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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It should be possible to discuss racial genetics dispassionately and honestly in a public forum. But it is not. That is simply an empirically derived conclusion gained from running Samizdata for 10 years… it.can.not.be.done. Sorry but that is the inescapable truth. Racists are the perfect example of Churchill’s definition of a fanatic and unless you immediately show them the door and boot them through it, discourse in the comments section will quickly become untenable.
So Samizdata will continue to delete and ban racists when they leave comments and no apologies will be made for that. Our house, our rules.
For another article pertaining to why we will not tolerate racist discussions on Samizdata, read this.
An article about the psychiatric assessment of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik got me wondering about a couple things, one entertaining and the other, not so much:
“The psychiatrists warned that Mr Breivik was likely to attempt further attacks, including suicide bombings”
Suicide bombings? Plural? As it has been claimed he worked alone, I am curious how he could carry out more than one suicide bombing.
But less flippantly, I cannot help wondering if the only reason this coldly calculating man is being deemed ‘insane’ is that is the only way the Norwegian state never ever have to let him out, given that Norway apparently has no ‘life sentence’ in which ‘life means life’… so the only way to put him away forever is to declare him insane and thus lock him up in a loony bin until he dies.
He may well belong in a small room for the rest of his life but using the much loved Soviet, Russian and Chinese approach of expedient psychiatric assessment to achieve it may reveal a lot about modern Norway.
In its varying degrees, the political, legislative and social applications of environmental science studies in this 21st century should be carefully compared to that of Eugenics in the late 19th and through the mid- 20th centuries.
– Redoubtable serial commenter ‘RRS’
Beijing is full of empty shopping malls and empty apartment buildings. There are at least 60 million empty housing units in China, and probably a great many more than that. The absurd construction boom that continues to go on here is many times bigger than the rest of the world combined, and the Chinese banks are many times more bankrupt than those anywhere else
– Michael Jennings (currently in Beijing)
It is often said that Guy Fawkes was the only man to ever enter Parliament with honest intentions…
Today is our blogiversary…Samizdata crawled out of the primordial ooze of the blogosphere on Friday, November 02, 2001.
Our name was a wee bit longer then but like some vestigial tail, it eventually dropped off once we learned to walk upright… and it took us a while for our flippers to evolve into feet… but here we are all those years later, still blathering on about the things that irk or amuse us.
13,315 articles and 226,617 comments later…
…Blimey, where did all those years go?
It bears repeating that banks are not creators of wealth. They are places where you store the surplus value generated by productive enterprise. In very narrow circumstances that surplus value can be loaned out at a profit, but a financial sector is the icing, not the cake. This should be common sense, but apparently it is wisdom so rare it can only be learned in countries small and remote enough to avoid the deadly medicine of the global financial markets.
– Tim Cavanaugh
Prudent savers hit by ‘excessive’ hidden fees on pensions
… sayeth the Telegraph…
The National Association of Pension Funds says that fees are too high and that consumers face an “eye wateringly complex” system of hidden levies. Last year, The Daily Telegraph exposed how pension charges could strip pensioners of up to three quarters of their income.
Well ok, that is entirely possible.
But does the fees that ‘prudent savers’ get charged not pale into insignificance compared to year after year of what artificially (i.e. politically driven) low interest rates has done to the very notion of being a ‘prudent saver’?
Indeed if you simply save your money in some safe low yield instrument, in such an environment as we find ourselves today you are not being a ‘prudent saver’ at all. There is nothing prudent about it as your money is very unlikely to maintain its value vis a vis inflation… and that is exactly the intention behind the policies of the Fed and Bank of England. They want you to spend in order to appease the animal spirits that drive the economy, rather than be a ‘prudent saver’.
That is who would-be ‘prudent savers’ should be railing against.
I was responding to a comment under this article… when it struck me: why do so many people find this screamingly obvious fact so bloody hard to figure out?
“The banks stole our money. If you are not banker, that includes you. The banks stole from everyone – businesses, countries, citizens.”
No, the politicians who bailed them out with taxpayer money stole ‘our’ money after they created the moral hazard that led to the banks doing the things that they were given the incentives to do.
In a sane world, said bankers should have simply been allowed to go bust… so the problem is not ‘bankers’, it is the people who refused to let the bastards go broke by giving them third party… taxpayer… money.
But the 9/11 deniers have two mighty weapons. One is technological. In the age of the internet, if you don’t want to read evidence that contradicts your fantasies, then you don’t need to. Just visit one of hundreds of websites that will supply you with freshly minted “evidence” to replace any bits of your theory that have fallen apart on you.
The other weapon is cultural. Thanks, in part, to multiculturalism, facts have been reduced to accessories in the West’s intellectual wardrobe. The postmodern message is that your version of reality is part of you; don’t let inconvenient truths damage your customised worldview and your self-esteem
– Damian Thompson. Often when I quote Thompson it is to fisk him but this one hits the nail squarely on the head.
Just when we [have] the strongest possible proof that Keynsianism doesn’t work, someone yells for an encore
– Commenter “J Cuttance” on the Telegraph
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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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