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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…is that so many people are astonished that a paragon of the establishment like Lord Hutton should take the view that whatever the government’s ministers say should be presumed to be correct whilst that of mere journalists, even those working for the state owned media, should be assumed to be dissembling.
Did anyone seriously think the outcome would be otherwise?
I realise this is The Story Of The Moment, but simply cannot get that worked up over the difficulties of institutions of which I have such low regard to begin with.
No… not some tedious article about race…
Perhaps the reason I find snow in London so fascinating is that it is both uncommon, little more than a dusting and very picturesque. I do not recall finding it so interesting when I lived in the United States, but that might have been because when it snowed, verily the skies opened and it tended to be a significant inconvenience! That said, New Jersey copes better with 3 feet of snow that London does with 3 inches 
He’s a shark in wolf’s clothing!
– Gabriel Syme
(I’d love to tell you the context… but alas I dare not)
As our regular readers will notice, Samizdata.net has had a major re-design and functional upgrade. The old site was great but things moves on and it was time for an upgrade. Take a moment to examine all the new options and links! Also see the revamped domain page and blogging glossary!
We would like to thanks thank the Dissident Frogman for his really great work.
Samizdata.net may be unavailable for a while today and tomorrow as we work to upgrade our software. Also we will be bring you some interesting… changes 
Hosting Matters was having some ‘server issues’ which caused Samizdata.net to be briefly unavailable. We are also having other technical problems but expect to be fully operational again shortly.
See what happens when I do not pay attention to what The Dissident Frogman is doing? He sneaks off goes and makes another side-splittingly funny flash animation. I visit his site often but for some reason I neglected to ‘press the red button’. Big mistake.
I suggest you go and do so… right now.
Dr Harold Shipman, one of the most prolific non-governmental mass murderers in recent history, has killed himself. There will be an enquiry as to why he was able to commit suicide, but to my mind the real mystery is not his death, for which few tears will be shed, but rather why he did the things he did.
Good riddance.
As Natalie Solent mentioned in a Samizdata.net article yesterday, Robert Kilroy-Silk is taking heavy flak for his remarks about the Arab world and has been brow beaten into a rather ignominious apology.
I was just interviewed on BBC News 24 to put my views on this affair and I pointed out that whilst I found his remarks full of nasty collectivist generalization, many of the points he made about what passes for civilization in the Arab world are simply facts… people do indeed get their limbs chopped off as punishment in Saudi Arabia, women are indeed second class citizens (if they are even citizens at all), human rights are ghastly across a great swathe of the Middle East, the last time the Muslim world was a hive of innovation was in the 12th Century etc. etc… all these things are simply facts.
Yet my point is not to defend Kilroy-Silk, of whom I am not a particular fan but rather to wonder why it is that Robert Fisk and John Pilger can make equally sweeping and egregiously collectivist statements about Israel and the United States without so much as a murmur from the Guardian reading classes?
Give me dusky capitalism over Aryan socialism/fascism any day
– Frank McGahon
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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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