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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Whilst still very much an early ‘work in progress’, the Capitalist Chicks< website is starting to take shape and now at least works with MS Internet Explorer 5.0.
I do have one minor quibble though: ladies, do you really need the damn disclaimer on every page? If you think that you actually do, might I suggest you re-word it at follows:
Disclaimer
The term ‘chicks’ is in no way meant to be derogatory towards women. If you insist on taking it that way, let us introduce you to the concept of several property. This is our website, we like the word and that’s all there is to it. If you have a problem with that, you are probably a socialist and thus are likely to find ‘chick’ the very least of many things here that will upset you.
Just a suggestion, ladies.
One of the really nice things about sex is that you can completely loose yourself in it for a while. But what is it about sex that makes people lose their reason even when it is someone else who is doing it?
Our conservative friends may stand with us regarding economic freedom and capitalism, but as soon as I slip into something interesting and make a seriously risqué suggestion, I rarely have a problem separating the libertarians (or Eastern-communists for that matter) from the conservatives and Western-socialists… not that they actually have different urges, just that one is open about it and the other only admits it if no one else is listening.
In some ways, I think many conservatives have accepted the Western socialist-feminist attitude to women, and think we are these poor hunted things that need to be protected from men. This attitude, coming from a strange mixture of Christian prudishness and Western-socialist identity politics, is particularly hilarious to me as I grew up in a communist country in which men were men, women were women and everyone understood the implications just fine thanks.
So when I read something like a sad little article about a 15 year old boy in Australia who was provided with a prostitute before he died of cancer, I cannot help but wonder at how some people have reacted to what was nothing less than an act of kindness and charity.
Conservatives fume about ‘immorality’ and people who fondly imagine themselves to be feminists fume about ‘sexual objectification’, but fortunately in that hospital there were people who realised that what mattered here was not the views of others but rather that a dying boy wanted to experience what all 15 year old boys want to experience before he died.
Some people argued “[it] demeans women and reduces the sexual act to being just a physical one.” Yet what gives those people the right to impose their moral theories on this boy? Clearly he was never going to have the chance to form a lasting or deep relationship, given that he was dying, so how dare these people try to deny him such a basic human experience?
How can a woman be ‘demeaned’ by engaging in her chosen profession with a grateful dying boy? It makes me so angry sometimes when I read of such cruel stupidity and self-righteous dogmatism. I am so very glad that more compassionate souls were there to make the only true moral decision or this story would have reduced me to tears.
The reality is that people have sex for all sorts of reasons, such as love and respect and caring and lust and attraction and curiosity and too much alcohol and it-just-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time. That is reality. Sometimes ‘the sexual act’ is ‘just a physical one’ and sometimes, just sometimes, that’s just fine by me too.
Peace on earth and goodwill to all men
– Attributed to God
God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay…
Warmest Christmas greetings to all readers of the Libertarian Samizdata.
I don’t mind admitting to the whole world (or such proportion of it that reads this blog at any rate) that I love Christmas. And not just any Christmas, mind, but a Traditional English Christmas. The Christmas of a chocolate-box cottages festooned with holly and mistletoe settled in a thick blanket of virgin snow. Inside, the ruddy-faced yeoman of England get ready to carve the succulent goose while their stout jam-making wives bustle in and out of the kitchen with sweet, steaming puddings. Through the window the sight and sound of squealing children building a snowman and playing with their toys (they have to be innocent, wooden toys – tops and hoops and dolls – none of your Nintendo in this folk-fantasy if you don’t mind) and carried on the wind are the melodic harmonies of the Church choir singing carols from vestries unseen
After the banquet, the sleep-inducing warmth of the crackling hearth, the brandy and the sherry and the port; the smell of cloves and mulled wine; stories and songs and recitations and in every soul the ghostly tingle of the metaphysical magick of the yuletide
This is what Christmas means to me. It is what Christmas will always mean to me. I know it is probably a construct; a quasi-Dickensian fantasy of an England that is no more and, perhaps, never was. But it is a righteous and worthy fantasy all the same; an expression of eternal desire for all the truly important things in life – goodness and bounty and family and home
I have no place in my heart for ‘Happy Holidays’ or the ghastly, bureaucratic ‘Winterval’. Christmas is Christmas and for me it will always be that chocolate-box cottage in the snow somewhere in Dickensian England
May I take the liberty of wishing a very merry English Christmas upon all my fellow Blogistas
Whilst perusing Fevered Rants, as I am wont to do, I came upon an article relating to how NORAD helps make certain that Santa is safe when operating over North America.
