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 have liked many of Mark Steyn’s articles in recent months but in The Falklands War is a model of fierce good sense, he has outdone himself. he draws many useful parallels between the Falklands War and the impending war with Iraq’s Ba’athist regime.
Why would anybody think, faced with economic catastrophe, that invading a string of distant islands is the answer? Dictators don’t behave rationally. Indeed, one reason they become dictators is precisely to escape the tiresome constraints of rationality. There may be valid arguments for not going to war with Iraq, but not the ones that begin, oh, even if Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, he’d never use them against the West. Never bet on a dictator’s rationality.
This is Steyn at his best… read the whole article!
What’s the last thing you need while desperately trying to survive as your country is mercilessly bombed by a state-of-the-art US Air Force? How about a bunch of Western pacifists who can’t speak Arabic and don’t know their Dinars from their elbows standing around getting in the way?
The ‘human shield’ left for Iraq yesterday. In three Routemaster buses (the kind they stopped making around 1946, you see them in all the old movies). So at least we can assume it will take them several months to get there, which will be a relief to Baghdad because, as Adriana Cronin noted a few weeks ago, Baghdad residents like the always-interesting Salam Pax don’t actually want a ‘shield’ of pointless woolly Westerners making a burden of themselves. They would actually rather have proper help, like food and first aid on the border crossings, if anyone happens to feel like a bit of charity Gulf war work.
But this pack of doves’ real enemy is not American bombers or Western politicians: it’s you and me, the public. Although insistent that, “Nobody really wants this war except those who stand to gain from this by selling guns,” (well of course, there’s a stash of rifles ready and waiting up in my airing-cupboard right now) they are actually attempting to hold ordinary Western members of the public to ransom. Former US marine Ken Nichols-O’Keefe, founder of “The Truth Justice Peace Human Shield Action Group” is going on hunger strike, not until the war is stopped, but until more people join his cause.
Ten thousand supporters is the exact price he stuck on his own head.
“If we don’t get 10,000 people, I think this is a world that will be hard to live in for all of us” said Ken.
Well, at least he won’t be living in it; that should help a little bit.
“This conflict will lead to World War Three,”
…he went on, presumably in a burst of wishful thinking…
“We need to stop this war first and foremost, if we don’t, shame on us all and pity on us all.”
Shame and pity it is, then.
So, comrades, get yourselves out there with the Shield of Confusion, or the war vet snuffs it. What a choice. As shieldster Ube Evans said:
“Somebody’s got to save humanity from themselves. I’m very scared.”
Baghdad: be very afraid. These people are trying to help you.
Although, as the hunger strike isn’t scheduled until Ken arrives in Iraq, and as it will take them all so long to get there in the double-deckers, my guess is that T.T.J.P.H.S.A.G.’s (say it loudly with enthusiasm and people will think you’re speaking Arabic) real secret plan is to trundle up some time around Christmas when the war is over, have a little holiday, buy a few carpets, and fly back home again. Let’s hope so, for the Iraqi people’s sake.
Whether one thinks government is a necessary thing (if only for fighting other, worse, governments) or not, it is well to remember that one should not place great trust in government.
A recent reminder of this in the British context:
A few years ago the mobile telephone (cell phone) companies paid the British government many billions of pounds for licences.
It is now widely agreed that the companies that got the licences went a bit mad during the auction process and grossly overpaid – but at least they thought they had an asset (even if it was an asset they had paid too much money for).
They were quite wrong. They forgot about the government’s power to regulate (although the very institution of a ‘licence’ should have reminded them of this power).
Now the government regulators have demanded that the mobile telephone companies cut the price of telephone calls.
In short the mobile telephone companies paid many billions of pounds for nothing. The powers that be can come along and regulate their profits away.
The “close working relationship” they had with the government was a sham, their trust in Mr Blair and Mr Brown with their “support for British high tech business” (like the late Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology” back in the 1960’s) was quite mistaken.
Now the companies are screaming and going to court – but I bet they wish they had not got involved with the government in the first place.
