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]
|
Yesterday we has a Samizdata.net Bash (rather than a general Blogger Bash) to greet fellow Samizdatista Frank McGahon on the occasion of his visit to London… and seeing as it was also Waterloo Day, we were delighted to have a guest at the party whose name is Wellington!
For once the London rain was conspicuous by its absence!
We have started a policy of recruiting Samizdata.net contributors as early as possible in their careers
Some familiar faces and some new ones from downunder
As usual there was a plague of digital cameras
Much booze was disposed of…
A mugger jumps out and threatens a well-dressed man with a knife, and shouts:
“Hand over your money!”
“You can’t do this,” says the outraged man. “I’m a local councillor!”
“In that case,” replies the mugger, “hand over my money!”
(via the Adam Smith Institute)
Over at the Social Affairs Unit, there is an interesting digital publication called Butler’s Dilemma: Lord Butler’s Inquiry and the Re-Assessment of Intelligence on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, by Professor Anthony Glees and Dr Philip Davies.
Although the Butler Report comes out tomorrow, this interesting analysis actually explains the issues at hand. The first section is called The Whitewash Blues…
I wonder what that would be in Latin?
Eamonn Butler on the Adam Smith Institute blog makes some interesting points about so-called consumer watchdog groups set up by the state. On one hand the state privatises because markets work better… and on the other it actually refuses to let markets do what only markets can do.
Samizdata.net will probably be moving away from Moveable Type and to Expression Engine some time in the not too distant future. I would be interested to hear from anyone who has made this move with their own blog or who has experience using Expression Engine.
It has been obvious to us for a while that MT is groaning under the weight of Samizdata.net (the comments are agonisingly slow for example) and a full site rebuild now takes about 4 hours! We really do need to move on to something better!
Over on the Social Affairs Unit blog, Michael Mosbacher takes Seamas Milne to task for the idiotic statement in the Guardian that the people fighting the US and UK are the ‘real’ liberation movement in Iraq, not the people who toppled Saddam Hussain.
On the broader topic of anti-Americanism however Mosbacher points out that Seamas Milne has a quite a way to go before he reaches the ‘stature’ of that florid friend of tyranny the world over, Harold Pinter, who has long been a pet hate of mine and others on this blog.
Rob Fisher has discovered a foolproof plan for getting invited to our famed Blogger Bashes…
…advertising Samizdata.net at the Glastonbury festival 
David Sucher seems to like to have the last word on his blog City Comforts, and as it is his blog, he gets to call the tune and delete comments as he sees fit. That said, his claim that he only deletes comments which do not have real e-mail addresses is simply untrue. Nevertheless, his blog, his rules. Fair enough, we set our comment editorial policy here on Samizdata.net as we see fit too.
I took Sucher to task for what seemed to me to be some vindictive comments aimed at Jackie D, one of the Samizdatistas, regarding comments over on Harry’s Place and on his own blog that were started off by Dick Cheney’s indelicate words on the US Senate floor. My final comment on David Sucher’s blog was deleted, so… this one’s for you, David:
I am, as you point out, a ‘libertarian’ (for what of a better word. I prefer ‘liberal’ myself, or even ‘social individualist’), so the reference to ‘statism’ cannot be put aside. However the fact there are indeed a great many libertarian jackasses is not germane at all.
The use of the term statist in my comment is to demonstrate that I (like Jackie) regard both parties as odious and largely interchangeable thieves, and therefore the issue of Cheney telling someone to “go fuck themselves” is, to me, not a very damaging uses of language in a legislature. I wish all they ever did was curse at each other, but alas they do eventually get down to the serious business of administering looting rights. So for me, it is all rather a non-issue for the same reasons Jackie indicated.
Both here and on Harry’s blog you commented “It’s obviously not the saying of “fuck yourself” which is the issue”… but you are quite incorrect as Jackie makes clear that is *indeed* the issue she is talking about, not Dick Cheney.
As she was defending the use of “Go fuck yourself” when appropriate, rather than Dick Cheney himself, it seems that her disinclination to get into what I have described as a partisan ‘two minute hate’, adding to the chorus of “Oh those wicked Republicans”, was what incurred your ire and intemperate language. We all have tetchy days on our blogs but you do yourself no credit given the length you seem to have gone to to pick a fight with her.
So I am not holding “feeling better” as a standard for public behaviour because for me the issue is *your* behaviour, not Dick Cheney’s.
With due regard.
In that marvellously bonkers publication Pravda, it is being reported that the Ukrainian sports authorities are blaming their lack of medals at a gymnastic event on the fact their Russian rivals brought in people with paranormal abilities to sabotage the Ukrainian competitors.
According to the federation’s governing body, evil-minded Russians hired psychics, people with extrasensory abilities in order to paralyze free will of Ukrainian gymnasts during competitions. Such statement of the federation received wide publicity among Ukrainian media sources, reports PrimaNews.