However, what really concerns me is that due to interference from Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson, Santa’s policy of only hiring elves from Northern Finland has been replaced with a more ‘multiculturally inclusive’ system that does not permit ‘racial profiling’. As a result many of the packages in Santa’s North Pole grotto which are destined for your home, have been packed by efreets and djinns of decidedly Middle Eastern appearance.
Think about the implications of that whilst you are opening those ‘nice’ presents on Christmas day. Check the soles of those new Adidas shoes very carefully before you go jogging around the block to break them in.
Merry Christmas.
One of the most appealing things about working with Libertarian Samizdata is the opportunity to show the many faces of the libertarian philosophy and the people behind it. Libertarians aren’t a bunch of humourless ideologues who spend all their time pondering pin heads. We’re real people who love liberty because we love life and desire to live it to the fullest. We play music, do sports, ride bikes, drive fast cars, ski, fly airplanes, get drunk, fall in love, go to churches or not, read porn or not, and believe it or not, party until dawn with our non-libertarian friends… without ever once mentioning politics.
If you come to us looking for an enlightenment or a revealed truth you will be very disappointed. Rather than answers, we give you questions; rather than proscriptions we tell you to think and to take responsibility for your own life. Of course if you do find comfort in some strange -ism you might find us a community tolerant of whatever strangeness you believe… so long as you do it peacefully.
Libertarianism does have core ideas and core beliefs. No one can be a libertarian without accepting the noncoercion principle. You must accept that I have a right to do anything I damn well please so long as I do not threaten you with direct violence to person or property and I use resources acquired honestly to do whatever it is I wish to do. I can’t use force, fraud or theft to take from you what I “need” for my lifestyle. I am both free to act as I please and wholly responsible for the results. If you are certain I’m a damn fool and will probably kill myself, you are free to attempt to talk me out of my bad behavior if you can get me to listen voluntarily. Otherwise you will have to wait until reality teaches me its’ harsh lessons. If the time comes when I am ready and contrite enough to beg for help and if you are of good enough heart to assist, you are free to do so.
Alternatively, if I attempt to steal from you or threaten you, it is your right to use whatever force is necessary to stop me even if it means my death. Libertarians are not pacifists. You are always in the right when you defend your person and property and loved ones against those who would do them harm.
Understanding non-coercion as an idea is the simple part. But ideas are fuzzy things when brought across the dream bridge to the physical world, a world in which maniacs fly airplanes into office buildings. What action does a libertarian take against a threat like that? The extremes are easy to judge. Few libertarians would agree that we should have had troops in Somalia or Panama. Most would agree that September 11th, 2001 and December 7th, 1941 were sufficient causus belli for any society, libertarian or otherwise. Some don’t and that is their right.
There are numerous philosophical strands that wend their way through the space of ideas and dump their passengers in pretty much the same location. If one thinks of ideas as points in space, then libertarians are those who are neighbors in that thought-space. Each will have their own unique perspective on how and why they ended up there.
However different our journeys we have all ended up with similar ideas. A belief that individuals know better what is good for them than any collective; that more individual liberty leads to better, happier lives; that government intervention even with the best of intentions fails to deliver the goods; that the vast majority of the several billion humans on this planet are decent, honourable and just plain nice.
If you’re really curious about us, try taking this little quiz. It’s not perfect, it’s probably not scientific, but you’ll come away from it with a sense of what all these crazy libertarians believe in. And who knows? Maybe you’re one of us.
Libertarians will be deeply concerned to learn that the authorities of the Orwellianly-named “Samizdata” have hidden from their readers that Natalie Solent’s most recent reading matter was not “?” as appeared in the summary of what all the Samizdata posters just read (an obvious ploy; the world public has long known that “?” is a Pokemon, silly). It was actually a whole pile of 1997 copies of House and Garden given to me by my next door neighbour. Clearly the powers-that-be considered this insufficiently intellectual. In a compromise move Ms Solent has offered a real-life clever person’s book she read just too late for the deadline: Getting the Message, a history of communications by Laszlo Solymar. It’s full of interesting nuggets. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a law passed in France in 1837:
Anyone who transmits any signals without authorization from one point to another one whether with the aid of mechanical telegraphs or by any other means will be subject to imprisonment …
And here is the text of a warrant issued by the British Government to the Post Office during the Boer War:
to produce, for the Information of the Intelligence Department of the War Office, until further notice any telegrams passing through the Central Telegraph Office (in London) which there is reason to believe are sent with the object of aiding, abetting or assisting the South African Republic and the Orange Free State.
