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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Prominent Libertarian Alliance member Sean Gabb has just produced a very useful and quite lengthy missive called Arguments Against British Membership of the Euro.
Also by Sean Gabb, see A Case Against the European Union and Uniting Europe without the Union
Highly recommended to anyone who refuses to accept the accelerating rate at which authoritarian European principles and institutions are being forced on British society. What is being done by our ‘masters’ with breathtaking extra-parliamentary manoeuvres in the name of European integration would, in less dissembling times, have been called treason.
Natalie is quite right that there is a noticeable lack of real religions in Star Trek. The only two sets of religious beliefs seem to feature prominently:
First there are the Bajoran in Deep Space 9, who follow an (invented) organised national religion that, it must be said, is presented extremely plausibly and without either sentimental support or anti-religious bias: some of their religious leaders are shown to be wise and honourable, yet others (Kai Winn) are portrayed as venal and corrupt. Significantly, the Bajorans are not, however, part of the Federation.
Then there is Chakotay (Robert Beltran), whose ultra-PC North American Indian spiritualism must appeal to the California ‘liberal’ (meaning socialist) sensibilities of the script writers. It is useful to note, however, that Chakotey is not in fact a member of Star Fleet even though he has been co-opted by it. Quite the contrary: he is an anti-Star Fleet Maquis rebel! There is an interesting subtext there for sure.
I would not include the Zen-like Vulcan philosophy shown in the shows as ‘religion’ as it is little more than a sophisticated and somewhat ritualised form of self-control with a set of attendant logic based ethics.
Yet I must disagree with Natalie that Star Trek’s lack of religion in the Federation will cause “less sympathy with the Samizdata crowd”. Libertarian views are in no way antithetical to religious ones and I find the complete absence of overt Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Hindu influences (let alone obvious adherents) indicative of a society that must surely be suppressing them. Even an atheist such as myself must accept that the religious impulse will not completely disappear quietly into the night unless forced there at the point of a loaded phaser…hardly something calculated to bring the smile of reason to libertarian lips. As evidence of it is completely absent in what is posited as mankind’s sole military service, the implications are clear.
Even if Star Fleet is aggressively secular ‘at work’, in many episodes we are shown the private quarters of crew members…can anyone recall an episode in which a crucifix is seen on someone’s table or a mezuzah by the door? You do not have to be religious yourself to find seeing religion completely edited out of the human experience more than a little sinister. As Natalie points out, Babylon 5 had a great deal of fun with real world religion, even to the extent of showing peevish squabbling between the leader of the resident Catholic monks and a prominent Jewish scholar. Likewise, Commander Susan Ivanova (Claudia Christian) on several occasions referred to her Jewish identity in various episodes. Although religion was not central to the show, it did not deny its very existence.
Next time I see a Star Trek show, I will scrutinize the credits for any references to Leon Trotsky.
The lastest blog to be listed is Moira Breen‘s interesting Inappropriate Response. I had been meaning to add it to the list for a while as it is well worth a daily visit. She points out in my diatribe against Star Trek’s Federation that I had missed some important facts, such as that Worf’s teeth are clear evidence of socialist healthcare and there is something deeply sinister about Deanna Troi. Eminently tupable but sinister nonetheless, I would agree.
No doubt fearful that having Al Qaeda members floating around their country is going to result in US military action against Yeman, it seems that the government of Yeman has decided to not be the next ‘Taliban’ on the US hit list. Pravda reports (As usual in Pravda the English in the article is a bit bizarre)
Today, in Yemen a wide-ranging operation started to annihilate Al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad’s structures in the country. The operation is being carried out by units of an anti-terrorist special subdivision leaded Ahmed Ali, the president’s older son. The operation is simultaneously carried out in Marib, Al-Jauf, Shabva and Hadramaut provinces, where training camps and bases of the terrorists are supposed to be situated. Spiritual leader of Yemenite extremists is sheikh Abdelmajid Az-Zindani regarded by FBI as a very dangerous. He is the leader of the opposition Reform Party and of illegal organization Islamic Jihad, connected with Al-Qaeda.
It may well be that the best thing to come out of the destruction of the Taliban in Afghanistan, due to the presence of Al Qaeda, is a message has been heard loud and clear throughout the Islamic world: playing host to third parties who engage in the mass murder of Americans can be extremely hazardous to your government’s health.
