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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On July 1 next year, Croatia becomes the 28th member of the European Union, and under the terms of the Treaty of Maastricht this new, proud sovereign state – not yet two decades old – must accept the entire corpus of EU law; and she must place her neck in the noose of the single currency. Unlike Britain or Denmark, the Croats have no opt-out. They are now legally obliged to give up the kuna for the euro, and I say, don’t do it, folks. It is not only a mistake. To submit to the euro would be a stunning refusal to learn the grim lessons of recent Balkan history
– Boris Johnson.
Blimey, I can hardly believe I just quoted Mr. Toad. But whilst I share BJ’s sentiments on this, knowing Croatia reasonably well, I suspect there was less opposition to this than one might have expected due to the indigenous Croatian political class being such a dismal collection of pond scum and turds who floated to the top. I think the average Croatian could not see how shifting power away from these wankers could possibly make things worse. And of course they are entirely wrong on that score, as they will eventually discover.
This whole notion of loyalty to one’s country really has no meaning whatsoever, since countries always change, just as do people who live in them. The only loyalty worth anything is that to one’s values and principles.
– commenter Alisa
There is an article by David V. Johnson, which is an interview with American leftist Martha Nussbaum, during which she conflates ‘respect’ with ‘tolerance’ and that is a telling category error. Nussbaum at least accepts (I sense rather grudgingly) that many ‘bad’ views must be accepted within civil society but…
Am I willing to tolerate Muslims? Certainly… at least the ones who will reciprocate and tolerate an atheist like me. And those who will not? Well no, I will not tolerate them either. For much the same reason I will happily tolerate any communist or socialist who wants to go live on a kibbutz, because I do not have to join them. And fascist socialists who want to live in judenfrei whites-only retreats on private property in the back of beyond somewhere, well knock yourself out guys, the farther away you are from me, well, lets just say it is a win-win for all concerned.
However the ones who wish to impose their oppressive views on me via the state? The ones whose views move them to do politics (which is what we call the struggle to control and use the means of collective coercion)? No, they will not tolerate me so I will reciprocate and try to use the force of the state, or whatever other means are available, to suppress them too. Tolerating those who will not tolerate you is more correctly know as “cowardice”.
But that is it. Tolerance. That is all that anyone can expect, provided they reciprocate it. Never respect.
Do I have ‘equal respect’ for Islam? Or socialism in all its ‘left’ and ‘right’ forms? Or racism? Hell no. I do not respect them at all as I do not respect any religion or any intrusive collectivist political order. But I will tolerate adherents of things I think are wrong if they tolerate me, which means not imposing their wishes on me by force. Several contributors to this blog are religious and I respect them, because they earned it, and their religious views do not require them to impose their beliefs on me by force. Tolerance.
Oh and another annoying thing in this article is the use of the term ‘liberalism’ to mean the exact opposite of the term as understood by classical liberals.
Ed West wrote a short but odd article about The Shard in the Telegraph:
Being a patriot, and a massive sexual inadequate, I should be pleased that Britain now has the tallest, most dominant, thrusting skyscraper in the whole of Europe. […] Why is it that with the exception of the US, which has very high inequality levels, all the other monster buildings are in tyrannies ruled by oil sheikhs or politburos? What does it say about Britain that we’re now part of this group?
It says nothing whatsoever. And I suspect Ed West cannot glean the future from tea leaves either. Why does he persist in looking for meaning where there is none?
That he sees it as a “middle finger” says nothing about the Shard but it tells us quite a lot about Ed West.
Strangely for a self-styled “patriot”, he uses many Americanisms, such as the middle finger as his rude gesture of choice rather than the English ‘mighty forks’…
…and when he says “kids” he means children rather than baby goats, also an Americanism…
He is however very English in his use of defensive self-deprecation. And he sees the success of others as somehow diminishing himself and in that way at least he is really very English indeed (he presumably holds with the fixed quantity of wealth fallacy)… but as he seems motived by envy, perhaps describing himself as a sexual inadequate was not ‘defensive self-deprecation’ after all.
