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 – Labour’s Gagging Acts Combined with the already-passed Online Safety Act and the previously announced intention to ban under-16s entirely from social media — a ban that Prime Minister-in-waiting Burnham intends to support — these laws, enacted or proposed, look to anyone except a Labour lickspittle to be a serious erosion of the rights of the British people to access information freely and express their political opinions online.
These draconian measures bear a striking resemblance to the reaction of a seemingly very different British government to ostensibly dissimilar circumstances: William Pitt the Younger’s infamous series of repressive laws enacted during the 1790s.
Pitt’s anti-radical legislation was designed to preserve elite power, control the public narrative, and protect the lower orders from ideas — what we now call misinformation — reckoned likely to lead them astray. The intent of these laws and the fears they were enacted to allay shed considerable light on Labour’s own attempts at gagging us.
– James Martin Charlton
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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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I recently bought a new microwave. I has a child-lock. I’m seriously getting pissed off with the “Think of the Children!” narrative being used to justify (enforce, really) everything under the Sun. It’s just awkward for me (and I don’t even have children!) but that is not what this is really about is it? It isn’t about control exactly. It is about enforcing an ersatz form of “self control” by reminding me every single time I heat up soup, use the internet or watch TV that I am doing this not because I am free to do so but because I am allowed to and if I “abuse” these privileges I am granter by our Great And Benevolent Lords & Masters I shall be held to account. The level of these micro-aggressions is incredible. Streaming Star Trek Voyager there were trigger warnings for everything. This included stuff that isn’t even there! Not that I would mind seeing Seven in the buff but it never happens – for shame! The media companies are terrified. And it gets weirder…The movie “Zone of Interest” which is about the home life of the commandant of Auschwitz had trigger warnings for “Alcohol and Tobacco Use”. This is because Rudolf Höss would have a glass of schnapps and a cigar after dinner. Was that really the worst thing the commandant of Auschwitz did? That really annoyed me. Rudolf Höss was a deeply evil man but not because he drank (in moderation) and had a few smokes. This is so missing the point I was beside myself. The NAZIs – some of them smoked… oh, and they did a few other bad things but that is not important children.