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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Samizdata quote of the day IKEA customers across the world are led to believe, naively, that the world is composed of simple elements that we can understand, interlink, and repair if necessary. Populist politicians throughout the world exploit similar social engineering… I respond critically to this European hypocrisy with an IKEA flat pack in the shape of the Swedish kingdom, which conceals an inconvenient truth.
– ‘Sonja Aaberg’, the Swedish sculptress, quoted by Mark Steyn in Euro-artists Speak
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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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That whole stunt was hilarious!
Says it all really. Sadly, it wasn’t part of the joke.
In the US they frequently release surveys of the 50 states related to various social rankings (graduation rates, poverty levels, etc.) Usually Arkansas comes in 49th while Mississippi will come in 50th (and last). Hence, the unofficial motto of the state of Arkansas:
Thank God for Mississippi.
There are times when certain aspects of living in the USA makes it seem like I’m living the worlds most bat-shit crazy place. And then I’ll read about happenings on the other side of the Atlantic, and I’ll think:
Thank God for the EU.
I think crazy is a constant, it just changes form.
This is thus the fatal flaw with large central planning You have to take in the constant of crazy, which kind of messes everything up. So, the solution is more planning, which is crazy, which makes sense, since more of crazy, is more crazy.
Now if only it didn’t take half a million bucks of government money to pull this stunt, I’d be a lot more in favour of it. Funny as hell, but a touch on the expensive side.
The accompanying text to the Slovenian piece is funny:
I have chosen a text by the official
Slovenian national tourism agency
as a departure point for examination
of our national identity. According
to this text, the first tourists appeared
in Slovenia back in 1213 and left
a message documenting their visit in
one of the caves in the Postojna complex.
The discovery that we ourselves
are unquestionably the descendants
of these tourists is telling; we view
ourselves from the position of foreign
visitors. This is a strategy associated
with the delight of masturbation: we
view the hand we use in autoerotic
stimulation as the hand of another.
We view our own national identity
with similar detachment, as though
we were tourists in our own land.
Alsadius,
The EU got the money by force. The artist recaptured the stolen money by guile. Further, this is that much less that the EUocrats have to work with. Also, they will have to hire another artist, and this time even more EUocrats will have to be pulled off what ever it is that the do, or don’t do, to supervise the artist.
This could turn out to be the artist full employment act.
So they censored it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7VDk4D35OU
Everyone seems to talk about the national representations while missing the bulk of the work: that part which represents the EU.
As ever, the elephant in the room.
Hey, I’m not saying the EU would have spent it wisely – they gave half a million bucks to an art exhibit, after all. It’s the principle of the thing, is all.