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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Muslim ‘moderates’ in Britain are calling for changes to British foreign policy as the only way to prevent Muslim ‘extremists’ in Britain from attacking the rest of us.
This is of course the same approach used by Sinn Fein and other Republicans in Northern Ireland, who held that only by political engagement and accommodation with ‘moderate’ political figures (i.e. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness) could the wicked IRA be stopped from blowing people up. Of course the fact Sinn Fein and the IRA were actually inseparable parts of the same movement was something only a reader of the Guardian could have failed to notice.
And so a ‘moderate’ Muslim, a member of the Tory Party no less, tell us that ‘Muslim anger’ must be recognised (our old chum root causes). Is that so? Well I think increasingly it is being recognised. It is being recognised as an excuse used for getting a non-democratic Muslim veto over British foreign policies just as a majority of Muslims also appear to want a Muslim veto over freedom of expression in Britain.
If the solution to Muslim extremism in Britain being offered by ‘moderate’ Muslims is to give the extremists what they want (i.e. changes in British foreign policy), then the so-called ‘moderates’ are nothing more than the mouthpieces of the extremists they claim to reject. No doubt if given the changes they want, we will be told that only if yet more legal restrictions are placed on what we kuffir can say about Islam will we be able to to placate Muslim ‘anger’ and thereby prevent those wicked extremists from blowing us up. And homosexuals must be legislated against in order to placate those wicked extremists. And alcohol must be banned in order to…
I think it is well past time for some British anger and a great deal of it needs to be directed at the British establishment for allowing this to happen via a policy of appeasment towards domestic Islamists.
If Israel really does accept and implement a ceasefire on Monday, it will have accepted the worst of all possible worlds. If it agrees to an end to the fighting which does not disarm Hezbollah, or even push it behind the Litani River, and does not get a third party force capable of fighting Hezbollah into Southern Lebanon, it would be fair to say Israel has achieved none of its war aims whatsoever. In short, Hezbollah will have won and we will soon be seeing celebrations in the streets across the Islamic world to that effect.
The primary Israeli method of attack, a series of destructive operational level1 air strikes against Lebanon’s infrastructure, only made sense if it was intended to isolate the enemy and dislocate its logistics as an adjunct to a massive and robust attack on the ground with a significant portion of its formidable army, with the intention at crushing Hezbollah as military force.
Otherwise, what was the point of the non-tactical strikes? As Hezbollah already had large numbers of artillery rockets deployed as organic supply with its front line units (demonstrably so), the air interdiction only made sense if Israel was planning an extended campaign for as long as it took to destroy Hezbollah, which means preventing Hezbollah’s resupply. Why else blow power-stations, fuel depots, bridges, roads and runways deep into the country rather than just strike tactical targets where Hezbollah is deployed? Bringing the Lebanese transportation system to a standstill was surely done to stop movement of supply so that as Hezbollah formations expended their munitions (a process that would increase as more units were engaged directly by the Israeli army), they would quickly become much less effective due to logistic dislocation. This is ‘Air Interdiction 101’, the sort of thing military planners have understood since ‘Operation Strangle’ in Italy in 1944.
But what Israel has done so far is a robust air offensive in support of little more than a series of limited objective raids with only a small fraction of the army. This has not only failed (unsurprisingly) to destroy Hezbollah, it has failed to even displace them far enough back onto Lebanon to prevent them firing rockets into Haifa on an almost daily basis throughout this campaign.
And now, having killed a great many people but still leaving a large number of Hezbollah fighters very much alive and still in possession of both their Katyushas and the positions from which to fire them, the Israeli government plans to stop? Having weathered what Israel threw at them (but not what the Israelis inexplicably failed to throw at them), Hezbollah can, quite justifiably, claim victory and greatly enhance their stature simply by virtue of Israel failed to gain any of its publicly stated war aim.
Can anyone tell me what the hell the Israeli government is thinking?