[…]
The federation also informs that “Russian mobs” brought fifteen paranorms to Kiev, including famous Russian medium Alan Chumak. They were seated in VIP seats on the stadium and somehow paralyzed the will of Ukrainian sportswomen; that is why the latter lost.
To hell with the gymnastics! If they can do such things, then they simply must organise special events in which paranormals compete to see who can paralyse the will of the other first! 
No Officer, I am not drunk, I had my will paralysed by Russian paranormals!
The Home Secretary has instructed the Humberside Police Authority to suspend the chief constable of Humberside, David Westwood. I have no views on the actual issue of David Westwood’s competence and whether or not he actually deserves to be suspended and ultimately sacked, but what is alarming is how Downing Street is centralising more and more decisions on local matters that have a huge baring on civil liberties.
Lawyers for Mr Blunkett are expected to ask the High Court, possibly on Tuesday, for an injunction forcing the authority to carry out his instruction to suspend the officer. This will be the first test of powers under the Police Reform Act 2002 and the Home Secretary will argue that suspension is necessary “for the maintenance of public confidence” in the force.
[..]
Colin Inglis, the chairman of the authority and the Labour leader of Kingston-upon-Hull told BBC1’s Look North: “The police authority is not a rubber stamp and if the Home Secretary expected a rubber stamp then that, I’m afraid, is not what he has got.
“The Home Secretary is not David Westwood’s line manager. David Westwood works for the police authority.
The issue is not “is David Westwood a good copper” but “do you want David Blunkett making those decisions?”. No prizes for guessing where I stand on that.
A few weeks ago when we culled the so-called race realists (neo-fascist racists) that were camping in Samizdata.net’s comment section, it became clear to me that if you let ill mannered loud mouths use your venue to try and shout down discourse and endlessly turn unrelated topics to their pet thesis, all you do is attract more ill mannered loud mouths who will do the same.
Everyone has their techy days in the comment section but when a person makes a habit of being obnoxious and immune to rational argument, I see no reason to indulge them or tolerate them. This is not a forum and this is not a chat room, it is a blog, which is quite different. Many blogs do not even have comment sections.
When you open your house to visitors, you do not give up the right to kick people out if they start insulting other guests and spray painting their opinions on the wall. Of course some people would say, “Oh but that is censorship if you stop them”. Er, no, it is just maintaining control over what is and is not acceptable on your private property… but of course some people, the sort that I am now far quicker to ban, do not actually believe in private property (not when you pin them down), and often cannot see that censorship by the state of private media channels and editorial control over a private media channel (such as a blog, for example) are materially different things. But then to someone who thinks all interaction should be political (the usual term used is ‘democratic’ these days), such distinctions make little difference to them. I am not referring here to specific people but rather the general class from which our ‘problem commenters’ tend to spring.
Some cannot see that they are not being ‘censored’ because of whatever their views are, any more than a man who gets on a table in a restaurant, drops his draws and starts calling for the darkies to be thrown out of Britain or for the middle class to have their homes confiscated is being ‘censored’ when he gets thrown out by a bouncer for being an jackass.
If I have any regrets it is that I have been too indulgent of endlessly poorly argued and often off topic drivel posted by a small minority of serial commenters in the past. I have no objection to vocal dissent from the ‘Samizdata.net world view’ (whatever that is), I just object to a constant stream of unsupported contentions delivered by megaphone that makes no attempt to actually engage in discourse. We have lots of dissenters who comment here regularly that I would not dream of banning.
So yes, there is a new hard line. Trolls and blogroaches will not be indulged and will be ejected rather swifter in future.
Given that Ireland is almost a poster boy for ‘before-and-after’ for what liberalising an economy can do, it is a pity that the people who argue for continuing that process have to couch their words in defensive language. Nevertheless, the Progressive Democrats seems to be making a far better case in Ireland for freeing markets than the pointless British Tories are.
Progressive Democrats president, Mr McDowell, last night issued a rallying call to fellow Ministers to hold to the Government’s liberal economic policy agenda, saying tax-cutting and deregulation have helped transform the State.
[…]
He rejected the accusation that supporters of this way believed in the unleashing of unbridled market forces. “It is the essence of the liberal, republican tradition that the market is the servant and not the master of the people. No one I know argues that Ireland is or should be an economy rather than a society.”
“Market is the servant and not the master of the people”… but what does that actually mean? It seems to me that an economy can be social, but only when it is not political… and Ireland can only ‘be an economy, rather than a society’ if politics (i.e, manipulation of the state) has so much control over what is done as to make the economy simply an adjunct of the state and its political processes, wiping out the economic underpinnings of society and the social underpinnings of markets.
So yes, I am all in favour of people in Ireland living in a society, and the only way to do that is to have a free social market rather than a politically regulated economy.
|
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.
|
