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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The true enemy of the Tea Party movement, contrary to what oh so many in the the clueless and wilfully blind MSM would have you believe, is not Obama and the Democratic Party, it is the Republican Party’s establishment… i.e. the people who made Obama presidency possible.
And so when George W. Bush, the very embodiment of everything that brought the Tea Party into existence, says “Sarah Palin is unqualified“, then it is time to start counting the days until the Tea Party propels her into the White House at the head of the angry mob of peasants with torches and pitchforks soccer moms, office workers and garage mechanics.
Often the quality of a person can be judged by who their are enemies… and that means Sarah Palin is looking more appealing by the day.
Liberty is not a pick and mix free-for-all in which you think government should ban the things you don’t like and encourage you things you do like: that’s how Libtards think. Libertarianism – and the Tea Party is nothing if its principles are not, at root, libertarian ones – is about recognising that having to put up with behaviour you don’t necessarily (approve) of is a far lesser evil than having the government messily and expensively intervene to regulate it.
– James Delingpole, with his obvious typo corrected.
Karl Rove, a leading advisor for George W. Bush and therefore one of the people who made the Obama presidency possible, has launched another attack on Sarah Palin.
If I were her, I would be grinning from ear to ear.
On this day in 1805, a famous signal was sent in the context of the struggle against an earlier iteration of pervasive European Union.
I rather liked this excellent article by David Harsanyi explaining the rise of the Tea Party:
Do I wish that Colorado senatorial candidate Ken Buck hadn’t declared that being gay was a choice (as if there’s something wrong with choosing to be gay)? Yes. Do I wish he hadn’t followed up by comparing a gay genetic predisposition with alcoholism? I do. If you were brainy enough to watch “Meet the Press” instead of wasting time in church last Sunday, no doubt you cringed at this primitive lunacy.
After all, what’s more consequential than a faux pas about nature and/or nurture? Who cares that Democrat Michael Bennet was busy moralizing about the cosmic benefits of dubious economic theory and science fiction environmentalism – ideas that have already cost us trillions with nothing to show for it?
Just as long as we stay focused on what’s important, right? We’re so easily distracted.
Those who believe being gay is a choice are Neanderthals. The enlightened trust science. That’s why the president appointed a science czar, people. A science czar who co-authored a textbook arguing for mass sterilizing of Americans to prevent an imagined population bomb. You know, “science.”
Read the whole thing.
Presenting the climate changes we’ve been experiencing in the last decades as a threat to the Planet and letting the global warming alarmists use this bizarre argument as a justification for their attempts to substantially change our way of life, to weaken and restrain our freedom, to control us, to dictate what it is we should and should not be doing is unacceptable. Their success in influencing millions of quite rational people all around the world is rather surprising. How is it possible that they are so successful in it? And so rapidly? For older doctrines and ideologies, it took usually much longer to get such an influential and widely shared position in society. Is this because of the specifics of our times? Is this because we are continuously “online”? Is this because religious and other metaphysical ideologies have become less attractive and less persuasive? Is this because of the need to promptly refill the existing spiritual emptiness – connected with “the end of history” theories – with a new “noble cause,” such as saving the Planet?
The environmentalists succeeded in discovering a new “noble cause”. They try to limit human freedom in the name of “something” that is more important and more noble than our very down-to-earth lives. For someone who spent most of his life in the “noble” era of communism this is impossible to accept.
– Václav Klaus
I would love to hear from AEP, or from Prof Congdon, exactly how creating money is supposed to create wealth.
If the Central Banks of the world buy private sector bank debt, they create new demand-deposit money that the private sector banking system can then lend. So more money units chase the same goods and services? Where is the new wealth?
– Toby Baxendale
An honest leftie? In the American MEDIA? Who’d a thunked it!
Lawrence O’Donnell: Yes. And I’ve been a liberal for so long that I still call myself one. I didn’t change to “progressive.”
THR: But you have referred to yourself as a socialist.
O’Donnell: Yes. A practical European socialist which, as it turns out, we all are, if you know that Social Security … is a socialist program, and that Medicare is a socialist program and that all economies of the world are mixed with some capitalism and some socialism and they just vary in their degrees.
THR: So you have no objection when conservatives call President Obama a socialist?
O’Donnell: No. But if they’re honest about it, they would call themselves socialist, too. Newt Gingrich preserved the socialist state. He never once introduced a bill to repeal Medicare.
THR: Would you object if a Republican introduced such a bill?
O’Donnell: No, because I think it’s an honest position. I hope Rand Paul does if he becomes a senator. There are people who honestly hold themselves in opposition to socialism. But there isn’t a single one in the U.S. Congress who does.
True enough.
Jeff Randall states the bleedin’ obvious…
Cuts, cuts, cuts. At this week’s Trades Union Congress, delegates talked of little else. George Osborne’s plans for reductions in government spending were denounced by his adversaries as “eye-watering” and “blood-curdling”.
[…]
This is what happens when the state is shrunk, right? Er, not quite. In fact, not at all. In terms of cash flowing out of the Treasury’s coffers, there is no evidence of cutting back. Total government outlay is set to go up this year, next year and every year thereafter to 2014-15.
According to estimates from the Office for Budget Responsibility, the figures will be £696 billion in 2010-11 (up from £669 billion in 2009-10), then £699 billion, £711 billion, £722 billion and £737 billion. These sums are not inflation-adjusted, but even so, they belie the idea that a demon barber is about to “polish off” the Budget and stuff its remains into one of Mrs Lovett’s delicious meat pies.
The lunatics took over the asylum many years ago and all that has changed is that a different bunch of lunatics are in charge now. How could anyone have expected anything else from someone like that jackanapes Cameron? Moreover he has been making the fact he never intended to shrink the state perfectly clear to anyone who has actually been paying attention for quite some time.
The British government want to sign up to the Schengen Agreement… but they want the police state parts of it without the free movement of people parts of it
– Guy Herbert
So… the global economy has been tanking in no small measure because certain states provided perverse incentives and pushed lenders to offer vast quantities of money to people who had no realistic probability of ever paying it back… and the solution to get us out of this whole mess is to twist banks arms into making loans they would rather not make.
The Lib Dem members of the Coalition favour a more interventionist approach to banking. Having been bailed out by the taxpayer, they argue, the banks have an obligation to lend. The Tories regard it as contradictory to try to control banks while encouraging them to build up their balance sheets.
No shit, Sherlock. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.
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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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