1 = I would argue that the attacks against Lebanon’s infrastructure were ‘operational’ (i.e. above tactical but below strategic). A ‘strategic’ attack would need to be against the supply terminals, which is to say targets in Syria or Iran. I realise this is an arcane issue of military semantics
Julie Burchill is a person about whom I oscillate between revulsion and admiration but she is in good form at the moment. In an article called Bleeding-heart ignoramuses, she ridicules the British media establishments anti-Jewish diatribes and the plain stupidity of some people’s analysis of the region. In the later category she points at an article by Matthew Parris that could well be the most poorly thought out “what Israel must do” article by someone who presumably does not want the extermination of all Jews in that country. The money quote being where he suggests that in order to be ‘loved’ by international opinion, Israel must return to its pre-1967 borders… and this at a time when the existing borders scant enough protection from long range attack. Parris writes:
That settlement has to be a return to her pre-1967 boundaries. Precisely because Israel is by no means forced to make so generous a move, the international support (even love) this would generate would secure her future permanently. It would bring her back within the pale.
So presumably if only Israel would place itself at the mercy of its sworn enemies, that magnificent body of strength and moral rectitude ‘the international community’ would make everything alright… after all, what is the value of mere survival if Kofi Anan, Jacques Chirac and several thousand Guardian readers in Islington think poorly of you? To which Burchill aptly replies:
Personally, I’d far prefer the Jews to be angry, aggressive and alive than meek, mild and dead – and that’s what makes me and a minority like me feel so much like strangers in our own country, now more than ever. I’ve always loved being a hack, but now even that feels weird, as though I’m living among a bunch of snatched-body zombies who look like journalists but believe and say the most inhuman, evil things.
Indeed. When Burchill is right, damn is she right.
I was struck by a comment from Professor Michael Clarke, writing in The Times yesterday: “Commercial aircraft represent globalism and high technology – they shrink the world and threaten cultural conservatism.”
Symbols are important because they illustrate the cloudiness of motives and social dynamics. They show the world is not black and white, neatly predictable. Not divided into the elect and the rest. People’s motives are mixed, and they often hide them from themselves or express them to seem grander than they are.
Which is why I do wish otherwise sensible people would stop taking Islamist loonies at their own evaluation. The same were not taken in by the 1970s liberationist terrorists’ claim to be the vanguard of The Revolution. We knew we had the Soviets in the background, quietly encouraging the mayhem for imperial reasons, but no one with a brain believed the workers and students actually were going to rise up and overthrow the bourgeois state.
They are self-identified as Muslim holy warriors, fighting on behalf of the Umma, but actually they are a tiny unrepresentative group. There is no more physical threat from the average western Muslim than there was from the average 1970s trades unionist. They might in a large minority have beliefs which if taken literally would have scary results (Sharia v. state ownership of the means of production). Those need to be disputed and opposed, but
such uncontemplated dreams and their achievement are far apart.
Terrorists for an abstract cause fit a very, very specific profile: spoiled middle-class kids of more education than brain, and petty-criminals made good who find their psychopathy is accepted and admired by the former when applied to the cause. He is not an evil genius; he’s a very naughty boy. → Continue reading: A clash of symbols
The news that one is not even allowed to take anything as threatening as a book on an aircraft or a bottle of Evian water – unless bought from an overpriced airport shop, no doubt – got me thinking about how the more customer-conscious airlines might try and deal with this. Millions of businessmen and women, for example, take stuff like laptop computers and documents to read on a trip to and from their meetings. These folk often pay business class rates and are valuable customers. I fly around Europe a fair deal to business meetings and it would seriously mess up my work life if I was not able to read anything on a trip. If I am forced to put my laptop in the main luggage, there is always the risk that the machine gets broken (this is no minor problem). It is also a real problem if people cannot take water with them to drink on flights, since flying typically is dehydrating and makes jetlag worse. These may appear niggling issues but actually they make a lot of difference to whether folk will fly or take other forms of transport. So what are the airlines to do?
Well, for a start, an airline could have a bunch of laptops in the aircraft and offer people the chance to use them, simply by giving them a disk which they can use to download stuff they want from their own machines and then use in a machine provided by the airline. If the overhead lockers are no longer needed for handluggage, then perhaps that free space could be filled with books, drinks, iPods, and other gadgets to help folk pass the time.