There is a new law in France that every car must carry a breathalyser so that drivers can test themselves and see if they are fit to drive.
Call me a cynic if you like but I strongly suspect that certain law makers may well have significant pecuniary interests in…
… the country’s two companies that make these breathalyser sets 
It may be a minor thing but why oh why do people who cover the world’s conflicts seem to have so little technical knowledge of the subject they cover? I saw an article in the Telegraph with an image captioned “This image made from amateur video released by the Shaam News Network, purports to show a Syrian military tank in Homs, Syria”… except it is clearly not a “tank”, it is a BMP… an infantry fighting vehicle.
This is not new. I spent much of the 1990’s in various parts of the former Yugoslavia and was often exasperated to grab a western newspaper in Zagreb and see pictures of “Croatian tanks”… which more often than not captured former Yugoslav OT M-60 APCs pressed into service by the Croatian, HVO or BiH armies… or even rather exotic Croatian improvised armoured personnel carriers (in effect armoured trucks with a machine gun). More recently I also recall a clip on CNN describing “British tanks” in Iraq that were in fact AS-90 artillery vehicles.
It seems odd to me that so few modern war correspondents are ex-military and thus, with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan, far too many of them cannot tell the difference between a Mauser and a javelin (and neither can their editors it seems). This is certainly why I find Michael Yon so refreshing… he actually understands what he is looking at up the sharp end.
One of our commenters has made what I think is a very important point about the rapidly snowballing ‘Fast & Furious’ scandal that may well consume the Obama presidency:
The (vitally important) difference, however, is that ‘Wide Receiver’ (the Bush administration program) was carried out in cooperation with the Mexican government, and actually attempted to track the weapons crossing the border. ‘Fast & Furious’ was carried out in complete secrecy from the Mexican Government, and attempted to basically funnel weapons illegally to Mexican drug runners, so that the guns left at crime scenes could then be traced back to US gun dealers. As someone on NRO (I think it was Andrew McCarthy) pointed out, this operation REQUIRED the deaths of Mexican nationals. How this is distinguished from an act of war against Mexico is not at all clear to me. But then, I didn’t go to Harvard.
– Samizdata commenter ‘Disillusionist’ making a very germane point about the ‘Fast & Furious’ scandal.
… may cause some system response latency in the Samizdata primary data meat buffer.
I am attending The State of the Net conference in Trieste so in between listening to fellow Samizdatista Adriana Lukas explain why all why “all yer hierarchies are belong to us” and doing my bit to drain Europe’s wine lakes, there may be some delays in clearing comments caught in SmiteBot’s merciless jaws.
Sometimes useful insights about the state of the world comes from sources very far removed from the dismal mainstream media. This was taken from Knight Frank estate agency promotional bumf stuck through my door yesterday under the title “What nationalities are buying in your area?”
Given what has happened with the presidential elections in France we will be seeing many more French buyers shortly. We have also seen a huge spike from people in France searching on our website for properties in London.
Yup. We may be fucked but we are less fucked than you.
I received this via e-mail and thought it was too good not to share…
Bliss.
[Greek government policy is] known as ‘drinking your way back to sobriety’.
The deficit spending the Greek government wants to do is almost-entirely suppressive or neutral to GDP – it is spending by government, for government, on government. The population is shrinking, their internal revenue picture is already dreadful and only getting worse (because they have the worst ratio of producers to consumers of tax funding in the civilized world, and getting worser) and the only way any government of Greece can survive and keep the mayhem in the streets down to acceptable levels is to restore the drunken-sailor approach to public spending that got them into trouble in the first place. This means 14 monthly pension checks a year, retirement at 50 for workers in hazardous trades like hairdressing, and all the other 1,001 ways they managed to bankrupt themselves already.
– Serial commenter llamas
The Greek electorate is in denial. It rejects austerity, but insists on keeping the euro. All the main parties duly parroted what voters wanted to hear, making for a fantasy election, a make-believe election, a fingers-in-my-ears-I-can’t-hear-you election. The only list which was honest about the necessary cuts – a coalition of three liberal parties – failed to gain a single seat.
– Daniel Hannan
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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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