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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I can forgive the fact that our intelligence personnel and police missed the bits and pieces that might have prevented 9-11. Despite the excellent hindsight of some writers, it really isn’t all that easy to put such together. Security and police around the world held pieces of the puzzle; but they did not share them because they did not know there was a puzzle. Some of the kamikaze war criminals crossed paths with law enforcement; but in a free society law enforcement does not breathe down the neck of every “suspicious” individual they run in to. Above all, no one… not me, not you, not the head of the CIA, not even Tom Clancy… could have imagined what was to come.
But my forgiveness has its’ limits. The following is simply beyond the pale, an inconceivable level of incompetence on the part of our public servants:
The Economist In the House of Anthrax
After the September 11th attacks, it was generally agreed that western intelligence agencies had failed through lack of “human intelligence”-men on the ground, as opposed to spy satellites and computers monitoring phone calls and e-mails. This failure was to be rectified. Yet since the fall of Kabul on November 13th, journalists have been fanning out across the city. They have stripped houses such as this one, and others directly connected to the al-Qaeda network, of all sorts of documents and other valuable evidence. These have included the names and addresses of al-Qaeda contacts in the West. For the West’s intelligence agencies, September 11th was Black Tuesday. There may be no words with which to describe their failure in the week since the fall of Kabul.
I would very dearly like an explanation why our multi-billion dollar intelligence service didn’t have anyone in those houses in Kabul before the media. Perhaps we should just replace the lot of them with the reporters. But what are we to do with all the failed spies then? Are any small towns perhaps in need of dogcatchers? Our ex-intelligence people might, just might be on the ball enough to find a lost dog if it’s big enough. And in a safe suburban Beltway neighborhood. In the middle of the street…
…with a dayglo “Stray Dog” sign hung around it’s neck.
I never thought that the US state which gave us the supreme statist elitist mouthpiece of Ted Kennedy would ever be worthy of anything other than derision and contempt, even from a resident of the “Socialist Republic of New Jersey”. Carla’s tea party clearly demonstrates I was wrong and I humbly apologize to the libertarian residents of Massachusets. Hail and well met!
I will be very curious to see how the mainstream media handles this tax revolt. Personally, I think they will treat it the same way they do most of the “Shall Issue” right to carry a concealed firearm legislation so popular in the US. Namely, avoid it as much as possible, then give it very minimal airtime during which you ignore all the great positives, vastly inflate the very small negatives, and spew dire warnings of calamity and anarchy. When the people get the law passed anyway and none of the horrendous predictions comes to pass, just pretend it never happened but work to get the law repealed by publishing every story of gun violence you can find, even if they occur in countries far removed culturally and geographically.
Think I’m making this up? At last count 33 of the 50 states have some form of “Shall Issue” legislation. Another 11 have a more restrictive form of carry laws. Only 6 absolutely forbid it. A show of hands, please, from those who learned that from the big media.
In the case of tax repeal, it will be interesting to see how the self serving career politicians supping at the trough of our tax dollars will argue that we need to keep the status quo. Look for a smoke screen of the beneficial state protecting society’s down-trodden and sheltering us all with its superior security.
It should be very enlightening.
Carla Howell’s group in Massachusetts have met the deadline! Over one hundred thousand Massachusetts voter signatures have been delivered to the Town Clerks for certification. The Second Boston Tea Party is brewing up strong and Samizdata will be keeping a close watch on this effort to end the Massachussetts income tax.
Today it’s Massachusetts. Tomorrow it will be other States. Her fire will spread to other states with Ballot Initiatives. Small Government really is a beautiful thing.
Even those of us not in the USA can celebrate a Thanksgiving Day for Carla’s accomplishment.
A Normal War Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has commented:
…almost every argument in favor of military tribunals invokes Johnnie Cochran, Alan Dershowitz, and the O.J. trial.
This may be the point of some but it is certainly not my argument. Enemy soldiers and leadership are not tried in civilian courts. The Bush Directive is rather lenient. In wartime a citizen who works for the enemy is tried for treason in a military court and then shot. The same is true for spies and saboteurs unless their continued existence is of use to the war effort. One need look no further than the fate of German agents who attempted to infiltrate England during the war.
They’re dead.
Under normal wartime practice, any al Qaeda found operating within the United States who are not in uniform and are found guilty of espionage or attempted or actual sabotage would be executed after a military trial. If the persons who attempted access to a West Virginia powerplant were caught, they would be tried as war time spies and sabatours. The persons distributing Anthrax in mail would also be liable to war time law and subsequent execution as sabateurs.
War isn’t a nice game. You play it rough and the stakes are your life.
