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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Russian special forces have pulled off a brilliant rescue. I was not surprised by the attempt. In fact, I was discussing this probability with a friend last night before going out to watch “The Bourne Identity”. There was simply no choice at all but to take the risk because the alternative was certain death for over 700 people.
I expected higher casualties among the hostages than what actually occured so my hat is off to the Russians. I’m also happy to hear of the death of such a large percentage of the terrorists. Thirty-six out of fifty ain’t bad shooting.
I’m really glad we’re on the same side now.
I find it rather interesting the sniper and his boy sidekick were living in Tacoma Washington and doing target practice in their backyard as recently as January. I could not be the only one who remembers there was an al Q’aeda cell training in the wilderness there. One really has to assume the authorities are looking for connections between an Islamic sniper with US military quals and a training camp in his vicinity1.
An FBI fellow interviewed by UK ITV News was certain the dastardly duo were working alone and doing this only for the money. I’m sure his statements must be as accurate and as correct as Official statements on the LAX shootings were.
There certainly is a potential venue for Muhammad to have been recruited. He was a bodyguard for Nation of Islam and that would have flagged his name but good for those who might be looking for native trouble makers. There is no need to assume Nation of Islam has any association whatever with terrorism for this to be true. If I were al Q’aeda I’d be nosing around and infiltrating this ready made army with a classic old style Communist co-opt, take-over and purge in mind.
If I were Louis Farakhan, I’d be watching my back very carefully.
I am relieved these people are in the lockup, although no where near as relieved as people in the region are. I have many friends in both areas where they were killing people. One friend’s youngest daughter goes to school 3 blocks from the Ashland Ponderosa. This is the South and I would not be surprised if he was picking her up at school the last few days… with a bit of security hardware close to hand.
Now we wait for the trial and see what connections come out in court. The State of Maryland will be seeking the death penalty and I doubt there will be any hue and cry over it.
Marshmallows anyone?
1 =“in his vicinity” out in the West should be interpreted to mean “within a few hundred miles. As they say, there is nothing out there but miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles. Well, nothing other than a lot of trees, mountains, not-so-extinct volcanoes and the odd bear, wolf and mountain lion at least.
If you still haven’t had enough of my postings on Iraq, here is one that describes just how the news we hear about Iraq is obtained, restricted and processed.
Having read Salam Pax blog and other ‘inside Iraq’ articles, I am now convinced of what has so far been a conjecture based on my experience of communism. Nightmares do not fade that easily and I recognise this is as the same stuff of which ‘the Evil Empire’ was made and 1984 written about. In its pervasiveness and destructiveness it is often beyond understanding of a free individual.
Please do as Lynn of Poet and Peasant, who posted this link, says: This deserves maximum exposure. Read it. Link to it. Forward it to your congressman. Print it out and give it to people who think they can get all the news they need from TV.
In the article, Farideh Tehrani, a 27-year old woman in Tehran, implores: Please tune out the biased and shallow works of journalists who use their pens to editorialize rather than report news. To us as Iranians, that is unfathomable. Don’t you realize that when we read your work, we ask what good is free press if it does not report the truth?
At this moment in our history, Iranians have limited means to voice our calls to the world beyond the rapidly crumbling walls of the clerical regime. We have a sense of urgency. Yet we feel left behind by the very champions of civil rights, human rights, and liberal reform who once dominated headlines. Don’t abandon us now, not at this junction in our history.
So Saddam is trying to show he cares. The amnesty was the most important gesture of a campaign aimed at presenting a softer face to his people and rallying them for war. Iraqis are being regaled with propaganda showing him as a caring and conciliatory leader.
He certainly has the means to do that – satellite television is banned, foreign radio stations are jammed and the internet is tightly controlled, with many websites blocked. Iraqis have no choice but to be overwhelmed by Saddam’s immensely powerful propaganda machine as the great majority encounter nothing but the state media’s relentless diet of indoctrination.
As part of the propaganda drive a mass wedding was held in Baghdad yesterday, paid for by the regime. More than 150 couples gathered at the headquarters of the Youth Wing of the ruling Ba’ath party to tie the knot, benefiting from the benign patronage of their leader.
The regime had supplied wedding dresses to the brides and suits to the grooms. None fitted. The grooms wore trousers that either flapped around their heels or barely covered their knees. Equally ill-fitting shoes condemned them to walking in a painful hobble. The brides, all clad in identical dresses, struggled to raise a smile.
After posing glumly for photographs, the couples left for a party organised by Saddam’s eldest son, Uday. Saddam had also paid for their honeymoon – a two-night stay in the Palestine Hotel in central Baghdad. After this, the brides would be allowed to hand back the wedding dresses. But the grooms would have to keep the suits.