A tip of the turban to Charles Tupper Jr for pointing out the Pravda article
It is good to hear that Dmitry is finally free to return to Russia. What puzzles me about this case is how did a US court even feel they had the appropriate jurisdiction to try him?
The way I understand it, he wrote the decryption software in Russia, for a Russian company, ElcomSoft. The software is entirely legal in Russia and yet somehow because the program can crack codes in ways prohibited by the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Sklyarov was arrested when he visited a conference in the USA.
Imagine for a moment that a US citizen, living the USA, writes an article in the Wall Street Journal (a newspaper which is sold world wide). Say that in this article, the US journalist makes remarks that are illegal in Russia (a nation not known for its free press) but in the USA are protected by the First Amendment and hence entirely legal.
How would the USA react if, when that journalist makes the mistake of going to Russia to attend some conference, he gets arrested by the Russian police, thrown in jail and charged with a crime because the Wall Street Journal with the offending remarks was also available in Moscow hotels? Would some US lawyer care to explain how that works?
Just a few gems from Tim Blair‘s unmissable idiosyncratic daily round up of who is declaiming about what on which blog.
Hammer the stupid, Moira!… Fisked by the demented…Unspooling of intestines praised… Steyn rocks, albeit at a slower beat than bloggers … Rand Simberg and the Burqa of Death … Solent child thrills to notorious book… HTML abuse… Spears version 2.0 … Goldberg-bashing links… Reuters a major piece of crap… Drunken Australian linkage flaw… blog humor/tedium ratio explored… reason apparently not linked to suicide attacks
To make sense of it all, visit Tim Blair’s blog and receive your free can of Fosters. Excellent.
You may be wondering ‘which Federation is that?’ Russia? Mexico? No. Star Trek’s Federation. What is more, my problem is more with the Star Trek shows than their fictional interstellar political entity.
It is not the stories I object to, which are adequate though often highly derivative. It is not the acting, which is generally satisfactory and occasionally quite good. It is not the dialogue, which is adequate for the most part with only intermittent trips into the creative quicksand. It is not the special effects, which are seamless and superior (no, not the first series). All these things are okay for the various Star Trek shows such as Next Generation, DS-9, Voyager (I have not seen Enterprise yet), which are collectively the Sci-Fi ‘franchise’ that more or less defines the qualitative median line through the genre.
Like any long running series, the Star Trek shows have had their ups and downs: The first few Next Generation were embarrassingly badly acted but they eventually pulled together as a company of actors. Voyager was for quite a while the ‘lemon’ of the franchise (Trek Fan One: “You wanna hear a Star Trek joke?” Trek Fan Two: “Sure” Trek Fan One: “Voyager”). Yet once they added the sublime Jeri Ryan and gave their script writers a firm kick up the arse, it belatedly became quite a good show (yes, I admit it: Jeri Ryan’s unusually named ‘7 of 9’ pushed pretty much all my buttons in all the right ways).
Other shows do the genre better for sure (Stargate absolutely, Babylon 5 for the most part, Farscape & Earth: Final Conflict intermittently) whilst still others do it worse (Andromeda) or far worse (SeaQuest DSV)…and of course there is the demented Lexx (imagine Voyager, but while stoned on peyote) which is in a class all its own that transcends mere notions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
So what do I have against the Federation? Well simply put, it is an authoritarian collectivist quasi-communist society (the government is clearly paramilitary) with a totally non-monetary command economy. That they have invented a state like that is not my grouse. I do not doubt there will be authoritarian states in the future just as there are now and so why not posit them? Fine… my problem is that somehow the Federation are held up to be the good guys!
There is little sign of any counter-culture within the Federation and what there is are mostly shown as being violent unreasonable terrorists (the Maquis, who in reality are just fighting to prevent their land being occupied as a result of a Federation sell-out). Also, aspects of their military culture are frankly beyond belief (particularly when compared to shows like Stargate or Babylon 5, which actually understand the essential logic underpinning the military mindset). Do these guys ever fire first? And how often has Jean Luc Picard surrendered his ship in various episodes? That is the Star Fleet Flagship we are talking about! Likewise it seems that insubordination, even under fire, is almost the norm! Sorry but with a culture like that, the Klingons, the Romulans , hell, the Tellytubbies, would have smashed the Federation long ago.
