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]
In her ill-judged attack on global capitalism, Naomi Klein decried the phenomenon of the corporate logo. One of the sillinesses of this is that logos and brands are essentially bound up with the reputation of a firm. A firm that has a strong brand, a strong reputation for honesty, quality and high service may have taken years, decades even, to aquire it. It can take only days to lose such a reputation through stupidity or dishonesty. That is why reputation is a protection for the consumer. Statists who imagine that we need all manner of regulations to protect consumers against shysters routinely forget this point. A firm that wants to make a whacking great profit is unlikely to deliberately harm or even kill, its customers. Self-interest dictates that a firm that wants to make money over the long term will work like hell to ensure its reputation is deserved. (It may be debateable whether limited liability either enhances or weakens this process, but I have not the time to explore that here).
I got thinking along these lines following the recent mess that has unfolded at Reuters, thanks entirely to sharp-eyed bloggers spotting something funny about photographs. Reuters is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, news service in the world. It both provides information directly to clients such as traders via its screens, offering real-time news alerts, and also wholesale news, providing text and photographs to newspapers and broadcasters. The company – founded by central European aristocrat Baron Julius Reuter – has employed some of the bravest and sharpest journalists in the business, not to mention folk who went on to forge careers in television like Sandy Gall or even thriller writers like Frederick Forsyth and Ian Fleming.
So what has happened over the photo scandal has the whiff of tragedy as well as farce. Its reputation has been badly damaged by the photo scandal. My sources at the firm realise that the situation cannot be shrugged off and it appears this will not happen. Good. The organisation deserves credit for immediately axing the jerk who doctored photographs to make a situation look more exciting and therefore marketable than it was. The whole back-catalogue of this person’s work has been taken down. Reuter’s head of editorial, David Schlesinger – no stranger to speaking his mind about matters – is certainly like to crack the whip, although I am not yet aware that senior managers’ heads may roll because of what has happened. (Stay tuned).
It is a shame in some ways since the company has been recovering financially over the past couple of years. Reuters’ profitability was hammered after the end of the dotcom boom in 2000. Bloated and complacent after the boom years in foreign exchange and equity markets during the 80s and 90s, Reuters’ lost ground to firms like Bloomberg. Bloomberg’s snazzy news and bond-dealing boxes and add-on features enticed away thousands of clients. And yet under new CEO Tom Glocer, the company started to fight back, halting the exodus of clients, simplifying its product range. It left its old HQ in Fleet Street and moved to a gleaming new office in Canary Wharf.
To fight back from this, senior management must show no mercy if there are further signs of this sort of nonsense. If they do not take a hard line, one can be sure business rivals like Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal will be ready to pounce.
I wandered through the aftermath of the anti-Israel, anti-Bush, anti-Blair demo in Parliament Square last Saturday afternoon, late on. I had my camera with me, and snapped one of the many placards still on view. It was not exactly what you would call a ceasefire call:
I can not help thinking that this guy is better at making photogenic placards than he is at military strategy. Unleashing armies would be like putting up other big signs, surely, saying: “Put your bombs here”.
Accompanying earlier posts here and here, another example of some Reuters truthmaking has been exposed by the blogosphere – and guess which side of the conflict is being targeted by Reuters’ dodgy Adobe warriors? The shot and caption in question can be found here. The caption reads
An Israeli F-16 warplane fires missiles during an air strike on Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon, August 2, 2006.
Looks plausible enough to an untrained eye such as my own, however Reuters again underestimates the superior intellectual firepower ranged against it in the Blogosphere, which has exposed the “missiles” as the guided-missile countermeasure known as chaff. The fact that two of the three rounds visible are copies of the single chaff release adds to the visual fiction. The link posted above debunking the Reuters image has a lot more detail.
We are starting to see the full extent of entrenched dishonesty in the Reuters newsroom, and it is astonishing that the people working for this once-venerable institution think they can get away with such crude deception. Did they think people with far, far greater expertise than these hacks would not notice? Reuters needs to get its house in order expeditiously, otherwise its supersession is assured.
Here is a link to a Getty image with the following information:
Caption:
Tyre, LEBANON: Rockets fired from Israel are seen falling in the outskirts of the southern Lebanese port city of Tyre, 06 August 2006. Israel’s army will carry on fighting Hezbollah in southern Lebanon until two soldiers, whose capture sparked the conflict last month, are returned, its ambassador to Washington said today. AFP PHOTO/SAMUEL ARANDA (Photo credit should read SAMUEL ARANDA/AFP/Getty Images) Copyright: 2006 AFP By/Title: SAMUEL ARANDA/Stringer Date Created: 6 Aug 2006 12:00 AM City, State, Country: Tyre, -, Lebanon Credit: AFP/Getty Images Collection: AFP Source: AFP Date Submitted: 6 Aug 2006 10:44 AM
Take a look and tell me what you think and although I do not claim to be an ‘artillery expert’, my interpretation of what that image shows is outgoing rockets (i.e. Hezbollah firing at Israel) rather than incoming rockets (i.e. Israel firing on Tyre). My reasoning is as follows… firstly the rockets are burning, suggesting launch rather than impact, secondly the back-blast is visible slightly behind the location of what I take to be the launcher rather than an impact area.