If money does not matter to you, you do not have much imagination
– Tania Emery
We have lately been hearing the question “Why Iraq when we know North Korea has the bomb?” The official answers we have been given so far have not been truly satisfactory. I will posit this is due to an (perhaps justified) unwillingness on the part of US officials to state the threat equation in its’ purest Machiavellian form.
North Korea is no where near the threat Iraq is. Even with nuclear weapons they are not in the same league. This may seem strange to the reader. They have nukes, they have missiles, they have half a million artillery pieces facing across the border, they have troops enough to flood across the border like a mile wide horde of cockroaches against a single can of Raid.
That is true. Next question. After they take over South Korea, what next? They are on a peninsula. Their neighbors are China, Russia and Japan. Japan is far across the water. So in the worst case, what do we lose? South Korea. That’s it.
What happens after they finish the rape, pillage and burn? After they’ve wrecked the South Korean infrastructure in pitched battles against the large and well equiped South Korean military? Is a nation that can’t feed itself going to rebuild the South Korean economy when it couldn’t build it’s own in the first place? What are they going to do with a large enemy population which has just been brutally awakened to the fact they can’t go out and shop in the trendy stores any more? That there is going to be no choice in the next election? That their future is the image of a boot heel stamping on their faces, forever?
Is North Korean going to go North and take on the Chinese Peoples Army? Are they going to build massive numbers of ships and attempt to cross the straits into the the teeth of a “Made in America” Divine Wind?? Will the three Korean soldiers who survive to wash up on the northern shores of Japan proceed to conquer it?
Not bloody likely.
You say, but they have nukes! They have missiles. This is true. But the missiles cannot yet reach the caribou herds in Alaska, and it is unlikely North Korea would retain the infrastructure for building them immediately following a very difficult victory. The entire Korean peninsula would be in ashes. By the time they rebuild with the help of fresh slave labour battalions from the South, America will have shipboard missile defense systems just outside their territorial waters ready to stop short range missiles aimed at Japan – and permanent facilities in the Aleutians to defend North America.
North Korea would find itself in a situation similar to where it started, only worse. It would take decades to fully digest the liberal South Korean society and bury the bones of it.
This is a “best case scenario” for North Korea. It is also highly unlikely and that is as apparent to the North Koreans as it is to me. A more likely result of such a miscalculation is a replay of the first Korean War… but without hordes of Chinese troops and experienced WWII Russian pilots storming across the Yalu to push back the American counter offensive.
Now compare the situation to Iraq. It is a large and strategically located asian nation. It is surrounded by far weaker neighbors. Only Iran seems capable of standing up to them. So he’d leave them for desert.
Look at a map with the jaundiced eye of an experienced Risk player. Jordan and Kuwait are obvious snacks. The Saudi’s are a pushover. The Emirates are nice people but are very small; Yemen wouldn’t last very long either. If left to his own Xerxian dreams, Saddam would very quickly reinstate most of the ancient Assyrian empire. He’d own the middle East from the Turkish border to the Indian Ocean.
Then he’d take on the nuclear powers. He’s got enough people and desert to take whatever Israel or Pakistan could mete out. He might leave Iran for Oday’s generation. Future conquests require going through Egypt, and once that is managed what is going to stop him in Northern Africa?
All the while, he’s got an economy far more effective than North Korea. There are shopping malls and consumer goods in Baghdad that would dazzle the eyes of a North Korean. He’s an old style conqueror, not an ideologue. He doesn’t have to control everything. He’ll use terror and random killings to keep the population sufficiently cowed, but beyond that they may work and create wealth.
This is why Iraq must be dealt with and North Korea may be left to moulder.
Note: Thanks to Mark G for pointing out a blooper on my part. I’ve corrected ‘Abyssinian’ to ‘Assyrian’.
Blogger Russell Whitaker has spotted a truly iniquitous case regarding legitimate self-defence in the United States
Ronald Dixon moved to Brooklyn, New York, from Florida not too long ago. The 27 year-old softspoken network engineer, a US Navy veteran naturalized from Jamaica, did not expect to have to defend the lives of his infant children from a vicious scumbag home invader. But defend them he did. Now, he finds himself in jeopardy, not for the defense itself (yet), but for the use of an unlicenced handgun in that defense! I’ve written a longer piece on this issue on my own site.