Isn’t that just wonderful? The problem is that I have heard of this kind of grotesque and absurd propaganda stunts. They are usually perpetrated by dictators who have completely lost touch with reality and live in the world of their own. It is a result of an evolutionary process based on survival instinct – the leader spends first few years shooting everyone who disagrees with him and voilà, all is well as everybody agrees with him! Remember Nicolae Ceausescu?
I suspect that we only hear about a small fraction of Saddam’s escapades. I hope that after Iraq is freed and the full horror of his regime revealed, it will become one of the examples of justified use of force.
Another bombing tonight in Northern Israel. Another bus rammed by a car packed with explosives. At least 15 dead and 30 maimed.
As I have indicated previously, this is not going to stop.
Tradesports.com runs an over-the-counter derivatives market with contracts covering various events.
Those of you who like a market solution for any problem will be pleased to know it quotes quarterly futures style contracts on the likelihood of Saddam being President of Iraq in December, March and June.
Market prices currently imply that he has an 83 percent chance of being the Mother of all Dictators come Christmas, but only a 48 percent chance of opening Easter Eggs as President and a 37 percent chance of seeing in the second half of the year in power.
Early optimism that Saddam would take an early bath has declined as time has progressed. Being an unregulated market there is of course nothing to stop Dubya doing a bit of insider trading…
Paul Staines
Dale is right, in their simplistic minds, the news anchors miss the real battle.
Finally, France appears favourably disposed to new U.S. proposals for a draft resolution that now drops any immediate authorisation for a military strike against Iraq unless Baghdad balks at U.N. weapons inspections.
Facing major opposition from everybody, except the trusty Brits who supported all the U.S. drafts, the United States radically changed key parts of its earlier draft resolution which authorised any U.N. member to “use all necessary means” if it decided Iraq violated a whole series of infractions. The new text also deletes earlier proposals explicitly threatening “serious consequences.”
It does sound pretty watered down, if you ask me, but after meeting chief U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix, the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said that a new resolution would not prevent Washington from undertaking a military strike against Iraq:
“The United States does not need any additional authority even now, if we thought it was necessary to take action to defend ourselves.”
The new U.S. compromise has been labelled as a “one-and-a-half step.” Instead of two resolutions – one that would give Iraq an opportunity to comply and a second that would authorise force – if the Security council does not do so after reports by Blix of any failure by Iraq to comply with its disarmament obligations, the United States could decide to strike Iraq anyway, and would probably get considerable support to do so.
What seems to be happening is that the French are backtracking whilst trying to preserve some diplomatic dignity. French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte said France insisted on a “two-staged” approach but did not say if this meant a second resolution. Well, given that the U.S. envoys are going around making statements about the U.S. determination to use military force anyway, and in the light of recent terrorist attacks, the opposing Europeans are starting to look like complete twits. The only reason they can get away with it, is that they look quite reasonable next to the rest of the U.N. twits.
The Russian U.N. ambassador, Sergei Lavrov, sharply criticised any unilateral action and warned the United States not to use the Security Council as an excuse for a military strike or one that would lead to a “regime change.” I am surprised that the holier-than-thou Russian even understands the meaning of “regime change”!
Bangladesh Ambassador Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury opined:
“Every possible effort should be made to avert war. These views are evidently shared by a preponderant majority of the membership of the United Nations. They must be heard, listened to and heeded.”
Yes, and your delusions of relevance must be exposed, dispelled and shown for what they are. An empty rhetoric with potentially dire consequences, endangering lives and safety of millions of innocent citizens whose governments, for once, are trying to have a go at protecting them. It is not often you will hear me support Tony Blair or George Bush as representatives of the state that, in case you missed it, is not your friend…
Anyone who watched news early this evening could not help but hear the joyful chortling of the anchors about the US losing in the UN and being “put back in a box”. Well, as it it turns out it ain’t so.
I had a feeling this was the case. The idea the US would sit back and wait for the mushrooms to sprout is just too ludicrous to imagine… unless you are a European news anchor.
But hey, the TV newsies are going after a UK madrassa for child abuse and doing so with both feet and cleats in the air – so they have some redeeming values. They even aired a quote that a child had been told UK law does not apply inside the Mosque!
Tim Hall says:
Some of the right-wing blogs I’ve been reading have complained that they’d heard no condemnation of the awful atrocity in Bali from the Islamic community. They should read this.
Yes we should. If we do, we find this:
Whoever has done this has committed a terrible sin and crime. The Quran says “Whoever kills a single human being unjustly is as though he had killed all of humankind” (Surah al-Ma’ida ayah 32). Deliberate murder of another person will put you in Hell forever. Imagine the punishment for those who have killed hundreds or thousands. Whoever has committed this atrocity will have God’s wrath upon him.