Flying is being turned into an experience in which passengers, even though they are paying customers, are treated as near-criminals. It is no excuse for the airlines to shrug their shoulders and blame all of this on the security services. They must think of imaginative ways to make travelling as pleasant as possible in the current worrying security environment. If they do not do so, then frankly they can expect little sympathy from me if they subsequently experience financial troubles. We must not, and cannot, let the nihilist losers of radical Islam bring our lives to a halt. Remember: the best revenge is to live well.
…of the Bush administration’s war on terror by Bill Quick. I find very little to disagree with.
A few excerpts, below the break, for those who need to be convinced to Read the Whole Thing.
Mr. Quick reflects my frustration that we have not been serious with fighting this war. I am not quite sure I can agree with him that we are worse off for having pursued this war because we have done so in a weak-kneed, half-assed way, but we certainly have not done what we could to exterminate the Islamofascist threat, and we are rapidly approaching the day when we will be worse off because it will be a nuclear-armed Islamofascist threat.
I vividly remember on the afternoon of 9/11, I told one of my law partners that I had no doubt that we would see nuclear weapons used before this thing was done. Sadly, five years on, I see no reason to withdraw that prediction.
As succinct and comprehensible a statement as I have seen of why military intervention in Iraq (and elsewhere) is essential to exterminating militant Islamofascism:
[T]he most effective strategy, in fact, the only proven effective strategy, available for waging and winning the war against Islamist fundamentalist terrorism: It would be necessary for us to destroy the regimes that sponsored, armed, trained, supported, protected, and used these Islamist terror organizations. Just as the seemingly ubiquitous communist “revolutionary fronts” all over the world seemed to dry up overnight with the destruction of their sponsor, the Soviet communist regime, removing the regimes in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, North Korea, and elsewhere that similarly succored a host of Islamist terror organizations would both give us a clear-cut, straightforward strategy, and also give us the standards by which victory would be measured: the destruction of those regimes would signal victory.
His verdict on Bush:
The first administration of the first century of the American Third Millennium will, in my estimation, be remembered as one of the biggest failures of that century. Bush’s great failure was, not invading Iraq, but not weathering the adversity that followed through acts of real leadership, and then pressing on with the necessary military destruction of the other regimes he, himself, named as most dangerous five years ago.
There have already been a couple of Samizdata quotes of the day, the first officially labelled thus, and the second an SQOTD in all but title. Had there been no such copying and pasting postings so far today, then I would have put up a quote from this (“MSM sacrifices itself for Hezbollah”), such as, for instance, this:
The MSM usually claims that it is better than the blogosphere because it can filter and detect fraud. The Lebanon conflict shows that claim to be a flat out lie. The MSM may possibly speak truth to power but it seems keen to speak falsehood to the rest of us and to support the terrorists. I assume MSM support of the terrorists is based on the idea that idividual journalists may die or lose access to “scoops” unless they uncritically regurgitate terrorist propaganda, whereas they see no downside to criticising Israel or the USA becuase these countries have a tradition of press freedom. Unfortunately that analysis seems to be at the usual level of MSM strategic thought – poor. In the short term they are correct. In the long term they are as wrong as it is possible to be. Aside from state supported outlets such as the BBC the MSM depends on advertising revenue to survive and that revenue is roughly proportional to the audience size. If the MSM are shown to be puppets and liars then they will lose audience (which they are) and hence lose money. Eventually they will be out of a job. And even the BBC will feel the chill wind of financial cuts if it loses credibility – there is no reason to assume that the next UK government will not force the BBC to wean itself from the license fee and even less reason to assume that once weaned it will not see a drastic downsizing.
Meryl Yourish thinks this means that the terrorists are winning the propaganda war, to me it seems more likely that they are helping the MSM destroy itself. It really seems to me that Lebanon is going to be the place where the MSM collectively martyred itself, fighting for the cause of an Iranian backed terror group that seeks the utter destruction of Israel and the imposition of Sharia law and press censorship that would be antithetical to the MSM itself.
My thanks to Nigel Sedgwick (who urls himself as something to do with this) who flagged up this piece in a comment on this posting here yesterday. → Continue reading: Puppets and liars and the myth of the non-existent camera
Blogging collectives only really work for the readers when the editorial line has some focus – Samizdata or Harry’s Place for instance take a line and have a community of writers with broadly similar views (Samizdatistas think private gun ownership is good and want to liberate Iraq through firepower. Over at Harry’s place they think gun ownership is bad and want to socialise Iraq through firepower.)