This is about as clear-cut a case of righteous home and family defense as I’ve seen recently in the U.S. This is also an unusual opportunity to overwhelm the Kings County (Brooklyn) District Attorney’s office with correspondance, demonstrating the reach of Anglosphere libertarian outrage.
Russell Whitaker
This story is already a little old but I thought I’d give my two pennies’ worth on the situation facing Danish statistics teacher Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, which was published over a year ago.
In a nutshell, Lomborg uses the evidence on which Greens rely to point out that by many yardsticks, life on planet Earth is getting better. As one can imagine, this has sent large parts of the Green movement and the anti-globalistas into a collective funk…
“You mean the world is getting greener, healthier and wealthier? But that’s just terrible! Heretic! Heretic!”
The response from many quarters has been nothing less than childish. A self-selected and rather Orwellian group calling itself The Danish Committee for Scientific Dishonesty has denounced Lomborg root and branch for the temerity of writing such a book and has sought to smear him and his academic credentials. So it is good to see the man himiself fight back. Check out the article by Lomborg in the online pages of the Wall Street Journal for his rebuttal of many of their claims.
Of course by writing in the WSJ, Lomborg has proved he is a mere lackey of the global free market capitalist conspiracy, so no doubt the doomongers will not pay a shred of attention. It might influence saner counsels, though.
And in the meantime, take a look at www.lomborg.com for an ongoing discussion of his book and associated issues.
A little anti-fascist sentiment brought to you by Samizdata.net
Sic semper tyrannis
I can’t help believing that it was the British decision to abolish and thereafter actively campaign against the slave trade that first introduced moral concepts into foreign policy.
Whether or not that is the case, it is the popular expectation that all foreign policy will be at least partly based on moral imperatives as opposed to the uncomfortably amoral calculations of national interest.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Europe where the various heads of state are forever delivering nauseatingly self-righteous lectures to the rest of the world from their bully pulpit in Brussels. Aside from switching off whenever I am so able I have also taken refuge in the suspicion that M’lady doth protesteth too loudly, a view which has been in some small sense vindicated by news of the French extending a hand of welcome to Robert Mugabe.
“France has confirmed that it is inviting Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe to take part in a summit of African Heads of State next month.
Mr Mugabe is currently banned from entering the European Union because of doubts about the legitimacy of his re-election last year.”
I suppose it would be bad form to have ‘doubts’ about his democidal marxist policies. And that is rather the point, for whilst I do not expect the enarques in Paris to rain down ‘Les JDAM’s du Francais’ on the former Rhodesia, it is nonetheless a reasonable expectation that the foreign policy decisions they make should reflect the ‘humanitarian’ principles they claim to live by.
Instead the French continue to do what the French have always done and pursue their own national interests in Africa under a cloak of Sartrean altruism:
“But French President Jacques Chirac was convinced that the Zimbabwean leader’s presence at the summit would help promote justice, human rights and democracy in his country, foreign ministry spokesman Francois Rivasseau told journalists.”
When the language of ‘human rights’ can be employed with such spectacular mendacity in an attempt to mask a nefariously machiavellian agenda then we know that it is a coin which has become irredeemably debased.
But this move by the French tells us that the mask is beginning to slip and, whilst I daresay the language of Brussels (which is not synoymous with France but heavily influenced by it) will not change in the short term or even the medium term, the polite fictions which underpin that language are close to being unsustainable.
The ugly, old ogre of national interest is being prodded awake from its slumber and invoked to stalk the world again. To accompany it on its travels we will need not just a whole slew of new ideas but a whole new language in which to express them.
By now, quite a few Samizdata readers will have learned of the infuriating plight of my good friends and fellow bloggers Andrew Ian Dodge and his lovely fiance Sasha Castel. They were able to spend just a few days in the UK owing to officials carping about (alleged) glitches in Andrew’s paperwork. Andrew and Sasha were forced to fly back to Maine earlier this week.