Alternative explanation: the rockets were fired by an Israeli aircraft just out-of-shot (hence rockets are still burning) and are indeed incoming fire. The reason I doubt that is the rockets seem to be producing a large signature suggesting they are long range artillery rockets (i.e. Katyusha) rather than free flight aircraft rockets (which are much smaller, do not produce such impressive flames and whose rockets burn out very quickly)
Why am I interested? Because presumably the stringer, Samuel Aranda, saw this incident (i.e. could clearly see in which direction the rockets were flying) and presumably also created the caption. Is it in fact the truth?
I wrote to Getty images asking for clarification but have received no reply yet. If there are any artillery experts out there I would be keen to hear what they think. As I have said, I am not an expert on the subject but I am sure there must be some folks out there who can confirm either that the caption is most likely correct and I am mistaken, or my interpretation is the more plausible one.
Update 1: Take a look at this image of outgoing Katyusha rockets.
A modest contribution to the debate between the media and bloggers… Thanks to Jon Stewart for pointing out yet another way in which the credibility and professionalism are the flavour of the day. Obviously.
For those who missed this in the Samizdata comment section a few days ago, take a look at this and make of it what you will.
Horray for Hollywood Pallywood. Truth is all in the editing it would seem.
Update: And that applies to still images as well. Reuter’s has its ‘Dan Rather moment’ as a picture of the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike is proven to be a Photoshop ‘enhancement’
If your community is built around a terrorist organization, and relies upon that organization for infrastructure and funding, you should not be too surprised when that infrastructure gets ripped out by irate victims of said terrorist organization.
And before anyone starts whining about ‘disproportionate force’ being used by the Israelis, I would encourage them to reflect on what force used in self-defense is supposed to be proportionate to. If someone attacks you with a knife, are you only allowed to use a knife to defend yourself, or can you pull your firearm and put them down with that? No one would say that a firearm is a ‘disproportionate’ response to a knife.
And that is because force is only disproportionate if it is (far) in excess of what is reasonably necessary to bring the aggression to a halt. A solid case can be made that, far from being disporportionate, the Israeli response has fallen far short of what they are entitled, and perhaps even obligated (to their citizenry) to exert.
As we enter Day whatever-it-is (sorry, lost count) of the war between Israel and Hizb’Allah, the ongoing suffering of the British chattering classes shows no sign whatsoever of easing up. In fact, and according to reliable eyewitness reports, Israeli attacks on Lebanon have led to the intellectual and moral displacement of tens of thousands of innocent journalists, politicians and media types, all of them old women, and who now have nowhere to go.
But I suppose that that is only to be expected given the Uberissue media status of the current war in the Levant. So dominant is coverage of unfolding events and so extenstive is the (usually wrong) analysis that even news of impending all-out, balls-out civil war in Iraq has been relegated to the ‘and-now-for-the-rest-of-the-news’ section.
However, I have noticed what appears to be a slight change of emphasis. Amid the dwindling number of pro-forma demands for ‘proportionality’ (as if flogging that dead horse for long enough will cause it to reincarnate), the blanket indignation at what Israel is doing is morphing into a sense of grievous effrontery over what Tony Blair is not doing, i.e. he is not caling for am immediate ceasefire. Some talking-head or other on Newsnight this evening even when as far as to suggest that Tony Blair’s lamentable failure in this regard was the cause of the continued strife.
But what if Mr. Blair was to oblige his critics and duly demand a ceasefire? Would the warring parties, upon hearing the plaintiff Voice of Blair wafting in on the Mediterranean breezes, forthwith end their hostilities? Would the Katushya rockets fall silent? Would the Israeli armoured divisions gratefully slam their gears into reverse and head, teary-eyed, back to Israel? Will the lion lie down with the lamb, the Hobbit embrace the Orc and so on and so forth? Well, no, and not even the most woodenheaded of the Ceasefiristas imagine that any of that would happen.
And if Mr. Blair were, indeed, to succumb to these demands (which seem to mostly emanate from his own party backbenches) what then? Nobody seems to know. But then, nothing need follow because calls for ceasefire are not really about saving lives in Lebanon, Israel or anywhere else. Nor are they about solving the problems or establishing peace. They are really about adopting the right posture that, in turn, absolves the posturer from having to make any difficult or embarrassing decisions. In short, it is a respectable cop-out.
