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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David Cameron seems determined to not miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity…
The Conservative leader also gave an interview to the Spectator magazine in which he said he would use the conference to show his party had “the grit and determination to turn the whole country around”.
But in terms of the deficit, he added: “I want to be realistic – both for what a government can achieve, but also realistic in terms of taking the country with me.” Labour has said it plans to introduce a 50p rate of tax for the highest earners – a policy Mr Cameron said he would honour.
Nevertheless, he told the Spectator he thought high marginal tax rates were “a fantastically bad idea” and if the 50p policy ultimately drove Britain’s rich to move overseas, “clearly it would be painless and advantageous to get rid of it at an early stage”.
If it is “a fantastically bad idea” then with Labour reeling around like a punch drunk boxer, why oh why not just say “Britain… are you fucked enough to be paying attention now? We are going in the WRONG DIRECTION… we will immediately repeal this tax and simply tear up every single page the fantastically bad socially and economically toxic legislation enacted over the past decade, and try to restart civil society before it completely flatlines”…
…but no…
Instead we get the usual timid drivel about being “realistic”. Why? Well it is obvious. When it comes down to it, it is really only the details that Cameron disagrees with, the basic notion of a vast profligate regulatory state is only bad when it does not have Cameron’s “safe pair of hands” (or some such similar nauseating Tory form of words) on the wheel of state.
Sometimes when problems need to be worked out, the people trying to work it out keep trying to whack the problem over the head with the very thing that caused the problem in the first place.
Gay marriage… or even gay ‘marriage’ if you prefer… is one such issue. Some argue that if the state recognises heterosexual marriages, then it offends against natural justice for the state to discriminate against homosexual marriages (or ‘marriages’/unions whatever). And of course the people who say that are right.
This naturally does not appeal to people who oppose the ‘morality’ of homosexuality or just feel gay marriage, or gay anything really, is ‘yucky’ and thus dislike the idea of the state they support with their tax money adding its imprimatur, at their expense, to something they find repugnant. And of course the people who say that are right.
So the obvious solution lies in the root of the problem… the state actually has no compelling need being in the marriage business at all as marriage is just a contractually relationship between two people that requires no involvement of the state at all. Stop the state rubber-stamping any kind of marriage and the problem goes away.
And likewise an issue of separation of church and state in the USA…
It would be easy to miss among the yucca and Joshua trees of this vast place – a small plywood box, set back from a gentle curve in a lonesome desert road. It looks like nothing so much as a miniature billboard without a message.
But inside the box is a 6 1/2 -foot white cross, built to honor the war dead of World War I. And because its perch on a prominent outcropping of rock is on federal land, it has been judged to be an unconstitutional display of government favoritism of one religion over another.
OMG!…hmmm… bad choice of exclamation… a religious symbol on state land! The state has no business allowing displays for this or that religious faction showing their symbolic whatnots on state land! And that is indeed right.
But others say that if this is also a object of real historical significance commemorating the dead of the First World War, then it would be Taliban-style barbarism to simply destroy it or even rip it from its historical context! And that is indeed right.
So… stop it being state land. Make the land the private property of someone who will safeguard this object of historical interest. The problem is not the cross, it is that this land does not actually have any business being ‘state land’ at all.
There are some problems that simply getting the state out of the picture will not solve. However for the other 90% of things…
When two working women who look after each other’s children are told they are breaking the law by doing so because they are not registered with the state to do that, the only sane and moral thing to do is to break the law and to urge as many other people as possible to do the same.
Oh yes… not that it should matter, but the two women in question are policewomen.
Michael Barone in the Washington Examiner asks: Can the Republicans win the House in 2010?.
Might I suggest this is actually not the right question or at least not a very interesting one to ask.
How about “Would it actually make much difference if the Republicans win the House in 2010?”