What is obviously incredible, considering that these are two citizens from Britain’s No 1 ally, is that they were treated in this way while, of course, thousands of folk enter this country successfully on false papers, or with no papers at all. Often many such folk disappear. Such people may even pose a security risk. The contrast between the treatment of Andrew and Sasha on the one hand and that of folk possibly entering Britain with hostile intent hardly needs to be stressed.
I guess this shows that as far as rules about emigration and immigration are concerned, we need a thorough overhaul in ways that encourage enterprising and good folk to live here like Andrew and Sasha. On a more positive note, may I recommend readers to look at Jim Bennett’s An Anglosphere Primer, which sets out ways in which these issues might be resolved.
In the meantime, my best wishes to two of the feistiest bloggers in the business. Britain has lost the chance to be host to two fine writers, not to mention two of the biggest heavy rock and opera nuts around!
“I hate Uncle Sam – I’m so over older men.”
– Jack (Sean Hayes) in Will and Grace, discussing his income tax situation.
If you have a spare half hour, you might consider reading a long essay by Bill Whittle entitled CELEBRITY (on Eject! Eject! Eject!) about silly Hollywood stars mouthing off about politics and not being challenged by the media but just being allowed to say it and get clean away with it. Power without responsibility, the prerogative of the whore throughout history, as I seem to recall a pre-WW2 British Prime Minister once saying about the media themselves, of his time.
Example: Viggo Mortensen. He played a good guy in Lord of the Rings, but is now, it seems, batting for the bad guys, arguing for “peace”, that is to say for the rights of despots not to be knocked off their perches, and the duty of the victims of despots to just go on suffering indefinitely. Apparently Mortensen recently said that many more people died in Afghanistan as a result of the US bombing there than the (just under) 3,000 who died in 9/11 attack on New York, when the true Afghanistan number is generally reckoned now to be about 500. As Whittle says, this person should most emphatically be allowed to say such things, but only in a world where the Viggo Mortensens of it are used to being worshipped, regardless of what they say, do such things get said by them so loudly.
There are many interesting responses one might have to this long essay of Whittle’s, but one of the more interesting things about it for me is that it is indeed long, around twenty or so scrollings-down of my computer screen. But since Whittle was nailing down a whole cart-load of thoughts that many others were three-quarters of the way to nailing down for themselves, many people, including me, found it great reading, and just kept reading and reading until they finished it. When I started work on this posting there were already 68 comments, and now as I’m giving this its final polish there are 73, so I definitely am not the only one to have read this thing.
What I think this demonstrates is that blogging is not a particular way of writing; it is just a technology to enable writing. How you do the writing is up to you. Samizdata has half a dozen postings or so per day, of Samizdata type length. That’s us. Whittle has pieces of very variable length, from Samizdata-short to massive, every day or two, with absolutely none of those rat-tat-tat fusillades of very short postings that Instapundit specialises in. That’s him, and that’s Instapundit. Blogging doesn’t have to be done any particular way, except that, I would say, it helps a lot if you can find a way of doing it that suits you, and you then stick to it. Sustainability is all. But I guess if you’re good enough you can even break that rule. I seem to recall writing here about this before. Yes. Do I now contradict myself? Somewhat.
One final thought. Those 68 rising to 73 comments included some interesting speculations about the possibility that saying things which are way to the left of regular public opinion might actually harm an actor’s career by making the regular public stay away from his/her movies, with, in particular, Alec Baldwin’s recently faltering movie progress being put under the spotlight. So, I wonder what will now happen to Viggo Mortensen’s career. Will all those working stiffs on aircraft carriers whom Whittle writes about so vividly and respectfully, and their millions of land-locked ideological brethren, want to see Mortensen pretending to be someone like them (or like they’d like to be), when he has now so plainly declared that actually he isn’t one of them in any way except physiology (or physiological aspiration)? I genuinely don’t know, and will be genuinely interested to see.
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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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