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Our hosting company has been under sustained DOS attacks from some worthless scrotes over the last couple days and if you have been finding it hard to reach samizdata.net, that is why.

It is also why there has been a low volume of posts here as we have frequently been unable to access our blog's 'back-end'. The good folks at Hosting Matters have been doing their best to keep things operational under difficult circumstances.

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A few weeks ago when we culled the so-called race realists (neo-fascist racists) that were camping in Samizdata.net's comment section, it became clear to me that if you let ill mannered loud mouths use your venue to try and shout down discourse and endlessly turn unrelated topics to their pet thesis, all you do is attract more ill mannered loud mouths who will do the same.

Everyone has their techy days in the comment section but when a person makes a habit of being obnoxious and immune to rational argument, I see no reason to indulge them or tolerate them. This is not a forum and this is not a chat room, it is a blog, which is quite different. Many blogs do not even have comment sections.

When you open your house to visitors, you do not give up the right to kick people out if they start insulting other guests and spray painting their opinions on the wall. Of course some people would say, "Oh but that is censorship if you stop them". Er, no, it is just maintaining control over what is and is not acceptable on your private property... but of course some people, the sort that I am now far quicker to ban, do not actually believe in private property (not when you pin them down), and often cannot see that censorship by the state of private media channels and editorial control over a private media channel (such as a blog, for example) are materially different things. But then to someone who thinks all interaction should be political (the usual term used is 'democratic' these days), such distinctions make little difference to them. I am not referring here to specific people but rather the general class from which our 'problem commenters' tend to spring.

Some cannot see that they are not being 'censored' because of whatever their views are, any more than a man who gets on a table in a restaurant, drops his draws and starts calling for the darkies to be thrown out of Britain or for the middle class to have their homes confiscated is being 'censored' when he gets thrown out by a bouncer for being an jackass.

If I have any regrets it is that I have been too indulgent of endlessly poorly argued and often off topic drivel posted by a small minority of serial commenters in the past. I have no objection to vocal dissent from the 'Samizdata.net world view' (whatever that is), I just object to a constant stream of unsupported contentions delivered by megaphone that makes no attempt to actually engage in discourse. We have lots of dissenters who comment here regularly that I would not dream of banning.

So yes, there is a new hard line. Trolls and blogroaches will not be indulged and will be ejected rather swifter in future.

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On behalf of the Samizdata Team, it gives me great pride and pleasure to announce a major change to our readers.

For some days now we have been working feverishly behind the scenes to smooth the path of the imminent merger between Samizdata and the Noam Chomsky Blog.

As I am sure you can all appreciate, this is not just a time of thrilling change but it is also a supremely fitting culmination of all the hard work and endeavour we have put in to this blog. That someone as august, as visionary and brilliant as Professor Chomsky should see fit to share a platform with us, honours us all in a way to profound and moving for me to express with mere words.

This is not merely a collaborative effort. It is a great coming together of like hearts and like minds in a grand joint push to change the world. We know that you, our readers, must be every bit as excited by the prospect as we are.

The newly-merged blog, called Noamizdata will be launched very shortly, so get ready to update your 'Favourites' list. We regret that this site will be down for a short period while the changeover is effected but we are working tirelessly to ensure that the interruption to your regular service is kept to a bare minimum.

Samizdata and Chomsky together will be a unstoppable force. The future starts now.

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We may be off the air for a short time due to some maintenance issues. Back soon!

Update: Well that was rather painless. Our downtime was hardly a blink

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We were off the air for a short while today because Hosting Matters were moving their servers into a security cage.

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Sorry about the brief but painful service outage some of you make have experienced. Our hosting server had a spot of dispepsia but the good folks at Hosting Matters got us up and running again in no time.

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Our most splendid Frogman has added another wallpaper to the Samizdata.net wallpaper page (scroll down to the bottom of the page). Check them out!

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We now have several very cool Samizdata.net wallpapers for your computer desktop, the link to which can be permanently found in our sidebar under 'network'!

More illuminated graphic splendours from the Dissident Frogman!

The mighty Frogman is on a roll... he has added yet another wallpaper to the selection!

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We are still stamping on bugs which a minority of people have reported due to the major Samizdata.net re-design.

Some of the 'hard to reproduce' bugs people have reported in some OS/browser combinations are proving a tad challenging to hunt down but we are still persevering.

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I last logged out leaving the Samizdata just as I like it. There was a place for everything and everything was in its place. Yes, it may have been a bit shambolic and démodé but it was comforting and familiar like an old friend or a favourite armchair.

Only look at what has happened! I turn my back for a few hours and some anally-retentive busybodies have gone and called in the Feng Shui consultants. Now my loveable, historical old Blog has been has been consigned to the scrap heap and replaced with this ultra-hi-tech, cutting-edge, state-of-the-art thingy which they are probably going to tell me has been conceived for 'balance' or 'harmony' or 'enhanced Chi' or something.

And as if that act of wanton cultural vandalism was not enough they have also furnished me with a new-fangled set of coding instructions with 'stylesheets' and 'javascript' and 'xhtml' this and 'attribute' that. The whole thing reads like stereo-assembly instructions. How is this old dog supposed to learn all these new tricks? It took me look enough to programme me the first time round. They will doubtless have to ship me off to the manufacturer now to be re-chipped and re-booted.

Or maybe they are planning to give me a make-over. Yes, I bet they are. After all age and experience counts for nothing these days. It's all about image, image, image and daresay I am no longer regarded as sufficiently 'happening' anymore. I can see myself now, being prodded and poked around by a squadron of invidious design-gurus ("Dahhling, that haircut is just sooooo 2003").

