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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There is quite a lot about the affair of the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko (almost certainly by the Russian secret service) in London. Much of it is quite interesting but there was a line in an article in the Sunday Times that really made my blood boil when they quoted an unnamed minister:
Amid signs that his death could cause a diplomatic row, Tony Blair concluded the cabinet meeting by saying “the most important issue” was likely to be Britain’s long-term relationship with Moscow. Another minister present said: “It caused some alarm that this case is obviously causing tension with the Russians. They are too important for us to fall out with them over this.”
I had to re-read that a couple times as I could hardly believe my eyes:
“…They are too important for us to fall out with them over this…”
So a foreign government can murder someone in Britain with a radioactive substance and some shit in the cabinet is more concerned that we retain good relations with the murdering guilty party? I would dearly love to know which minister said this. Did anyone catch a reference to this remark elsewhere which says who it was? If the Russian state murdering people in London is not just about the best and more righteous reason to ‘fall out’ with a foreign government, then what the hell is a good reason to fall out with a regime? Moreover, to make that remark where it would enter the public record more or less tells Putin he can murder anyone he likes in the UK as relations with the Kremlin are what really matter to HMG.
No doubt the mystery minister is peeved that the late Mr. Litvinenko has the temerity to get himself assassinated on British soil for daring to bad-mouth the psychopathic Vladimir Putin. Yes, the sooner this tiresome freedom-of-speech nonsense is suppressed so that intergovernmental relations can return to normal, the better.
Truly, the state is not your friend.
Blogs and other internet sites should be covered by a voluntary code of practice similar to that for newspapers in the UK, a conference has been told. Press Complaints Commission director Tim Toulmin said he opposed government regulation of the internet, saying it should a place “in which views bloom”. But unless there was a voluntary code of conduct there would be no form of redress for people angered at content.
– BBC
It is extraordinary how people opine without understanding the subject. It seems like Mr. Toulmin understand nothing whatsoever about the internet. There is indeed a “form of redress for people angered at content” on blogs available and that is… blogs. It is extremely simple: go to blogger.com, spend about five minutes doing the ‘three easy steps’ and then start posting your rebuttals on your own damn blog.
As for a voluntary code of conduct… I invite Tim Toulmin to ask his lawyer to write one down on a piece of paper, roll the document up tightly and then stick it wherever his lawyer’s imagination and Mr. Toulmin complacency will allow. I look forward to being told off for that remark when Tim Toulmin sets up his own blog.
For another similar view to mine, see here.
There seems no end to the absurdity of US planners as to the conduct of the war in Afghanistan… surely the way to victory in all military conflicts is the unswerving pursuit of a single core objective (in this case the destruction of the Taliban and its power base) with ruthlessness and focus.
Yet what do we see? A demented conflation of the entirely justified war against the sponsors of the 9/11 attack on New York and Arlington, with the preposterous ‘war on drugs’. At a stroke, attacking the income of Afghan farmers and warlords alike thereby more or less guaranteeing that these people will make common cause with the Taliban on the basis that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
I’d rather be stuck in a lift with Abu Hamza than Zac Goldsmith
– Sean Gabb, at the Libertarian Alliance/Libertarian International conference today
Does anyone in London know who this piece of shit is? This creep assaulted Jackie, one of our intrepid Samizdatistas, so if you recognise him, please either let us know (e-mail link is in the sidebar) or if you prefer call British Transport Police on 0800 40 50 40. For the story, see here.
Again and again, when people here on Samizdata and elsewhere pointed out that there was nothing ‘conservative’ about ‘Dave’ Cameron, various Tory apologists kept saying “oh, but Dave does not really think those things!”…
I look forward to them now explaining how the Right Honourable Member for Witney can be making common cause for an authoritarian socialist like Polly Toynbee.
Perhaps the few remaining members of the dwindling faithful who voted for this jackass to be their leader should repent their ways and go join a real conservative party before ‘Dave’ does the ‘full Toynbee’ and backs the forcible suppression of all private education, confiscation of private wealth (oh, sorry, he’s already decided to back that) and nationalisation of whole industries like dear Polly would like.
The attempt assassination in London of a critic of Vladimir Putin, Alexander Litvinenko, almost certainly carried out by the Russian intelligence services, highlights that it is long past time to stop treating Russia as ‘just another European government’.
But there is another rather interesting twist to this story that I did not spot in the media yesterday, courtesy of the UKIP.
Update: sadly it is not longer an ‘attempted’ assassination.
