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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Here is a fascinating comment from Sunday Fox News by DefSec Rumsfeld:
Rumsfeld: It — it certainly is not an act of peace or an act of cooperation. The coalition forces our — U.K. planes and our aircrews are constantly subjected to being fired at by the Iraqis. It’s been going on for some years now. It’s the only place in the world where we’re being fired at, as a matter of fact, on a regular basis, except for Afghanistan.
Snow: So, we’re already at war?
Rumsfeld: Well, technically, the state of war that began in —
Snow: Was never —
Rumsfeld: — 1980 — 91 — has never ended. I mean, the — that has still — there is currently a state of war with Iraq that has not ended.
Glenn Reynolds put me on the trail of this one: EMP weapons.
I personally don’t know what all the fuss is about. New Scientist published an article a year or three ago which shows how to build one of these in your garage. Perhaps getting things right for targeting from a moving cruise missile and accurately controlling the output energy are the special part… but the main concept is dead easy.
If you are interested, go dig it up yourself. I’m not going to tell you how.
Once WWIII is over with… perhaps.
Five police officers have been stabbed, one fatally, during a raid on an apartment in Manchester:
“The operation was linked to the discovery of the deadly poison ricin in a north London flat last week and to the Metropolitan Police anti-terrorism operation, police have confirmed.”
‘Linked’ in which way? Sadly there is not enough information here to fill the back of a postage stamp. Probably with good reason.
I wonder how deep this rabbit hole goes?
Following last week’s ricin incident it seems that the British authorities have decided to come clean with the public:
“British ministers have been warned by their security advisers that a west European city is “likely” to be the target of a terrorist attack using a chemical or other non-conventional weapon in the short-to-medium term.
They have also warned that they cannot be sure they know the identity of more than 50 per cent of people in the UK who might carry out a terrorist attack on behalf of al-Qaeda.”
Just how long, I wonder, is that ‘short-to-medium’ term? And just how many is ’50 per cent’? Is that two people or ten thousand people? Any clue?
Is this true and we’re being softened up to endure the worst or is it hogwash because the authorities have a fairly good idea who these people are but don’t want to let on that they know? Beats me.
I will say, however, that if the claim in the second paragraph turns out to be correct then, leaving aside the possible ghastly consequences for a moment, it really does illustrate the extent to which the British internal security apparatus has been woefully misdirected these last few years.
We live in a country with more CCTV cameras per square mile than any other country on earth, our police and customs officials have surveillance and information gathering powers that the KGB would envy and, because of Money Laundering Regulations, it is almost impossible to function in our society without having to prove identity. If I failed to send in my VAT Form at the end of this month, the state will be all over me like bluebottles on a dog-turd. Yet we could, conceivably, be playing host to scores or maybe even hundreds of potential mass-murdering terrorists and the response of the security services is to shrug and say ‘sorry, guv, haven’t got the foggiest’.
Any chance of a re-assessment of priorities in future?
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has attacked Tony Blair for his “mind-boggling” support for the US over a possible war in Iraq. He was shocked and saddened America was being “aided and abetted” by Britain as the British Government is expected to announce later this week that it is planning to deploy troops to the region, reportedly numbering 27,000. When does compassion, when does morality, when does caring come in? The dissident frogman has an excellent take-down of such idiotarian rhetoric.
There has been some discussion on the Libertarian Alliance Forum about “if they know where the weapons are, then why don’t they just tell the inspectors where to go?” I will attempt to tackle this question from a tacticians’ point of view.
Iraq is big: about the size of France and a hell of a lot emptier. There are miles of underground facilities. We can’t possibly be one hundred percent certain we’ve found everything. No matter how long the inspectors take there is uncertainty for the Searchers. However there is also uncertainty for Saddam. He can’t know what our spies have found out, if anything.
So we have a mathematical “game” with two players that might be likened to “battleship”, but is far more complex. It’s also deadly serious. There are potentially hundreds of thousands of lives at stake.
One player has assets on his hidden board and the other player is trying to find them. The second player knows where some of the assets are but can’t even be sure what percentage they know of; the other side knows all of its’ assets but can’t be sure how many of them the other side knows. This gives us a matrix of four possibilities:
- Searcher knows of the asset : Owner believes the Searcher knows of it.
- Searcher does not know of the asset : Owner believes the Searcher knows of it.
- Searcher knows of the asset : Owner believes the Searcher does not know of it.
- Searcher does not know of the asset : Owner believes the Searcher does not know of it.
What is the best strategy for each player?
The owner will be as helpful as possible on all the sites they believe the Searcher knows of. They can clean them out in advance and pretend great surprise at the inspection. The pretense also assists them in their game playing over the other three categories. → Continue reading: Why doesn’t the CIA tell them?
Azedine Berkane, held in France for the stabbing of Bertrand Delanöe, the homosexual Mayor of Paris, in October this year, may be refused a trial on the grounds that he is a nutter.
Two psychiatrists have concluded that the Islamic fundamentalist who was assumed to have acted in accordance with Islamic hatred of homosexuality, is in fact suffering from a psychosis which often leads to violent behaviour “within a religious context”.