I would write a letter of complaint to these soulless technocrats but what good would it do? Besides they have all probably swanned off to some fashionable Islington eatery where they are quaffing down the polenta with rocket salad and feeling very smug about being so 'cool' and a la mode.

Bah! It's all humbug.

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As our regular readers will notice, Samizdata.net has had a major re-design and functional upgrade. The old site was great but things moves on and it was time for an upgrade. Take a moment to examine all the new options and links! Also see the revamped domain page and blogging glossary!

We would like to thanks thank the Dissident Frogman for his really great work.

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Samizdata.net may be unavailable for a while today and tomorrow as we work to upgrade our software. Also we will be bring you some interesting... changes

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Hosting Matters was having some 'server issues' which caused Samizdata.net to be briefly unavailable. We are also having other technical problems but expect to be fully operational again shortly.

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Due to a server hickup, Samizdata.net was feeling poorly... we now return you to your regular programming.

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The server upon which we are hosted was a bit dyspetic for about an hour today... but it is feeling much better now after it was burped (rebooted) by our excellent chums at Hosting Matters, who really are the worlds best hosting company!

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I am about to install some bot-killing software, so if comments happen to break for awhile or the site rolls over with its itty bitty paws flailing in the air, you will know why...

Update: Samizdata.net comments will now require you to enter a security code that you copy off a graphic that will appear in the comment pop-up window. This should prevent spam-bots from auto-posting their garbage all over the blog.

Also, we have updated some code to stop spammers harvesting the e-mail addresses of commenters as well.

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Ou readers may have noticed that the Samizdata was down for a few hours today. It appears that the cause was sustained DOS attack directed to our hosting company Hosting Matters.

Little Green Footballs was also affected and has further details.

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Social individualists of the world unite!
You have nothing to lose but your chains
and a whole world to win!

Although intended as a humorous meme-hack, the statement is also quite clearly true. The irony is that for individuals to preserve their individuality, they must unite with others to fight the collectivist political pressures that would deny that we are moral free agents and make us so much less than we are: to fight involuntary collectivism we must voluntarily act collectively.

And so that is why I set up Samizdata.net and lured others to dive into the blogosphere with me head first.

It was my attempt to give a platform to shout out to the world for like-minded individuals who rejected the intrusive force backed collectivist view of the world. We are not really trying to 'convert' people, though that would be nice, rather we are trying to change people's meta-context and let the ideology take care of itself. That is our 'mission statement' if you like.

A meta-context is a person's frames of reference through which they interpret the world around them. It is not an ideology or a political 'ism' or even a philosophy... it is 'just' a series of axioms and 'givens' that colour and flavour how you think about things and come to understand them via a set of critical or emotional preferences and underlying assumptions. We all have a personal meta-context.

For example, it is one of the reasons that although I have written many articles on Samizdata.net about the issue of private ownership of firearms in the USA, I very rarely discuss the Second Amendment. Why? Because an individualist meta-context does not have rights as something which are dependent on The State.

The Second Amendment of the US Bill of Rights is a legal artifice, but it is not the source or reason that people should be able to own weapons as a matter not of privilege but by right. In fact, no state and its laws is the source of any right whatsoever: rights are objectively yours to begin with and are not given to you by anyone. Thus I will never argue an American has the right to own a gun because 'it says so in the Second Amendment' because they would have a right to do so even if it said nothing of the sort.

Yet that is not to say I think the Second Amendment is a bad idea, just that it is nothing more than a useful profane tool to secure an objective right, not a source of rights. To me as an individualist, I see do not see the state as central to my life or quite frankly to civil society... as I am not a fully convinced anarchist I do see some role for limited government in securing the rights of individuals, but just as an adjunct to far more important the networks that are primarily social rather than political.

And so if we are trying to change people's meta-context to include more individualist and less collectivist frames of reference, then it behoves us to use phrases which assist in this process rather than those which are loaded with 'trigger words' that may well get our views unhelpfully pigeonholed in places that does not really reflect where we are coming from. Now I certainly regard myself as a libertarian of the minarchist flavour... what is sometimes called a 'Classical Liberal'. However the term 'libertarian' is increasingly loaded with meanings that generate more heat than light, and thus I have started using the term 'social individualist' rather than 'libertarian in Samizdata.net's introduction in the sidebar. We have not changed... certainly I have not... and I intend to continue arguing that the term 'libertarian' can only be used correctly to describe people who promote the individual liberty to chose how you interact with the world via social interaction rather than force backed political interaction. Just as Living Marxism changed its name to Spiked in order to shed the 'baggage' of the term 'Marxism' without actually changing a thing ideologically, we started life as 'Libertarian Samizdata' back in our early days on-line and then just became Samizdata.net in order to better reach beyond the worthy true believers. We are no longer Libertarian Samizdata but our thinking is really no different to when we started.

Yet if the term 'libertarian' gets in the way of what we are trying to do, it is time to start de-emphasising it. I am still a member of the executive committee of the London based Libertarian Alliance and I still regard myself as a pukka libertarian. But a more accurate description of my views than just the broad church of 'libertarianism' would be that I reject collectivist views of the world as utterly falsified, but at the same time I do not regard individuals as atomised objects existing in splendid isolation. Unless you live alone in a log cabin in the middle of Canada subsisting on nuts and moose meat, you are an individual within a social environment: a civil society. And it is the extent to which you can freely act within civil society as an individual pursuing self-defined ends by right, without political coercion or permission, that is the measure of whether you are free or not.

Additionally, I have long regarded socialism as the most ironic use of language in the history of mankind, given that it means to replace social interaction with entirely political interaction. It is time to reclaim the word social and reject the newspeak inversion of it into meaninglessness.

And it is addressing those issues that make this a social individualist weblog.