Until the Big State Tax and Regulate schmucks like McCain, Romney and their entire ilk are explicitly repudiated and figuratively (and in a perfect world, literally) thrown into Boston Harbour, I will tell you what difference re-electing the party that gave the world George Bush (either) will make… No meaningful difference at all.
Obama is the bastard child of the both parties, make no mistake about it. Nothing he is doing now would have been even within the realm of political possibility if the state had not already been vastly expanded with Republicans in the Whitehouse.
No child left behind indeed… they will be paying for this legacy for a very long time.
No one who gives a damn about liberty should even consider supporting the Republicans until they have had a profound and merciless internal blood-letting and made themselves worth voting for by throwing the Big Staters out. They are not even close to that point yet.
Now is very much the time to call for as much Republican disunity as possible because so much hangs on what happens now. If the mega-statists keep control of both parties as completely as they have over the last twenty years, there will be no way out of the deepening hole.
“I want simply to learn about the world and to live freely.”
– Laura Dekker
And she is indeed learning about the world… that states regard people who wish to act on their desire to be free as deeply suspicious. Get out of the Netherlands and stay on your boat, my dear, because the state clearly owns you at the moment.
Watch this outstanding commentary on political correctness in academia and the culture and naked lies in the media called MSNBC & The Great Liberal Narrative: The Truth About The Tyranny of Political Correctness.
And I know Bill and he is a really great guy, a true gentleman. But Bill… stop calling them liberal. We are the true liberals.
PJTV really is getting some truly great stuff up lately.
This image makes me smile and I wish him every success in a highly competitive area of sport shooting. How lucky he is not to be British.
In the meantime…feel free not to try to “educate” me on anything. Republican or Democrat, you don’t need my buy-in to continue wrecking this country.
– Jackie Danicki
I have never really understood the point of facebook. Yes, I know it is popular but the fact is it is being used for things it is very poorly suited for, such as pro-liberty activism, by a great many people. There is even a samizdata facebook group (largely inactive, as again I really cannot see the reason for it and only created it as several people asked me too).
So when I was asked to join a (worthy) facebook group lamenting the fact facebook summarily and without explanation shut down a (worthy) group of anti-anti-smokers with 800,000 members, I joined it and posted this:
This is why the whole facebook model (a corporate controlled walled garden) is not suited to activism in the way a network of blogs on the wider internet is. To be honest although I joined this group, I think facebook is more suitable for discussions about LOL-cats than anything serious. I lost interest in facebook the day they took it upon themselves to change how “my” page looks, which just drove home that unlike a blog, my facebook page is not really “mine” at all. Anything you do on facebook is at facebook’s sufferance. I just do not see the need for facebook to be honest.
Facebook… yawn. No thanks… I have the internet.
Oh, and by the way I have nothing against LOL-cats.
Everyone was quiet: If you’ve got nothing to say, now is a good time to not say it
– the incomparable Michael Yon, reporting on British military operations in Afghanistan from very much up the sharp end.
If you do not regularly read his site, you really should as it is filled with gripping stuff. Please consider dropping your mouse on this link to contribute to keeping Michael Yon in action.
Okay, be honest now… this time last week, how many of you had heard of Georgian blogger Cyxymu? Hello? Anyone? No, I suspected as much. Me neither.
So… imagine you are some Russian nationalist jackanapes hoping to silence a critic of Russian foreign policy and you get a bright idea:
“Hey Boris! Lets unleash the bots of war and do a massive world wide takedown of Twitter, facebook and Livejournal so that no one will read those nasty things mean old Cyxymu is saying about Mother Russia!”
Pure genius. Now, does anyone who reads the tech press (or indeed the mainstream media) not now know who Cyxymu is?
Although Russia abounds with fascistic nationalists who could have done this off their own initiative, in truth an epic fail of this magnitude anywhere in the world generally implies government involvement.
Russia continues its steely eyed march into hilarious self-parody and irrelevance (unless you happen to be a tiny powerless neighbour)…
… get yer pecs out Obama, your soul mates want to play.
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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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