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]
Head teachers in Cheshire have warned parents they will report them to the authorities if they allow their children to play computer games rated for over-18s.
“We are trying to help parents to keep their children as safe as possible in this digital era.”
… I concluded the best way to keep your children safe is to home school them so that they stay as far away as possible, not from GTA, but from power obsessed busybodies like these people.
… and you cannot have freedom of association without freedom of disassociation.
Therefore I am perfectly willing to see a non-state owned company decline to do business with me because of my politics, or because of my hippopotamus fetish, or because I tend to wear red trousers. Of course by ‘perfectly willing to see’ I mean ‘that a company is legally permitted to discriminate against me’… I am not suggesting I would be thrilled by it.
So is there any reason anyone who cares about liberty should oppose this? Indeed would it not be better if the law just stated it was none of the state’s business who a company chooses not to do business with for any reason, absent any prior or overarching contractual obligation?
This is one of the funniest things I have read in quite some time.
Please can we ask people to stop clapping but do feminist jazz hands? it’s triggering some peoples’ anxiety. thank you!
My goodness what timorous fearful little things they are! Not exactly the sort of women who might be up for a spot of defending Kobani with some fellow Marxists then, eh? Truly the western world’s loonie left is vanishing up its own backside.
Well should I have the singular misfortune to find myself in a room with these delicate little flowers, I might be moved to make a somewhat different gesture rather than “Jazz Hands” as an alternative to clapping. Think this might ‘trigger some anxieties’?
Amongst the ten people voted “World’s Top Thinkers” are Russell Brand and Thomas Piketty? Seriously? This must be a truly tenebrous selection of voters! I have occasionally stood in more thoughtful things than those two whist incautiously walking down the street palm surfing for porn essays on complexity theory!
This is too nightmarish to write about at length, but it suggests yet another upside to taking the human out of the loop: avoiding a CFIT of the worst kind possible.
But of course the NSA would never do that. They do not need to when they have FISA courts to rubber stamp any fishing expeditions they wish to carry out. No need to break in when you have a spare set of keys under the doormat any time you want to look around.
What you will notice is that it is all presented in terms of social conservatives and social liberals. It is about the competing rights of members of religious communities and members of sexual communities. And, depressingly, there isn’t a single even slightly libertarian voice in the debate. Everyone that speaks is (if I may use the word) a statist.
My own theory is that the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland that started in the late 1960s have less to do with religion, or even national identity, than they have to do with Northern Ireland’s endemic statism, or, to be precise, with the fact that pretty well everyone in Northern Ireland believes strongly in coercion and in the duty of the state to coerce people into doing what they believe is right – be it banning sex between two blokes, banning people paying for sex, banning people from discriminating against prods, papists or gays, and forcing people to pay for state education and healthcare.
In an interview in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten, the Russian ambassador to Denmark, Mikhail Vanin, said he did not think Danes fully understood the consequences of joining the programme.
“If that happens, Danish warships will be targets for Russian nuclear missiles,” Vanin told the newspaper.
What exactly are people supposed to hear? What I am hearing is…
“Yes I know you would rather spend your taxpayer’s money on outreach programmes for gay radical muslim single parent transgendered climate change threatened whales, but we really really want you to get those defence budgets up to the NATO required 2% figure!”
What reaction are they expecting to overt threats pretty much explicitly saying “if you, as a NATO nation, assist NATO with the deployment of a defensive weapon system within NATO borders, we will point nukes at you!”
Might this not be a tad counter-productive when the Russian Troll Army are tirelessly trying to convince assorted useful idiots to push the line that “Russia is no threat to anyone, honest guv!”…?
I guess the the Russian ambassador to Denmark did not get the memo 😉
“Asset forfeiture” is the an Orwellian term for “the government steals your shit and there’s pretty much fuck all you can do about it.” It was supposed to be a way of going after what the government deemed ill-gotten funds and property – gotten with the sale of illegal drugs, for example. It became a sick (and legal) way to steal from law-abiding citizens, who were not afforded “innocent till proven guilty” but instead needed to prove their money or property was NOT gotten through illegal means. Many couldn’t afford lawyers and were simply screwed by the government.
Many socio-political forces today are about the return to tribal identity. Tribes are isolated from the Other and easily coerced through emotional appeals to identity rather than universal logic. This has picked up methinks because information and people are increasingly ignoring the borders and authority defined by the state. So the thugs among us look to draw new boundaries based on race, gender, language etc. The new tribes destined to wage continuous and pointless war.
– the pseudonymous Chip drops an absolute blinder of a comment on Samizdata. There is a reason this comment is also categorised under ‘globalization’.
There are a few decent folk out there who really are wasted on that dismal collection of pond scum, the Tory Party (I refuse to call people who do not believe in the rule of law ‘conservatives’). And Daniel Hannan is certainly one of those glorious gleaming will-o-wisps of cogency floating above the festering miasma of Cameron’s Tory Blairism…
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.
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa