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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verb. Similar to fisking in that it is a refutation of another’s views, but misting is less aggressive and is usually humorous. ‘Mistings’ usually take the form of an imaginary exchange of views.
‘Misting’ is really MiSTing – from the show MST3K, Mystery Science Theater 3000, which was a show on The Comedy Channel about characters who were captured by malicious aliens and forced to watch terrible old sci-fi movies. They responded by commenting (rather hilariously) about the movies.
The term has rather different connotations amongst German speaking bloggers.
expression. When a blogger finds that he has been linked by multiple sites, or has been added to several blogrolls, in a short time.
(Coined by James Martin )
This is very cool. Here is a tube map (underground metro) that allows you to locate nearly 250 bloggers in London.
Good news! Samizdata.net is still accessible in China, at least as of this morning! A few months back we did get a couple e-mails from Chinese readers, so it is good to know that the Great (Internet) Wall of China has some holes in it, no thanks to collaborators Cisco and Oracle (may the great EMP from the sky strike them down).
- Communist China: GDP per capita (2001) $4,300 per year
- Capitalist Taiwan: GDP per capita (2001) $17,200 per year
- You are four times better off under capitalism
So here are a few things you are not supposed to see in China. Now stop messing around on the Internet and go out and conspire with someone to overthrow the state, willya!
Or even if their isn’t, either we have free will, or we do not and are just deterministic biochemical meat puppets dancing to some unfathomable script… God playing with himself. If the latter is true, then what the hell, nothing, and I do mean nothing actually matters. Morality? Truth? Life? Death? Meaningless.
Even if you do not believe in God, the same questions are relevant. I would argue that we do indeed have free will (for an excellent discussion by an atheist on that, see sections of David Deutsch‘s remarkable Fabric of Reality). And if we have free will, the very notion of submitting to the slings and arrows of life when an arrow-proof shield can be fashioned with our own hands is surely unreasonable… and to forcibly require that a person do nothing when the means to build that shield exist is not just unreasonable but monstrous.
In the print edition of New Scientist, Tom Shakespeare, the co-author of Genetic Politics: From eugenics to genome advocates outlawing parents from using ‘sperm selection technology’ which can allow the sex of a child to be chosen. He sees this as a precursor to parents eventually selecting desired traits for unborn children:
On balance, then, I believe that sperm sorting will in the long run do more harm than good. And this seems doubly true of sex selection via pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. Even if there is no “gene for” intelligence, sporting prowess or artistic talent, few scientists doubt that gene-chip technologies will one day provide considerable information about genetic variations. Letting parents choose embryos on the basis of sex now, for no good medical reason, will make it harder in the future to say no when they ask to choose embryos on the basis of other traits.
This thinking is actually quite close to that used by socialists who argue that ‘private’ education should not be allowed because it should not be up to mere parents to decide what is best for ‘their’ children. Not only can private individuals not be trusted to make such decisions (it should be left to ‘experts’), it is also unfair to others if those children are better educated. Similarly, if physically more capable disease resistant children can be ‘created’ by parents, this is somehow seen as ‘bad’ for everyone else. → Continue reading: If there is a God…
Want to buy a robot mini-dragon to watch out for fires and intruders? Got lots of money? Then what you need is a Banryu.
It looks like something from Appleseed or Ghost in the Shell. Very cool indeed.
There is a new film called 28 Days Later, which to summarize extremely briefly, involves Britain in the very near future laid waste by a bio-engineered plague released by animal ‘rights’ activists. This plague, called The Rage, turns people into feral zombie-like killers.
Although the film has gained some rather good reviews, why bother shelling out your hard earned and heavily taxed money to see zombies up on the big screen?
Britain is already full of zombies tramping somnambulantly under the CCTV cameras, past the voting booths in which they can meaninglessly vote for ‘worst choice one’ or ‘worst choice two’ and only moving at all due to the sensory stimuli provided by the carcinogenic stench of greasy fast food dispensaries and the flickering light cast by sub-moronic Pavlovian response inducing game shows.
So why bother going to see a film about them when all you have to do to see zombies is look out your well barred and burglar alarmed window?
I am not usually this bleak-of-view, but to see the protections of both habeas corpus and double jeopardy doomed by a currently unassailable government… and yet to then see this greeted not with rioting on the streets but for the most part with a collective ovine shrug, does rather lead anyone who values liberty to dark sentiments.
…and tough on the causes of crime
This meme hack was brought to you by Alan K. Henderson. See here for the inspiration.
Tonight three North African Muslims were arrested by MI-5 and charged under Section 57 of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, with conspiring to release cyanide gas in the London Underground (the subway train system).
The arrested men were said to belong to an organization that is part of Al Qaeda.
If only the British State would spend a great deal more of its appropriated money on this sort of legitimate operation and building up our highly professional but vastly under-funded military… and spend vastly less time and stolen money distorting our economy, abridging our liberties and generally screwing things up, we would be a great deal safer than we currently are.
Alas Dodgeblog is dead… yet despair not for Andrew and his eldritch minions have gone slithering and gibbering over to their new cobwebbed lair in some dark and dank corner of the otherwise fragrant realm of La Blogatrice, Sasha Castel.
Also, former Dodgeblog alumnus Mommabear has found a new den at On The Third Hand.
Moors murderess Myra Hindley has just died and is hopefully now burning in hell. Good riddance.
…does not mean it is not true!
In Brian‘s earlier article about why railways are the width they are, there has been much commenting about the veracity of the theory that it can be traced back to Imperial Roman times. But in those comment, it was claimed the English V-sign is also of largely mythical origin. I disagree.
The meaning of the V-sign is quite well known and I have not seen any better explanations.
The US gesture of extending the middle finger is clearly just a phallic reference (i.e. “f**k you”), but the English V-sign, which has some similar connotations (i.e. it is not a sign of endearment), has historical roots dating back to the 1400’s. If the middle finger is a gesture of anger, the V-sign is a gesture of defiance and above all, a threat. “It is with these two fingers that I use my longbow!”… Up yours, with an arrow!
Of course as with anything of this nature, it is more or less a matter of folk lore yet I have not seen any evidence to contradict the contention that the V-sign was indeed a gesture of defiance by common English soldiers towards the French, though my understanding is that it was not just associated with the Battle of Agincourt but was in general use during the Hundred Years War.
 
Both versions of the gesture made perfect semiotic sense and
were calculated to resonate with the ‘common man’ circa 1940
Since World War Two the V-sign, knuckles inwards, has come to mean V-for-Victory far beyond the shores of Britain. Knuckles outwards, it retains its more ‘earthy’ meaning. Yet Churchill would have been well aware of both the gesture’s significance and history. He intended to coopt both to use against Nazi Germany: Defiance and, to put it bluntly, Up yours.
The V-sign considerably pre-dates the European Union…
but do not think it is can only be aimed at foreign enemies
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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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