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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If people want to make a fuss about what a cultural phenomenon the Beatles were, and comment on their innovative and interesting music, well that is just peachy and not at all hard to understand. What is a bit baffling is why so many folks are trying to suggest John Lennon was anything more than a talented musician.
I just watched part of the old recording of his peace-bed thing with Yoko Ono and I was reminded of an old Dirty Harry quip: a man’s got to know his limitations.
“All we are saying is give peace a chance”. And it was true, that really is all he was saying. Lennon said it over and over again. Peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace… and presumably felt that just repeating the word over and over again was a better way to convince people that is was a mistake to oppose the communist take-over of South Vietnam… rather than, say, a geo-political critique of US involvement or, say, arguing that preventing communist domination of South Vietnam was not worth American lives or in fact articulating any sort of coherent argument at all. I too would like to imagine a world without war, but I would like to imagine it without tyranny first.
The guy was a buffoon. A talented, gifted, artistic, charismatic buffoon. Just stick to celebrating his art.
David Cameron is the new Tory leader. So we have a ‘choice’ between two Blairites.
I cannot tell you how excited I am about this development 
The only people who object to ID cards and CCTV are ‘bad people’, right? I mean after all, everyone knows that the people who work for the State are of a more incorruptable and moral nature than us mere private people.
Yeah, right. The State is not your friend.
I have this unusual mp3 file (mp3 file now removed to save on bandwidth) on my hard drive and I have no frikking idea where the hell I downloaded it from, what it is called or who the artist is. Does anyone out there have an idea? Please let me know if you have any clues.
It has quite a low bit-rate so I would guess it is a sampler track dumped on-line to promote a CD (so you would think the information tags would be filled in but nooooo).
Update: I have removed the mp3 file to save on bandwidth now that the question has been answered by the commentariat.
Just did some live blogging over on PajamasMedia on the subject of who should control the internet.
I must confess that I was not wearing my pajamas however.
I saw this by Alan Moore on the SMLXL blog, referring to the Communities Dominate Brands blog (Alan Moore is one of the co-authors of the book the blog refers to). We often hear about the economic impact of the internet, mobile communications and new media, but the real story is that it will change just about everything, including culture, politics and government.
There is a school of thought, that, within 10 years communities will have replaced the orthodoxies of government, management, business and marketing as the primary medium by which these organisations will successfully engage with their audiences.
Further, enabling or capturing peer-to-peer information flows will transform these organisations and how they engage with their stakeholders, simply for the better.
And, that those organisations that ignore the newly empowered and connected customer/voter/stakeholder will simply struggle to survive.
This is the unsung, un-remarked media and cultural revolution. That the great explosion is in peer-to-peer communication – something many organisations up until now have overlooked.
The US Constitution begins, famously, “We the People…”. The European Constitution begins, “His Majesty the King of the Belgians…”. That gives you a fair idea of the different spirit of each document.
– Charles Moore
(Hat tip to Taylor Dinerman for pointing out this gem)
MP Andrew Dismore has blocked attempts to clarify the law on self defence in Britain being proposed by MP Anne McIntosh, because he thinks it would be ‘vigilante law’.
Well I have thought for some time now that non-state use of force in defence of life, limb and private property is exactly what is needed in this country and to make no apology for robustly defending what is yours. Take the law into your own hands because it is indeed yours to take, not Andrew Dismore’s to deny. I realise that if you are old, infirm or a small woman living alone, the fact the state has disarmed you means you have no option whatsoever but to surrender your property and just pray the criminal(s) will not harm you, but those of us still physically able should be encouraged to use whatever weapons they can find at hand to assert some self ownership. Just do not make the mistake of calling the Police in Britain after the fact if you can possibly avoid it as they work for the likes of Andrew Dismore and are not there to serve you.
You may not have the legal right to fight back effectively, but you will always have the moral right to defend yourself and what is yours. Look at it this way, if you are the only one left alive after some son of a bitch breaks into your house, well, that means it is going to be hard for him to sue you or contradict your version of events, doesn’t it. If they do make it out, then just clean up the mess and deny everything.
