore that the Tanzanian Government is acting irresponsibly and therefore it is the responsibility of the British Government to prevent the duly constituted Government of Tanzania from acquiring military air-traffic control radar that they obviously think they need.
Now read that again, gentle reader, before we continue… are you making the causal links that elude this chorus of clowns?
The Tanzanian Government entered into loans with Western and Japanese Banks in the 1980’s and 1990’s. This money financed years of highly inefficient socialist centrally planned spending (plus a bonanza for the Swiss bankers working for a few inexplicably wealthy ‘retired’ Tanzanian ministers) that resulted in far less of an increase in Tanzania’s ability to produce wealth than was required to service the debt on the funds borrowed. Years later, well meaning and largely socialist elements in the West decide that somehow the actions of an African sovereign government are a ‘stain on Western capitalism’ and a large chunk of the debts are written off (at Western tax payers expense).
And the lesson that we have taught the Governing classes in Tanzania is…?
- Borrow as much as you can get banks to lend you because the consequences for imprudent economic decisions are, well, there aren’t any.
The Tanzanian Government is not acting foolishly in buying this radar, they are just playing by the rules of the game we have written. Have I missed something here or is Glenda Jackson MP and her ilk really as obtuse as I think they are?
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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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