I fear the hatred and violence that will continue to flow from this. May Allah SWT help us all.
I also followed one of the links in this piece, to “Muslims Condemn Terrorist Attacks”, and then the links really start to pile up. I counted no less than 83.
Now I’m no expert on the nuances of Islamic theology, and I cannot possibly tell you how genuine all this condemnation really is. Do they all come from one particular part of the Islamic world, and are we only really looking at old-fashioned intra-Islamic infighting? Search me.
Are they perhaps merely pretending to condemn? Are they merely scared (“I fear the hatred and violence …”) that if the West’s plan A (“War Against Terrorism”) fails, then, united by the failure of plan A to prevent a series of Bali-type horrors around the world, the West might then switch to plan B (“nuke the damn lot of them”)?
Well if they are scared, good. They should be scared. If that message is getting through to the Islamic world, perhaps partly via its English-speaking fringes, good good good. There could hardly be better news for humanity than that.
Maybe this vast pile of links has already been Fisked into nothing in some blog now unknown to me and a commentator will supply the link with a sneerful flourish, and that will appear to be that.
But I say that even pretending is good. Someone obviously thought it worth assembling all these alleged condemnations of terrorism, even if they aren’t, to make it at least look as if terrorism is being condemned by at least some Muslims. Good. Real changes in thought often begin as a mere pretence that such change has already begun. In politics, again and again, you start by changing the window displays, and then your (at first) mere subterfuge works its way backwards into the shop itself. Such subterfuge does at least mean that some Muslims know that they have a problem.
And maybe it’s better than that. Maybe some of this is for real. Maybe those Good Muslims, whom we now curse for their insanely self-destructive silence, really are finding their voices. Maybe they found them months ago, and we’ve been missing it. True, many of the titles of these links do read more like defences of Islam against the charge of terrorism, rather than actual condemnations of terrorism, but like I say, even that is a step in the right direction, and others among them read like much bigger and more genuine steps in the right direction.
Thanks to Scrofula we know that the British MP, George Galloway is still out there, way out there.
Galloway spoke last Friday at the American University of Beirut, urging students to take to the streets in massive demonstrations if they wanted to avoid a century in which they will see their resources stolen and continued Israeli domination in the region. He talked about a Western plan aimed at carving the Arab world into smaller and even weaker states.
He claimed that British officials are deciding whether Saudi Arabia will be two or three countries and if Sudan will be two states or not. Their intention, according to Galloway, is to create a holy Saudi Arabia for the Muslims and keep the other Saudi Arabia that has oil fields for themselves.
Nothing’s missed, we have it all here – Israel, oil, British imperialism – Brendan O’Neill should leap for joy… I wonder whether Mr Galloway reads Spiked (former Living Marxism).
Galloway told the audience that people in Britain have done their bit by organising protests against a war on Iraq. But he said it is time for Arabs to demonstrate that they can threaten interests of the West in the region.
I led the biggest demonstration in the history of Britain two weeks ago, half a million people marched through the streets of London under the slogan ‘Justice for Palestine and no war in Iraq’
Apart from confusing two very different demonstrations and blatantly lying about importance and size of the anti-war one, what the hell is going on here?! How can a representative of the British public, a member of the nation’s legislature, incite violence (as in inviting ‘demonstration of a threat to insterests of the West in the region’) against his own country? This used to be called treason, fair and square, and George Galloway is guilty of it many times over. If democracy has any spine, why is he running around spewing such non-sense as an elected member of the Parliament? Do the people who voted for him agree with his treason? → Continue reading: What’s the punishment for treason nowadays?!
The media and bureaucrats are at least beginning to discuss the possibility of al Q’aeda involvement. After you’ve read the article come back and I’ll finish….
Okay. What is blatantly obvious in the comments? Do you see the same pre-September 11th thought patterns I see?
We are no longer dealing with terrorism that fits into the familiar tick box on government forms. We are not looking at terrorism intended to make a statement or to get prisoners released. We are not looking at terrorism as an isolated event with an isolated purpose.
We are looking at the face of 21st Century warfare.
The enemy is out to destroy our society by any means possible. They don’t need to give manifestos to the media about their purpose because the attacks are a warfighting tactic, not a statement.
If any of our readers happen to be in the right circles, please tell these officials to get their heads out of the box and start thinking WAR, not comfortable 1980’s statement oriented violence happenings.
Let’s stop talking about Motive. That’s police work. Start talking Strategy, Tactics and Objectives and how the Beltway events fit into the big picture of this World War.
I might be entirely wrong about the unfolding of this event…. but even if it is homegrown psychos this time… it won’t be the next.
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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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