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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Admit it. You love cheap clothes. And you don’t care about child slave labour…
So sayth Gethin Chamberlain in The Observer.
Well… seeing as he puts it that way… I suppose it would be better if these Third World folks were unemployed (and thereby provide a lower carbon footprint of course, not to mention gainful employ for First World NGOs involved in the Pity & Guilt Industry) and depending for their survival on First World aid money, disbursed via their government. The important thing is that The Islington Set can feel good about increasing the price of clothes for the British lumpenproletariat… and just remember that a lot of those bastards with their false consciousness and lack of class awareness voted for Thatcher back-in-the-day!
Of course much the same was said about The Dark Satanic Mills of the industrial revolution. But just as in India, people moved into the ghastly factories of the Midlands and elsewhere because it was better than the subsistence of grinding rural poverty… and this ultimately led to the technological mass affluence of today that has taken the vast majority of humankind beyond one-failed-harvest-from-starvation.
When I read this…
THE country’s top political blogger, Paul Staines – better known as Guido Fawkes – has threatened to sue Tory MP Claire Perry after she alleged he had “sponsored” a hack attack on her website.
… I was moved to say that this Perry is very much in favour of Guido using the courts to kick the living hell out of that Perry, the thuggish ‘Honourable’ member for Devizes.
Put the boot in, Guido!
There you have left-wing hypocrisy in a nutshell. When a government official like New York mayor Michael Bloomberg tries to reduce the public consumption of sugary beverages with a tax that makes the drinks more expensive, he’s a public health hero. But when it’s a profit-generating company that stands accused of increasing beverage costs, it’s a greedy manipulative Wall Street blood-sucker.
– Ira Stoll
The dependably nauseating David Cameron is demanding a massive infrastructure for internet censorship… oh to protect the children, of course.
And also of course, this is not really about porn… that is a bare faced lie. It is about political control. The state wants to easily be able to log what you look at and to easily block access to whatever it deems ‘unacceptable. The notion any government can be trusted with the infrastructure to control what people can see is madness.
In the USA there as been a high profile case involving a neighbourhood watch person by the name of George Zimmerman, a half-Hispanic, half-White man who killed a young black man called Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman was acquitted of murder and indeed the jury also declined to find him guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter as well.
This seems to have sparked gasps of disbelief and protests from left-of-centre commentators and the racial identity industry.
I only know what I read in the mainstream media, and previously felt no need to comment on a foreign murder trial as I had no opinion on the subject of the guilt or innocence of George Zimmerman. I was not privy to anything beyond the usual reportage and concluded that case would all come down the the minutia of corroborating evidence that you really needed to be the courtroom to see and hear.
So my question is… so what do these people know that the jury did not know? Why exactly are they protesting the verdict? I have not read any coherent arguments as to why the jury in this case got it wrong.
Intertwined with government hubris is shameless incompetence. This is demonstrated regularly on CSPAN, though it is often appreciated only by people who know the details of the often plausible sounding pontifications from the floor of the house and senate. But when you think about it, who could possibly know what one really needs to know in order to make sound decisions about the massive pile of things Congress attempts to control.
– Nicholas J. Johnson
Underneath the contempt for UKIP lies a careless assumption by the antiseptic metropolitan elite that their condescension is universally shared — that these beery coves with fag ash down their golf-club ties are demographic dinosaurs in a Britain ever more diverse, more Muslim, more lesbian, more transgendered. But the Britain to which UKIP speaks resonates beyond the 19th hole. It was not just that the party won an unprecedented number of seats in May’s elections, but that they achieved more second-place finishes than anybody else. Beyond the leafy suburbs and stockbroker counties, in parts of Britain where the traditional working class has been hung out to dry by Labour in pursuit of more fashionable demographics, UKIP has significant appeal.
– Mark Steyn
Although I think it is a mistake to consort with the EDL, does it not seem strange that the two US bloggers behind Jihad Watch and Atlas Shrugs should be banned from entering the UK… whilst Mohammad Al-Arefe can come into the country and preach the overthrow of Western Civilisation?
Some “experts” say that women should pee their pants or puke to avoid rape. Are they serious? Guns are better. Don’t pee your pants; make your wannabe rapist pee his pants.
– Julie Borowski
If big government were the key to economic success, France, with more than half of its GDP accounted for by government, would have rapid economic growth rather than an unemployment rate of 11 percent and negative growth. Yet France, Britain and the United States are demanding that the low-tax jurisdictions increase their taxes on businesses. They also demand more tax information sharing among countries. The officials of the G-8 assure us — as if they think we are all children or fools — that sensitive company and individual tax information will be kept confidential and not be used for political targeting, extortion, etc. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service had a reputation for being less corrupt and less incompetent than tax agencies in many other countries, which only illustrates how low the global standard is.
– Richard Rahn, the Tyranny of the Taxers
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists are an interesting outfit, a group crowd sourcing denouncing people to various states across the globe.
Just as we see the edifying example of Edward Snowden revealing routine US surveillance of hundreds of millions of people, we have as a counterpoint the ICIJ, who are folks that clearly think there is not nearly enough surveillance being carried out by nation states… and so they want to see if like minded folks can help nations worldwide ensure there is nowhere anyone can keep their money free from appropriation by the world’s tax men.
The ICIJ no doubt warms the cockles of Tory leader Dave Cameron’s heart as much as the likes of Edward Snowden scare the crap out him.
Yet I suspect many people who have not really thought this through very well might assume people like NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden on one hand, and the ICIJ on the other, are actually doing much the same thing.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
There is an article in The Guardian by Paddy Ashdown that falls at the first fence… i.e the tagline at the very top…
NSA surveillance: who watches the watchers? It’s not the widening of state intrusion that’s wrong, but the weakening of the safeguards that should be there to protect us
No that is the key error. It is not the lack of safeguard that is the issue, it is the huge amount of power in the hands of the state. It is indeed the widening of state intrusion that is wrong because there are simply no ‘safeguards’ that can stop the abuse of that amount of power by whoever currently controls the political process.
As has been said before, this is not a “left vs. right” issue, it is a “top vs. bottom” issue. NO ONE and NO INSTITUTION can be trusted with that kind of power. Ashdown is one of the people at the top, there is simply no way for him to understand.
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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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