A second opinion is expected before prosecutors have to decided whether Mr Berkhane, 39 years old unemployed and without fixed abode, can be considered mentally fit to stand trial for attempted murder.
In fairness to the psychiatrists, Mr Berkhane has a history of mental illness, and has allegedly claimed that he was being pursued by a “satanic cult”. In 2001, Mr Berkhane was a voluntary patient at a psychiatric hospital in the Paris suburb of St Denis. In March 2002, he was reported missing to police by his mother.
If the French authorities deal with homophobic attacks by Muslims by shaking their heads, saying “poor chap, he’s off his rocker”, locking them up indefinitely, and giving them drugs or electroshock treatment, it doesn’t seem a very glorious path for a young Mudjaheddin to follow. Might this be better than the death penalty? Or is it too cruel?
Good news: it wasn’t merely some US policy wonk/adviser/pundit doing the calling, it was a Muslim. Bad news: it got him a death sentence. Good news: this death sentence has been and continues to be big news.
I know I’m following tracks trod by many, many others. Nevertheless I here add my little vocal chords to the chorus of support for thoughts along these lines, and of complaint that the man has been sentenced to death for voicing them.
I’ll spare you any further profound thoughts from me about Islam, exact nature of, menace of, blah blah blah, except to say that it seems to me a particular moral duty that those, like me, who have complained about such things as the “inherently beligerent” nature of Islam should note at least some evidence to suggest another interpretation of Islam’s nature, at least potentially, as and when it crops up.
So here’s a quote from the man himself, Hashem Aghajari, from his already much quoted speech of June 2002 that got him into all the trouble:
The Islam of today is different. It is very clear that we have a different understanding of it in all areas, including economics. It has to suit the thoughts and realities of today. Just as people at the dawn of Islam conversed with the Prophet, we have the right to do this today. Just as they interpreted what was conveyed [to them] at historical junctures, we must do the same. We cannot say: ‘Because this is the past we must accept it without question.’ This is putting too much emphasis on the past. This is not logical.
For years, young people were afraid to open a Koran. They said, ‘We must go ask the Mullahs what the Koran says,’ [since] it was used primarily in mosques and cemeteries. The new generation was not allowed to come near the Koran; [young people] were told that [first] they needed [training in] 101 methods of thought and they did not possess them. Consequently, [the young people] feared reading the Koran.
Then came Shariati, and he told the young people that these ideas were bankrupt; [he said] you could understand the Koran using your own methods – you could understand as well as the religious leaders who claim to have a ton of knowledge. The religious leaders taught that if you understand the Koran on your own, you have committed a crime. They feared that their racket would cease to exist if young people learned [Koran] on their own.
Ignoramus that I am, I have no idea who “Shariati” is (comment please).
Follow the link above, and you also find Thomas Friedman in a New York Times article (“A story worth watching”), reproduced by The Iranian, saying this:
What’s going on in Iran today is, without question, the most promising trend in the Muslim world. It is a combination of Martin Luther and Tiananmen Square – a drive for an Islamic reformation combined with a spontaneous student-led democracy movement.
And there are plenty of other enticing links. Follow. Copy. Paste. Comment. When the words “Hashem Aghajari” are typed into a search engine, let the hit number just keep on rising and rising.
I got this far by going to IndyMedia from (who else?) Instapundit, who has long been saying, for example here and then a few days later here, that all public Muslim moves in the right direction deserve the blogosphere’s support. Indeed.
Richard Miniter, who gave a speech at the Libertarian Alliance conference described by David Carr, enthusiastically recommends this essay by David Warren, entitled “Wrestling with Islam”, which I missed when it came out during last month.
Choosing paragraphs to excerpt is difficult, because, as Miniter says, it is all so good. Try this:
Elsewhere, we encounter the old elites, but find them like beached whales, still nominally presiding over the societies which they have helped destroy, economically, socially, religiously, and in every other practical way, so that there was nothing left for them but to find a new excuse for holding on to power, and someone else to blame for what happened.
In Pakistan, for instance, the elites are certainly still there, only beginning to be diluted by the arrivistes from the Islamist madrasas. From the other side, they are bled by emigration, for the engineers and the technocrats, and the other functionaries of the New Class, are leaving as fast as they can to the West. It is an economic imperative, there are diminishing opportunities at home; for where there is no oil to pump and refine, there tends to be precious little else in the way of an economy. They wash their hands of all those five-year plans, and get quite peacefully on planes for Europe and America, where they can hope at least to stay solvent. And all they are really leaving behind is the poor of their societies, to fend for themselves.
The New Class that remains, which by now is becoming rather an old class, finds itself enmired in a more and more urgent search for some new silver bullet, some fine new theoretical scheme to replace the tried-and-failed socialism, if for no other reason than to justify their own purchase on elitehood. The alternative is to slide down from eminence, into those mushrooming brick, stick, tin & mud suburbs that they must fear in a way that we, who have not seen them up so close, can never fully understand or empathize with. It is no small thing to lose your place in the social order; and especially in an order with such deep shafts.