Vigilante law? As so many members of the political class in Britain leave us with little alternative, I am all for it. When the state fails in its most fundamental duty, it is time for society to remember whose law it really is. If you are able to, fight back, just keep in mind you will be fighting back against the state as well and act accordingly when the plod turns up a few hours or days later to ‘protect’ you.
Unbelievable. Blair is actually going to fold on the EU rebate for the UK? Why? What possible advantage could it bring him politically to give away even more of our money to the parasites in Brussels?
What ever happened to:
If we cannot get a large deal, which alters fundamentally the way the budget is spent, then we will have to have a smaller EU budget
– Tony Blair
We were told that the British rebate would only be negotiable if the monstrous EU agricultural subsidies were also negotiable. Yet France et al have give up nothing whatsoever of any consequence, and yet the halfwit in Downing Street is going to give them want they want anyway? WTF?
I must be missing something here.
Whilst on my recent trip to the USA, I saw a computer game called Cold War that looked interesting. I am sooooo tired of brainless run-n-gun FPS games that this looked like something work trying.
Alas, once I got back to Britain and started to install the game, I saw that it was about to install StarForce copy protection.
So I hit cancel, removed the disc from my computer and threw the game in the rubbish bin where it belongs. Most annoying is that nowhere on the box does it say that the game uses StarForce.
Why does that matter? Well a few months ago, my nifty and hitherto perfect Alienware computer suddenly died without warning a few hours after I installed Splinter Cell 3, which also uses StarForce copy protection. Am I certain StarForce was to blame? No, I am not but I am bloody suspicious and not without good cause. I wish I had thought to check this site before I dropped $39.99 because I would have never purchased it if I had known.
Is the new-and-improved StarForce better at not blowing up your system than the previous versions? I am not sure but it only has to happen once for me to never ever allow a firm’s products on my hard drive again. If a games company wants my money, it had better find a way of protecting itself that does not put my operating system at risk because there are plenty of other games out there to choose from.
I would recommend you not make the same mistake I just did. Spend your money on something else.
It is a great shame to see Randy Cunningham, a fighter ace who did sterling work over North Vietnam, descend into the cesspool of corruption like so many before him. My opinions of the man were already diminished by his blinkered views regarding the excesses of Serbian nationalism but to see this old warrior revealed as utterly corrupt is still deeply saddening.
It is equally revolting to see Democrats act as if this is the special preserve of the Republican Party rather than an endemic feature of the whole process of which they too are very much a part. Taxpayers for Common Sense has some rather more non-partisan views:
Keith Ashdown, of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group, said Cunningham’s guilty plea hurts both parties. “There are very few things that I read that kick me in the gut. This is beyond my wildest guess of how bad it actually is — how bad, how long and how nobody knew about it,” said Ashdown. “I don’t think Democrats or Republicans win on this. It basically makes people detest Congress even more and deters voter turnout.”
In truth the only way to reduce corruption in high places is to have less high places and which party is on top makes very little difference.
It is always fascinating to watch one’s enemies twisting and turning on the spiky contradictions of their own ideology. It is also rather interesting to see your enemies turning on each other.
As Lord May of Oxford put the boot in to environmental activists during his speech to the Royal Society:
[He] said that environmental campaigners risked holding back the fight against climate change with an absolutist approach that refused to consider nuclear power.
“I recognise there are huge problems with nuclear, but these have to be weighed against other problems,” Lord May said. “This has to be recognised as a problem by what you might call a fundamentalist belief system.
And we also get to see Tony Blair’s speech to the Confederation of British Industry being disrupted by Green activists.
The Greens say we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions and yet when the government tries to adopt nuclear power to do exactly that, the Greens are up in arms.
Face it, unless the world agrees to regress to a pre-industrial level of technology with commensurate mass death of ‘surplus’ modern levels of population, the Greens will never be satisfied. Never mind that most climate change is probably caused by natural processes.
At least these guys are honest about what they really want.
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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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