Pundits seem to have very negative opinions about the recent Presidential Directive on legal jurisdiction. So much so I wonder if anyone has actually read the document. I have and I cannot find anything particularly damning. It places captured enemy forces under military rather than civilian law. The directive is carefully targetted at al Qaeda and only non-citizen al Qaeda at that. So why the fuss?
Perhaps the answer lies in history. The directive is quite a normal one for a country at war. It would once have seemed so obvious a need as to be hardly newsworthy. The difficulty is the United States has not fought a normal war, to an end condition of total victory, since World War II. That is over half a century ago. Most of those who would understand the necessity of it are retired or no longer with us.
Make no mistake, this is a war. The al Qaeda are our enemy every bit as much as the Nazi Party of Germany was our enemy. I cannot imagine Himmler and Goering being tried in front of a “normal” court; nor can I imagine bin Laden (assuming the lads who find him constrain themselves from carving him into Purina Pig Chow) being given a New York defense lawyer and allowed to fight a 10 year court battle. He and his people are not just ordinary killers. They are not just ordinary terrorists. They are the founders and leaders of a distributed military force that declared the annihilation of the United States as a religious duty. They have proven their words in deeds.
Given that bin Laden publicly declared war on America in 1996 and has since had his troops carry out military actions against the United States, it behoves us to treat those forces no differently than any other military force in any other war. That means captured soldiers are treated under the Geneva Convention. There is another side however. We will define certain members of al Qaeda not simply as terrorists, but as war criminals writ large. Even if we ignored every other attack by al Qaeda and called them normal military actions, even if we ignored evidence about TWA800; even if we ignored the thousands of African civilians killed and injured by the attacks on US Embassies… we are still left with September the 11th.
There is no doubt, under any sane interpretation, ramming large civilian airliners into giant civilian office towers while faced with a totally unpreperared populace is a war crime of an obscene magnitude.
Because al Qaeda operate as a co-ordinated and trained military force, much of the information we have on them comes via classified means rather than normal public criminal investigations. Criminals and mere terrorists can be tracked down and tried over time; an army must be dealt with differently. We know we cannot catch them all, at least not all at once. It behooves us to not allow yet to be captured enemy forces to learn from our court transcripts.
We simply cannot afford to hand them such valuable intelligence. If they understand our most secret technical means they can more readily avoid them; if they know our channels of information they can act to disrupt or inject false information into them; if they know our informers they will kill them.
A military tribunal is just right. The al Qaeda declared war; therefore they are enemy soldiers. We will try them with reasonable fairness and perhaps somewhat more mercy than they would give were the tables turned. But mark my words: those directly responsible, those directly in the chain of command that extends from the burning rubble of the World Trade Center to the caves of Afghanistan are going to swing at the end of a stout rope. It may take 10 years to round them up; but it will only take a few months to finish the job.
Carla Howell is near a breakthrough in Massachusetts that will go down in history as the Second Boston Tea Party. Her “Initiative to End the Income Tax in Massachusetts” has now succeeded in collecting and delivering 101,139 signatures to the various town clerks for certification. This is a wide enough margin to ensure success even if the Clerks were hostile to the measure. They need only pickup the certified lists from those 351 Town Clerks on December 3rd and deliver them all to the State House by December 5th. Words cannot express the gratitude owed to her and her team.
This initiative to abolish the Massachusetts state income tax will appear on the ballot in 2002. It will generate an enormous amount of national publicity. How could anyone ignore such chutzpah? That people would actually dare to not just roll back, not just cap, but to actually abolish a major tax?
We might actually win this one. It is a possibility. Very few citizens actually want to pay taxes. Hardly anyone ever votes for a politician who says they want to raise taxes. But until now, no one has ever had the opportunity to directly vote on it, to “Just Say No” to taxation.
Carla and her team have done a magnificent job. She is once again proving herself to be the most effective local libertarians in our entire quarter century history as a political party. But they need help. These things do not pay for themselves. If you want to help her to fight the good fight, you should make a donation now and as often as you can afford to.
Win, Lose or Draw, we can make this the turning point. The point at which the growth of the State is not just slowed but actually reversed.
It is up to you.
The fact that Bill Ayers was a Weather Underground member 30 years ago does not affect his right to express any view whatsoever. The Opinion Journal got it very wrong this time by coming out behind those who would prefer he just go away. True, his book and his expressed views are inappropriate and tasteless and bound to get a lot of people angy. That is not the issue.
