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 “America innovates, China duplicates and Europe regulates.”
– Jeremy Warner, Daily Telegraph, (behind paywall). (He is writing about the EU’s Precautionary Principle and generally silly approach to new technologies. These are differences of degree, of course: it is not as if the US is quite the swinging-from-the-chandeliers classical liberal place of yore.)
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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’s putting it mildly.
Used to be, we Americans were the tops at figuring out how to satisfy our own yearnings, and then we’d transmit the plans over to China and they’d assemble our inventions for us.
Now we’ve become even more rarified in our abilities, no longer deigning to handle the picayune details ourselves and letting the lower-ability Chinese do more for us in exchange for pay. We now sit here in an inchoate goo of yearning, and we allow the Chinese to figure out what it is that we’re yearning for, and then design and produce it and ship it over to us.
As we leave those mundane details to others, we become more godlike.
The United States has become something close to a gulag, spiraling downward into a pretty good rendition of the world of “1984”. I have ceased to believe that there is any hope for its salvation now, except through the familiar paths of fire and blood – and maybe not even then.
If you think that sounds overstated, let me tell you that I expect that within a few short years it will become impossible to exist in the world here unless one routinely mouths all the woke pieties constantly. That means no working, no buying, no selling, no internet, no government services, no banking, no phone service, no social media, unless you continually genuflect to the Woke Emperors and abase yourself before them.
And all the pathways for fixing that without fire and blood are being systematically dismantled, one by one.
Chinese people are quite capable of innovating – and they are going to show that.
“Europe”, i.e. the European Union, is a sick joke.
America?
I agree with the above three comments – of Perry, bobby b and Ferox.
It is becoming horribly likely that Donald John Trump, in spite of his many faults, was the last chance for the United States.
That last chance (if he was the last chance) is now gone – and I do not believe that the West can stand without the United States.
Let us hope that I am WRONG – that the United States will (somehow) struggle on till 2024 and then there will be a great wave of rolling back “Progressive” statism in 2025.
Russia – Russia is not Frankfurt School Marxist, it is not “Woke”.
But I do not support Mr Putin and his regime – which is corrupt and brutal, a thief and a murderer.
Nor do I believe that Russia is only not Frankfurt School Marxist (not “Woke”) because of Mr Putin and his regime.
Russia WITHOUT Mr Putin and his pals, that might be a power worth supporting. It might even hold its own against the PRC totalitarian Communist Party dictatorship – in spite of the vastly greater population of China.
Some considerate individual archived the article for others to read:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210423080457/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/04/23/europe-regulating-ai-oblivion-presenting-huge-opportunity-brexit/