– the incomperable Guido Fawkes
“I have run into a certain amount of conflict with bodies like Oxfam and Christian Aid, who are very effective at presenting what looks like extremely professional, well-researched data which seems to prove that trade is bad for poor countries and bad for poor people in these countries. I do not know a great deal about the subjects that they deal with, but I know enough about trade policy to have doubts in my mind when I read this stuff. But my colleagues come to me with it and say that they have had a deputation, including the local vicar and all the party members and have been given this report from Oxfam’s public affairs department and it must be right! They ask ‘why are you being awkward and asking questions? Surely we should just sign’.”
– Vincent Cable, Liberal Democrat Shadow Chancellor (via The GI)
I’ve remarked here before on how the paedo-craze leads to possession of ordinary images of children being deemed indecent, and hence their possession a serious crime, depending on who has them. Now comes an example where there were no children (nor, as the facts suggest, any young adults) involved at all, except in the imagination of the court speculating about the imagination of the defendant.
The Times reported yesterday:-
A COMPUTER expert who altered indecent images of naked women to make them look like children has been warned that he faces a prison sentence.
Stafford Sven Tudor-Miles scanned photographs of adult porn stars into his computer and used sophisticated digital equipment to reduce the size of their breasts.
The images, which Tudor-Miles also manipulated with graphics software so that the women were partially dressed in school uniforms, appeared to be of girls aged under 18.
For those who have not been keeping up with the intricacies of UK sexual offences legislation: Possession of, or (more seriously) making, indecent (not defined) photographs of children (defined as being or appearing to be under 16) became illegal a while ago. But it was extended to pseudo-photographs, i.e. digitally edited images, in 1994. And the age criterion was raised to 18 just a couple of years ago. And the courts have in their wisdom decided that copying an image to or within a computer counts as ‘making’ it.
So photoshopping or downloading a picture (which also counts as ‘making’ it) that appears (to the court) to represent someone under 18 and is indecent (as it appears to the court after hearing the evidence of prosecution experts that may relate as much to the nature of the defendant and the context in which it was found as that of the picture itself) is a crime bearing a prison sentence and registration as a sex offender – even if the defendant made absolutely certain that no-one under 18 was in any way involved.
You can screw your sixteen-year old girlfriend or boyfriend however you both like*, but snap them with their top off, or even leering suggestively, and use it as a screensaver, and you are a manufacturer of child pornography who could easily, given bad luck and a zealous prosecution, end up unemployable and/or be locked up to be tortured by career criminals. I don’t know how unlucky Mr Tudor-Miles was, but The Times also quotes Ray Savage, one of the professional experts involved in the case:
“I’ve seen it in only two previous cases,” he said. “To create an image of a child by altering an image of an adult is just as serious as downloading child porn, and probably more worrying in terms of the time taken and work involved to produce such images.
“In general terms, these images can be as crude as someone having pasted a cut-out of a child’s head on to an adult’s photo.
“At the other end of the scale, someone will use sophisticated computer image manipulation equipment to alter the size of the breasts and genitalia to make a very realistic image.”
More worrying? Mr Savage worries me more than Mr Tudor-Miles.
If our protectors wish to stamp out people having sexual fantasies about schoolgirls, then police raids and mass arrests here and here are clearly called for. Better still, lets deal with the problem at source and stop women going to school. It worked for the Taliban. I have it on good authority that you still can not buy a stripy tie or a navy-blue mini-skirt in Kabul.
[* But not, under the new Sexual Offences Act, wherever you like.]
After nearly sixty years it looks like the US is finally slipping free of Korea.
The U.S. military will stay on, perhaps in reduced numbers, and play a supporting role, officials say. South Korea wants to take back the authority for wartime combat by 2012. The Pentagon says South Korea can have the authority back by 2009.
Roh said Wednesday that anytime in between those dates would be fine; indeed, he said, Seoul could take it back “even now.”
I have long felt the South Koreans quite capable of defending themselves so long as the US keeps them under its nuclear umbrella.
This standup comic nicely sums up what I think of the dip-shit worldview of Islamic homicide bombers. (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan).
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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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