→ Continue reading: David Warren wrestles with Islam
Islamic preacher Abu Obeida, an Algerian asylum seeker in Britain, has allegedly said that Islamic law requires Muslims everywhere to come to the assistance of Ba’athist Socialist Iraq if it is attacked by the West.
British journalist A.N. Wilson decries British and American threats against the Iraqi regime in his article called War on Iraq is madness, claiming that Anglo-American actions make Abu Obeida’s call to British Muslims to take up arms against British forces seem quite reasonable.
But it is the achievement of Tony Blair’s government that he has managed to make Mr Obeida and his friends sound like the voice of common sense.
Of course one should not think for a moment that A.N. Wilson has qualms about governments using violence, particularly against their own nationals, as he favours the forcibly sterilisation of social undesirables. Thus given his taste for violence backed state enforced eugenics I suppose his de facto support for Ba’athist National Socialism is not so hard to understand, i.e. he favours the type of regime which could actually implement the sort of views he holds.
Saddam may be a brute to his own people, but surely, by the standards of international law, this is less threatening than the Israeli occupation of territory that is simply not theirs. Think of Mrs Thatcher’s reaction when General Galtieri “did an Ariel Sharon” on some barren little rocks in the south Atlantic.
So Saddam Hussain, who used poison gas to exterminate entire towns which opposed him, who invaded Kuwait and before that Iran, is less of a threat that Israel? And Wilson’s history seems to have airbrushed out the fact Israel is in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza because its neighbours repeatedly attacked Israel first. I was not aware of any recent British attacks on Argentina prior to General Galtieri’s military occupying the Falklands but perhaps A.N. Wilson is privy to some secret history which I am not aware of.
If I were young enough for military service and was compelled to fight either for Iraq or America, I would fight for Iraq, on the simple grounds that the Iraqis and their surrounding countries should be allowed to work out their own destinies without Western bullying. If I feel that, how much more strongly would it affect a young British Muslim?
And there we have it. Presumably if A.N.Wilson were old enough to have been available for military service in 1939 and was compelled to fight either for Nazi Germany or Britain, he would have fought for Nazi Germany, on the simple grounds that Germany and its surrounding countries, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, the Netherland, Beligium, France and Austria, should have been allowed to work out their own destinies without British, and later American, ‘bullying’.
No doubt… after all, his views of forcibly castrating and spaying the underclass would have been very well received in Berlin in those days.
I have been wondering recently why all the Al-Qaeda attacks happen in countries that would be at the bottom of the list of expected targets for a terrorist group with their agenda. They aim at American or Israeli targets but that does not explain the exotic selection of places they chose to do so. Here is a list of suspected Al-Qaeda attacks, by no means exhaustive:
- Djerba, Tunisia, 9th March – A truck explodes near the El Ghriba synangogue, killing 14
- Rishon Letzion, Israel, 11th April – a suicide bomber kills 16 and wounds 60 at a billiard hall
- Karachi, Pakistan, 14th June – suspected suicide bomber kills 14 outside Sheraton hotel and a car bomb outside the US consulate explodes later killing 11 and injuring 45
- Aden, Yemen, 6th October – an explosion of the French tanker Limburg kills a crew member
- Bali, Indonesia, 12th October – bombs explode outside the Sari Club disco at Kuta Beach resort killing 185 people and injuring hundreds more. A third bomb explodes near the US consulate in Sanur, no-one is hurt.
- Zamboanga, Philippines, 17th October 2002 – two bombs detonated at a shopping center leaving 6 people dead and 144 injured.
- Mombasa, Kenya – 28th November – a vehicle crashes into the lobby of the Paradise Hotel and together with a second device explodes, 14 killed and 80 injured. Two Stinger missiles are fired at an Israeli passenger jet at it takes off from Mombasa airport, narrowly missing 260 passengers.
These are not obvious terrorist destinations. One explanation is that the developed Western country have higher security, which makes it more difficult to carry out same style of attacks. I very much doubt that, as the IRA used to manage just fine disrupting life in London and I am not aware of any security measures that would make terrorist attacks impossible.
Any more theories about why the strange collection of targets? It is the ones that are missing from the list that puzzle me…
My previous posting about ‘ironic Jihad’ was satirical but this is certainly not!
The militant Islamic group Hamas is urging followers to conduct a three-day ‘electronic Jihad’ on Jewish websites, starting today, Novermber 29th. Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles said the latest find this week was particularly alarming: “We have had numerous hackings back and forth between Israeli and Islamic sites since the Intifada began two years ago.
But this is something we have not seen in some time. There seems to be an entire portion of a We site which is devoted to a ‘how to’ get involved in that kind of activity.”
The term ‘Jewish’ websites could mean anything from Israeli government sites to any company that does business with Israel.
Apparently, the same way bloggers are using the Internet as a forum for ideas and for additional sources of information, increasingly computer literate Islamic groups are using it to transform the Islamic and Islamist world and to circumvent official sources of information.
“….The Internet has become not only a battlefield, as this announcement would seem to indicate… of electronic wars, but it is also a key element in propaganda battles in Arabic, Persian and in English.”
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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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