The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States does not make exceptions for taste, timing or disagreeableness of content. So I think the Mary Ellen Keating from Barnes and Noble was spot on when she said:
Granted, we live in troubled times. The reprehensible acts of the terrorists were designed to promote fear, divisiveness, even hatred among fellow Americans. We cannot let them win. Removing Mr. Ayers’ book from our shelves or canceling a previously scheduled appearance is out of the question. To do so would be to give in to our fears, and ultimately to validate the position of our enemies.
If Mr. Ayers seems to be promoting blowing up buildings as a means of change, then we are free to stand outside with signs and express dissent. We are free to not buy his book. Those who feel so inclined are free to complain to Barnes and Noble (as some have done) and to take their business elsewhere if they so chose.
But from where I sit, Mary Ellen has a better understanding of what a free country is about than do the complainers. As I have said before, “A flag you can not burn is not worth fighting for”.
That is the difference between us and ‘them’.
An article in Wired reports a victory against the ‘forces of darkness’ with a US court refusing to allow the French state to impose Internet restrictions across the world. Does this mean I think wacko groups like the KKK or Nazi historical fantasists are ok? No I don’t. However I do not want my judgement and prejudices to have force of law, unlike the lawyer for the forces of statist authoritarianism, Stephane Lilti.
“If this ruling, which we will appeal against in the United States, is upheld, it will give total impunity to all those who seek technological asylum in the United States,” Stephane Lilti told Reuters. “This would make America a haven for all types of people on the extreme right and racists … for us French it will be extremely difficult to ensure our justice system’s decisions are respected because we will be dealing with someone who can take refuge in a U.S. computer.”
Excellent. Every time we can make a repressive law in France or anywhere else unworkable, the light of liberty shines a little brighter across the entire world. Why should anyone respect the French justice system’s decisions to repress free speech? Notice Lilti does not seem to worry about ‘the extreme left’. I guess this means a post to the Internet in support of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot is just fine by him.
What force advocating statist lawyers like Lilti do not choose to realise is that the best way to destroy irrational buffons like the KKK is not by forcing them underground but by actually shining the light of day on them. Let them out into the open where everyone can see what preposterous little people they are by reading their own words… sort of like the way Stephane Lilti is exposed by his words as a noxious enemy of liberty who rails in fury against the rest of the world’s refusal to be a party to the repression of French internet users.
As Sinead O’Connor put it in a song:
Though their own words.
they will be exposed,
they’ve got a severe case
of the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’
So I would like to raise my glass to all you technological asylum seekers, yearning to speak free…the brave ones, the oppressed ones, the articulate ones and yes, even you stupid hateful ignorant ones.
And to those who would gag us, censor us and unplug us… fuck you
An interesting article by Saritha Prabhu, who give an nice perspective on what the war against terrorism actually means to ‘the man in the street’ in The Tennessean.
Living in an affluent western society it is easy to forget that for most of the rest of the world, when a war suddenly comes snarling across your border it is not something you only get ‘feel’ by watching the BBC or CNN.
There is an interesting Boston Herald article about the draconian plans to, in effect, declare martial law in the USA in the event of a bioweaponized attack of smallpox.
Probably the best computer game yet made is Deus Ex, in which you, the player, take on the role of J. C. Denton, an ‘enhanced’ agent of uncertain background and shifting loyalties.
Initially you start out as a good little statist secret policeman working in the USA and supporting FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (which actually does exist in real life) as it tries to distribute vaccine to key people as a terrible disease ravages New York city in the near future… and fighting against the ‘terrorist’ bad guys who for some reason are trying to thwart FEMA. Eventually you end up working for these self same ‘terrorists’ and fighting against your previous employer when it turns out that the plague is really just an excuse for FEMA to mastermind a coup d’etat, suspend all civil rights and take over the US government.
Read the Boston Herald article and then ask yourself…is reality starting to take it’s lead from computer games? Scary thought.
Deus Ex is a superb game. Unlike most ‘first person shooters’ in which you interact with people mostly by shooting them, in Deus Ex you have to actually talk to them (and of course some you do indeed end up shooting). This is a game which actually has characters expressing political and moral views, from mystical totalitarianism to cynical statism to well armed libertarianism! Also, how many other computer games do you know of in which during a visit to Paris, you can find yourself being subjected to a believably idiotic existentialist argument? Likewise, whilst stealing some weapons from an arms dealer’s house, if you click on a book next to his bed you will find yourself reading a chapter of Common Sense by Tom Paine. Elsewhere, you may or may not encounter two utterly incidental characters who are clearly very closely based on The Story of O. This is a superb and intelligent game that does not treat the player like an ignoramus.
However let’s hope it is not also an accurate vision of the future!
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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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