As regular readers here all know, the state is not your friend… but sometimes its petty tyrannies and inanities are bloody funny:
The makers of Welsh Dragon Sausages were warned they could face legal action if they did not specify which meat they were using. “I don’t think any of our customers actually believe that we use dragon meat,” said Jon Carthew, of the Black Mountains Smokery at Crickhowell, after receiving a warning letter from trading standards officers.
A quick check and sure enough, these people fail to mention their sausages are not in fact made from dragon meat (which I had assumed was ‘self-smoking’). Hell, I only bought them because I thought they contained the ultimate in ‘endangered species’.
The Classic Version
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.
The Modern Version
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. BBC, ITV and Sky show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. Britain is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be that, in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
Then a representative of the NAAGB (National Association of Green Bugs) shows up on ‘Newsnight’ and charges the ant with ‘green bias’, and makes the case that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of greenism. Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when he sings “It’s Not Easy Being Green”. Tony and Cherie Blair make a special guest appearance on the BBC Evening News to tell a concerned interviewer that they will do everything they can for the grasshopper who has been denied the prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly during the Thatcher summers.
Gordon Brown exclaims in an interview with Jonathan Dimbleby that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his ‘fair share’. Finally, the EU drafts the ‘Economic Equity and Anti-Greenism Act’ retrospective to the beginning of the summer.
The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, has his home is confiscated by the government. Cherie gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of judges that Tony appointed from a list of single-parent welfare moms who can only hear cases on Thursday’s between 1:30 and 3pm when there are no talk shows scheduled. The ant loses the case.
The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around him since he does not know how to maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. And on the TV, which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant’s food, they are showing Tony Blair standing before a wildly applauding group of New Labourites announcing that a new era of ‘fairness’ has dawned in Britain
(original provenance unknown)
Thirty one stalwart samizdatistas plus assorted friends and allies descended on Samizdata HQ last night/early this morning for our celebration of five years on the front line of the blogosphere.
Two of Samizdata’s editors presided over the festivities
The damn paparazzi were everywhere
People tended to congregate around the alcohol
As the hordes started to pack into Samizdata HQ, others took up defensive positions on the stairs
Our fearless editor seemed strangely surprised that her spray-on
leather pants caused people to have an irresistible urge to touch…
…or spank…
… or smack
Yet people seemed quite uninterested in Brian’s rear-end
Kamal demonstrated how to do anatomically improbable things with corks,
yielding gasps of admiration from enraptured onlookers
The food from Penni Black was excellent and greatly improved the ability of
the assembled samizdatistas to absorb the waves of high quality alcohol
Guido Fawkes reminded us all why we blog (however there
was some debate as to whether he meant ‘freedom’ or ‘beer’)…
But Jax was in no doubt that the answer was indeed ‘beer’
Guido demonstrated his patented “grab ’em by the googlies an’ squeeze” tactic to
Peter Briffa but Jonathan Pearce seemed more interested in communing with
his Martini (shaken, not stirred)
As the evening wore on, Paul Coulam shared his technique for remaining upright
(i.e. frequently look to see which direction the floor is)
The ‘sitting down’ method of avoiding unexpected non-verticalness was also widely adopted towards the end
noun. A very long blog article
Usage: “Paul Marks has done another Blogapotamus on Samizdata.net”
On November 2nd, 2001, I rounded up a posse of disgruntled hyphenated libertarian types on three continents and an island, telling them they were henceforth ‘samizdatistas’ and offered them a way to get their ‘gruntles’ back that was far more effective than cursing at the television every time the news came on.
We started off initially on blogger.com along with many other so-called warblogs, before eventually migrating to Moveable Type.
We drew our initial inspiration from Glenn of Instapundit fame (and duly got Instapundited quite a few times) as we raged anti-idiotarian fury against the mainstream media’s editorial absurdities.
We coined a few terms which seem to have gained wider currency, such as Moonbat and Tranzi. We learned the fine art of fisking, slew some trolls, stomped on a lot of blogroaches, fact-checked a few asses and we wrote more than a few blogapotamus postings.
Putting one in the eye of The Man yields many benefits and millions of page views, a couple crashed servers, 8,651 articles and 129,117 comments later, Samizdata.net once again proves that not only is blogging far more fun than gainful employment, it is a great excuse for throwing parties… and thus tonight at 7:00pm London time we hold our Five Year Blogger Bash, therefore expect light blogging from the UK contingent and possible heavy casualties by tomorrow morning.
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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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