The incessant, prating ceasefire demands have little to do with either the Middle East conflict or, indeed, any other conflict and are much more to do with internal politics. The pressure on Mr. Blair is not really to put a stop to the fighting because everyone really knows that he cannot do any such thing. Rather it is pressure on Blair to toe his party line, mollify his backbenchers and let everyone off the moral hook.
So does this mean I get a sick kick out of watchiing the continued bloodshed? The answer is an emphatic ‘no’. I, too, would like to see an end to the war as soon as possible but, as balanced against that, I would like to see an end to Hizb’Allah even sooner. Call me callous if you will but I would rather risk being seen as callous than offer myself up as a fashionably useless poseur.
With the IAF striking border crossings with Syria and the Syrians shooting down an Israeli reconnaissance drone in Lebanon, perhaps a greater Middle East war is indeed at hand. As Israel really has no viable options that do not involve destroying Hezbollah and destroying Hezbollah probably requires preventing Syria from acting as either a safe haven or supply source, a wider war was probably inevitable.
Seeing the last of the Ba’athists in Syria crushed would be splendid but of course the most likely people to fill their still smoking shoes would be Islamists of some ilk. Not easy to see a happy outcome no matter what happens and yet doing nothing is not an option for Israel either given that it would be pointless to try and negotiate with such intractable enemies when in truth they will be satisfied with nothing less that Israel’s annihilation.
The picture on top of this New York Times story about Iran’s reaction to the conflict in Lebanon demonstrates the problem.
It also distracts from the story itself, which is pretty interesting in the way it describes how many hopes, and fears, the Iranian regime has invested in Hezbollah.
Its fears are about the military damage that Hezbollah is sustaining under the weight of Israel’s attack. That is something that is totally speculative, as we don’t have any way to assess it. However given the weight of fire that northern Israel is under at the moment, it is quite possible that Hezbollah is being weakened quite considerably by the sheer volume of munitions that it is expending.
I am not a military person at all, but I cannot help but wonder what the military situation might be like if Hezbollah used its rocket artillery strictly against military targets.
Be that as it may, Iran feels that it is benefiting from the increased prestige that Hezbollah is getting from Arab populations, which normally would be denied it for sectarian differences. It is a moot point how well that prestige will last when the fighting stops and Hezbollah has to account for its actions to the rest of the Lebanese community, which is by no means pleased with what Hezbollah has done.
But I still can not get over that image from the streets of Tehran.
Diana Hsieh, a hardline objectivist of the Big-O variety, thinks libertarians like Tom Palmer, whom she cites in an article on her Noodlefood site here, are losing their nerve if they worry about attacks on civilian targets in places like Beirut. She writes:
Obviously, wars cannot be fought without harm to civilian populations. Governments and their militaries do not exist in some separate dimension from civilians, such that they might be uniquely targeted by an invading force. Enemy governments are thoroughly integrated into the territory over which they rule, depending upon its wealth, hospitals, roads, factories, trains, farms, ports, industry, people, and more. That’s why quickly and decisively eliminating the threat posed by an enemy nation cannot but require the bombing of so-called “civilian” targets.
Moreover, without active support and/or tacit submission from a majority of the civilian population, no government could maintain its grip on power. That’s why the vast majority of the population of an aggressive enemy nation are not morally innocent bystanders. The sometimes-awful luck of genuine innocents in wartime, such as young children or active dissidents, is a terrible tragedy. However, the party responsible is not the nation defending itself but rather all those who made such a defense necessary, particularly the countrymen of the innocents complicit in or supportive of the aggression of their nation.
I am very troubled by that last paragraph. Hsieh seems to be saying that civilians in a country that is led by a brutal government are, unless they do everything to rebel, more or less complicit in the crimes of that government. Therefore, they have little or no excuse to complain if bombs come raining down on their homes.
This way of reasoning involves, by an ironic twist, to a sort of collectivist “guilt” shared across a whole populace. If a family living say, in Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany have not actively sought to overthrow those governments, then they are somehow not terribly deserving of our compassion (Hsieh, to be fair, seems to exempt children and one or two other groups from this).
I entirely defend Israel’s right to do what is necessary to defend itself from terror groups like Hamas and Hizbollah, and alas, its actions may lead, inevitably, to the loss of civilian life. I consider myself pretty much pro-Israeli and have nothing but contempt for the bogus moral equivalence drawn in certain parts of the media between the actions of the Israeli armed forces and terror groups. But I have a real problem with the line of argument presented here by Hsieh. The ends do not always justify the means, and as moral agents, it is surely right to minimise loss of innocent life as far as possible if that can be done. For consider this: if the western powers had really thrown off all moral constraints about foreign populations in the recent past, then much of the Middle East would be a radioactive wasteland.
Israel is killing a lot more people in Lebanon targeting Hezbollah position which are located intentionally within populated towns and villages, than Hezbollah are killing in Israel targetting literally anyone with their random rocket attacks fired blindly into towns and cities… but Hezbollah’s poor ‘score’ is not for lack of trying.
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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