Plus ça change…
Regarding the latest ‘close call’ terrorist mid air incident, News Max reports, with more than a hint of irony:
“[FBI investigators] have turned up nothing to link him to Muslim extremists, like those blamed for the Sept. 11 terror attacks,” reported the New York Times on Monday.
Nothing eh? Now call me churlish, but when a suicidal Islamic person gets on a US civilian airliner, with a three-week-old passport of dubious provenance, and who looks like Osama bin Laden on a ‘bad hair day’… and who then tries to blow himself up over a fuel tank mid-air using his ‘shoes-of-death’ filled not with improvised explosives but with MilSpec C-4 (not something one commonly finds in French drugstores), I would have to say there is indeed ‘something’ rather than ‘nothing’ linking him to what came to pass on September 11.
Does that mean I am convinced he is an Al Qaeda terrorists? No, not completely, but if I were a betting man I sure as hell know where my money would be going.
Now where did I leave that Paracemetol?
– Dale Amon
Aye, it has not been a pretty sight. Dead bottles have piled ever higher on the table tops and the barrages of incoming pints have been incessant. We’re expecting another intense battering tonight after too few hours rest from the ordeal. Numerous head injuries have been reported. One of my musician friends just called for help after being lost for a day and claims to have suffered grievous braincase damage. We’re planning a rescue party and hope to have him on anaesthetic within a few hours, before the alcohol level in his blood stream falls to dangerous levels.
It’s pure hell, but this is what the Samizdata forces train for!
A Merry Christmas to all, and just remember: Guinness Is Good For You!
In an article in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd writes that after September 11, Americans were turning away from unimportant things like expensive clothes and luxury
But now we are supposed to be in the era of the real rather than the pretentious, the warm rather than the cool, the fundamental rather than the grandiose.
So we must ask: Is the vast new $40 million Prada store that has just opened not far from Ground Zero, trumpeted by the company as “the New York Epicenter” and designed by the hot architect Rem Koolhaas, a relic of our gluttonous ways or a resumption of them?
Of course I realise that Americans are going through a process of adapting and trying to understand new realities, but at the risk of sounding unkind, all they are really doing is waking up from a dream and finding themselves in the real world.
It broke my heart when I saw those terrible images on television on September 11 and oh how I wished a thousand deaths on the monsters who were responsible for it. But I felt nothing more, or less, than I felt when Sarajevo was besieged for 1400 days, during which 10,000 of its people died and 50,000 more were injured out of a population of just over 500,000.
During the war, everywhere in what used to be Yugoslavia experienced shortage and hardship and sudden horror. Americans watched this through the filtering eyes of CNN and the BBC for a few minutes each day before going back to their dinner or driving to the mall, yet it might as well have been occurring on another planet psychologically speaking.
People in Sarajevo would have to dash across roads to go to the markets, risking death from Cetnik snipers and artillery fire on a daily basis. But if you ever go back and look at the videos, look very carefully at the people. You will see women with clean hair, lipstick and makeup. Men wearing pressed jackets and even ties. People determined to retain their humanity as well as just survive another day.
I think Maureen Dowd does not understand, at least not yet, that if the monsters can make you live in their world of poverty and sorrow, then they have truly beaten you. That is why when I realised that Benetton was about to open a shop in Sarajevo in 1995, I wept because I realised that the nightmare was almost over at last. So Maureen, take it from me that there is nothing noble about ‘sweat suits and old clothes already in the closet’. Listen to me and go to that place in New York, only a few blocks from the World Trade Centre that those evil people destroyed. Wander through the wonderful opulence of Prada’s shop and gaze at the exquisite Italian style, treat yourself to a nice little black dress: then look around again and realise that you have won and they have lost.
[Original link to NYT article via Instapundit]
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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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