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]

Samizdata quote of the day

“The upgrading of the G20, Gordon Brown’s plans for planetary financial regulation, and the Copenhagen climate summit (whose inauguration of a transnational bureaucracy to facilitate the multitrillion-dollar shakedown of functioning economies would be the biggest exercise in punitive liberalism the developed world has ever been subjected to) are all pillars of “global governance.” Right now, if you don’t like the local grade school, you move to the next town. If you’re sick of Massachusetts taxes, you move to New Hampshire. Where do you move to if you don’t like “global governance”? What polling station do you go to to vote it out?”

Mark Steyn.

6 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

  • Gareth

    What polling station do you go to to vote it out?”

    What polling station did we go to to vote it in?

  • I want my spacestead on Ceres NOW!

  • I rather enjoyed this spoof of Obama-speak:

    There are those who say there is no evil in the world. There are others who argue that pink fluffy bunnies are the spawn of Satan and conspiring to overthrow civilization. Let me be clear: I believe people of goodwill on all sides can find common ground between the absurdly implausible caricatures I attribute to them on a daily basis. We must begin by finding the courage to acknowledge the hard truth that I am living testimony to the power of nuance to triumph over hard truth and come to the end of the sentence on a note of sonorous, polysyllabic if somewhat hollow uplift. Pause for applause.

    But did he really say “I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war.” ?

  • Paul Marks

    World government has not always been the goal of the collectivists.

    For example, in Plato’s day they thought in terms of a fairly small city state.

    However, now in recent centuries the mainstream (not just the Marxist) left think in terms of world rule.

    Perhaps not by a formal Federation – but, if they can not get that, by the “structionalist” approach of a series of agreements.

    As for using the anti bankers hysteria to advance this agenda – “never let a crises go to waste”.

    This may well be true of C02 globel warming as well – if one believes in this doctrine the logical response would not be some great world agreement, it would be to deregulate the nuclear power industry (by the way, the regulations do not help”health and safety” if anything they harm these things as well as vastly increasing costs by keeping out new technology).

    Going for a world agreement (i.e. yet another big of world government) is about advancing a collectivist agenda – not reducing C02 emissions.

  • John B

    “Where totalitarianism becomes possible it becomes inevitable.”
    We´ve got the technology, bunnies. I think we are just fine tuning the rationale.

  • Paul Marks

    Inca Peru had totalitarianism – and their technology was very primative (pre Inca civilizations had the wheel and so on – but the Inca did not).

    What matters, politically, is the ideas in people’s heads – not the tools they have.