Yet it is clear that the Federation’s agents are the very essence of violent interaction under other conditions. Most striking was one episode of Next Generation called Unification, Part II. Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes) enters a saloon seeking information. He encounters a female piano player whom he suspects might know what he needs to discover. She suggests he might like to ‘make it worth her while’. In a voice dripping with disdain, he says “I don’t carry money”. He then falls back on sweet talking her and eventually she reveals a Fenegi merchant nearby may actually have the information (the Ferengi are little arch-capitalist gargoyles with large ears. Good little Von Mises fans that they are, they insist on payment in ‘gold-pressed latinum’, none of this fiat money crap for them!) . As charm is not going to work on a Fenegi merchant, Riker roughs the puny unarmed merchant up and threatens him in order to extract the information. Now keep in mind that we are being told to regard Riker as the good guy. A Feregi will sell anything yet rather than even try to buy or barter for the information, Star Fleet’s armed uniformed thug just resorts to violence. This is just one of the more stark examples of why it really bugs me to hear Sci-Fi fans hold Star Trek’s Federation up as some sort of ‘better society’ in the future.
And yes, I really do always cheer for the Klingons.
There is an excellent article on the Ludwig von Mises Institute website by Sean Corrigan called Worse than Recession.
Economies do not subside because demand wanes – we could all use a shiny new car, or a beautiful new house pretty much any time. However, in a world where means, unlike wants, are not infinite, we have to be able to offer something in exchange. We do that by first profitably producing things other people require, at a price they are willing to pay, not by stamping our feet and making demands like a petulant 5-year-old.
This is ‘economics for grown-ups’. Read the whole article, it is good stuff.
All e-mails to the Samizdata are indeed read and passed on to whomsoever they pertain. We try to answer them all either directly by e-mail or via a follow up posting. As we have had several annoyed e-mails regarding Samizdata reader Sarah Walker’s remarks which were mentioned in a post, let me state that a reader’s views are just that: a reader’s views. If we find them germane and interesting, we might sometimes publish them with or without comment from a Samizdata editor, but they remain the reader’s views… and no…under no circumstances will we give out their e-mail addresses!
I missed these excellent brios first time around, but on the theory that highlighting any negative exposure for ol’ Sauron can never be a bad thing, let me commend these well researched exposés to you all.
Over on Front Page, David Horowitz systematically exposes Noam Chomsky to the light of day in The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky.
He drops his second daisy cutter The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky: Part II Method and Madness to complete the mission. A job well done, Dave.
After much poking around, I cannot find any particular significance about 11 Sept 1970 that Natalie was wondering about. The dates of any significance I found were:
On 6 September 1970 the PFLP carried out one of the most memorable hijackings in history prior to September 11 2001. This was the simultaneous hijack to Jordan of a Swissair DC-8 and a TWA 707.
On 12 September, this was followd by the hijacking of a BOAC VC-10. All aircraft were forced to land at Dawson Field, outside Amman. At the same time another group of PFLP hijackers hijacked a Pan American 747 to Cairo and blew it up there. The Jordanians were deeply divided on what to do about the hijackers. The day after the destruction of the hijacked planes King Hussein declared martial law and sacked his pro-Palestinian prime minister.
As far as I can figure, it was 14 September when it all finally went horribly pear shaped. The Jordanian army and Palestinians directly came to blows when the Jordanians attacked the Palestinian base at Zarqa.
On the 19 September, Palestine Liberation Army and regular Syrian army armoured units invaded northern Jordan, driving towards Amman, with Arafat declared northern Jordan a ‘liberated area’. After initially loosing ground, the very professional Jordanian army counter-attacked the Syrian/PLA forces and pushed them back.
On 22 September an Arab League delegation arrived in Amman to broker a deal between the Jordanians and Palestinians.
On 24 September (or 25 Sept in one accounts I found) no sooner had the Arab delegates returned to Cairo to announce a political deal than Arafat rejected the settlement and renews his calls for the overthrow of the Jordanian Hashemite monarchy (in spite of the fact the Jordanian Army was now starting to get the upper hand throughout the country).
On 27 September King Hussein arrived in Cairo for more peace negotiations with Arafat. These came to nothing and eventually Arafat’s forces were finally completely crushed and ejected from Jordan by July 1971.
Does any one else know if there was anything special about September 11 1970 that I might have missed? If so, e-mail and tell us.
The demented Hollywood Investigator reports on the fact that due to the marvels of modern technology, Britany Spears has been ‘upgraded’. As you can see in the pictures, they are talking about her, ahem, microphones.
I wonder if David Deutsch is aware of Miss Spears’ less well known talents in the field of Quantum Theory?
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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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