My new blog is http://anarchic-civ.blogspot.com.

This blog will be deleted.

This is not a picture we're likely to see in our local newspapers: Sheikh Sharif Sheik Ahmed, the Head of the Executive Council of the Somali Supreme Council of the Islamic Courts and his cabinet, or whatever, having a meeting with a UN delegation and drinking Coke.

In other news, a plane has landed in Mogadishu reportedly bringing either weapons from Eritrea for the Islamic courts or small sewing machines from a "friendly nation." The plane has the flag of Kazakhstan on its tail.

Check out somalianarchy.com!

That's where I'll be posting about Somalia for the foreseeable future instead of here.

Are the Mogadishu sheikhs crazed killers or the object of desperate propaganda?

I would bet heavily on the latter. On the one hand, you've got Reuters and others claiming that the Islamic courts are killing people for watching the World Cup. But then there's an alternative version of what happened, saying that the killers were 'mooriyaan' (or 'mooryaan') and had very different motives. According to this Somali-English dictionary, 'mooriyaan' means "poor people (living in misery)". Here's the alternative version:

Allah oh my dayz, wat lies..

I'm in moghadishu now...and that is not what happened..

It wasnt the sheikhs...it was mooriyaan..

A group of 12..attempted to rob the cinema...and one guy and girl got killed..

Walaahi i could hear the gunshots from my house..(well my granz)...

Like i always say..Dnt believe everything u here...

And i can actually bear witness..and put my hand on a kitaab and say football isnt banned here...

My cousins (male) watch every game at restuaraunts..

BBC Chats *****! if u want the truth watch aljazeera!

Here's another source that says there is no ban on watching the World Cup.

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog, wherein I hope to bring to light some underreported news and views and partially chronicle and analyze events from a propertarian standpoint.

I would define a propertarian as someone who believes that the non-agression principle, and by extension, liberty and property, form the best foundation for a social order in terms of a) rights, b) utility and c) stability. I believe that under certain conditions, a social order can emerge in which all the services that are generally associated with political government, including policing and dispute resolution, are funded on a voluntary basis, whether for-profit or non-profit. You can also think of me as a radical libertarian, anti-taxation zealot, advocate for self-government, market anarchist, anarcho-capitalist, voluntaryist, or free marketeer, as these are all synonyms.

So, with that out of the way, I want to delve into what has been my main focus of interest, which is Somalia. Somalia is one of the most complex, least understood and lied about places on earth. The problem is made worse by the fact that even when reporters report facts correctly, their anti-propertarian bias taints their analysis, leaving casual readers misinformed as to what is really going on. I hope that this blog and the information that I link to will serve as antidotes against this misinformation.

It would be interesting to commission polls in every country in the world except Somalia with the question, "Do you think our country should help to impose a political solution on the Somali people?" I think most people would answer no, because most people have the good sense to know that home-grown solutions are best. Somalis identify with their clan more than with pan-Somali-ness. Representative democracy on the level of the defunct Democratic Republic of Somalia would not be viable there, because it would be impossible to create a government that would more or less fairly represent the complex clan structure. Unfortunately, this is not the view of the UN and the US government (proving that democracy doesn't work in America, either). So while the US is suffering the embarrassment of having backed a group of warlords against the Islamic courts, the UN, which backs the increasingly irrelevant Transitional Federal Government, doesn't fare any better.

The ridiculousness of this situation is captured in a PBS interview (available in an audio file and a transcript) with a Somali professor and a US diplomat that took place on the day the warlords were finally ousted from Mogadishu by the popular uprising against the Mogadishu warlords spearheaded by the Islamic Courts Union (now called the Supreme Council of Islamic Courts).

The key thing to know about the Islamic courts is that they are diverse, free-market (i.e., voluntarily-funded) providers of policing and dispute resolution, as is clear from Professor Samatar's words:

The reason why the Islamic courts and the population have been able to succeed in doing this is because there are three groups who are involved in this business: One is the Islamic court; the other is a huge number of very successful businesspeople who have tremendous amounts of weaponry; and, thirdly, there's a very widely distributed civil society movement. It's these three groups who are holding the fort, so to speak.

The uprising came as a surprise precisely because the Islamic courts are not powerful as a political group, but are utterly dependent on voluntary support from ordinary people. In a stateless society that is awash with guns, this is the only kind of force that could have succeeded against the tax-levying warlords.

In short, the Islamic courts don't have the power to tax because they don't have near enough control of the guns, and they can't get control of the guns without the power to tax.