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]
|
If that’s not bad enough, researchers at the University of Maryland insist that global warming will destroy civilization. A forthcoming journal article asserts that expanding population and the difference in wealth between the rich (“the elites”) and the poor (“commoners”) will bring down the United States in the way the barbarians brought down the Roman Empire. There’s a solution, of course. Higher taxes, increased regulation and more government supervision of everyone’s lives, and other liberal nostrums.
[…]
Sacrificing babies to the ancient gods of Carthage didn’t save that ancient empire, and abortion won’t chill the climate today. The public is tuning out the likes of Al Gore and his prophecies because they notice that two decades of hysterical predictions haven’t come true.
In a climate of skepticism, the only way for scientists with a scam to get attention (and government grants) is to concoct ever more over-the-top claims. If driving a Chevy Volt will reduce incidents of rape or a curlicue light bulb will rescue Western civilization, a finding that Earth’s temperature hasn’t budged in 210 months should be something to celebrate. It means the planet is doing just fine.
– Extract from a Washington Times editorial.
A rather spiffing article in spite of the preposterous use of the word ‘liberal’ to refer to illiberal collectivism.
The government lost the crypto-wars. Crypto is now freely available, but in a sense they won because there are so many ways at people’s data that bypass the cryptography. What we’re learning from the Snowden documents is not that the NSA and GCHQ can break cryptography but that they can very often render it irrelevant… They exploit bad implementations, bugs in hardware and software, default keys, weak keys, or they go in and break systems and steal data.
– Bruce Schneier
The idea that Vince Cable is a statist thug is hardly controversial in these parts. Moreover he affects some of the same nauseating fatherly manner as the late Tony Benn, and frankly they have more than a little in common. Well, not the dead bit yet. Sadly this approach is something folks in Britain are total suckers for, and indeed my utter hatred for these people is often greeted with genuine bafflement.
“Yes, I grant you he may not always be right,” they say, giving me a bemused smile, “and he a bit of a leftie, but he is such a nice chap!”
Generally the sound of my grinding teeth goes unnoticed as I try to resist the urge to shout “it’s a tactic you guileless English moron!”
Cable is someone who is strongly of the view his notions of what other people can earn should have the violence backed power of the state enforcing them. In short, he agrees with the approach of Castro’s Cuba, he is just willing to set the maximum wage rather higher. But in principle… yeah.
If he does not ‘understand’ why someone else earns the amount they earn, it must not be allowed.
What I have never ‘understood’ is how anyone could regard the LibDems as a party of civil liberties when you tot up all the pluses and minuses. Indeed if the Tories are the Stupid Party, Labour is the Evil Party… then the LibDems are perhaps the Incoherent Party.
…and apologist for the greatest mass murder in human history, Mao Tse-tung, has died. He outlived by some 38 years the 50–60 million people who were murdered directly or starved to death at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party that he so admired in his moronic youth.
This was the question asked on the Guardian…
“How will the artist fare when The Ukip take over?”
And I was moved to reply thus:
Well if ‘the artist’ does something that people care enough about to pay for willingly (for example ‘the artist’ formerly and once again known as Prince…said to be not short a bob or two), then they will continue to do just fine.
But come the UKIP revolution, for the most part I imagine ‘the artist’ currently funding their decaf macchiatos by gnawing on the public teat, justly receiving money from the appropriately taxed philistine lumpen-proletariat (who inexplicably stay away from Ken Loach films in droves) … oh dear, I fear they may indeed have to get a real job. Oh the humanity! Damn you Farage! Damn you to hell!
Or more likely, ‘the artist’ will just find a different way to live off the forcibly appropriated money of others, of which the many and varied ways are always advertised in the Guardian.
Thus I council against despair. Indeed, after a challenging period of adjustment for the bourgeois left, I foresee ‘the artist’ eventually living happily ever after, regardless of the brutality of the Farage Brownshirts, by becoming a Diversity Enforcement Officer for some tier of local government.
If Russian govt. endorses Crimean referendum, will they also allow/endorse similar votes in republics in Russian Federation?
– Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia
I saw this in a very affluent part of London, scrawled on the hoarding of a building site. One of the people working there saw me taking this picture and laughed.
Me: “I wonder who wrote that?”
Builder bloke, foreign accent: “Many guys here are Polish.”
Me: “One of them wrote this?”
Builder bloke, shrugging: “I guess.”
Me: “Is this because of what is happening in Ukraine?”
Builder bloke: “Yeah, Ukraine. And because it’s true. People forget, then something like this makes you remember what it is to live close to Russia. My son is in Army. Shit like this is why.”
Me: “Polish army?”
Builder bloke: “Latvian army.”
A Russian communist-era movie played on the TV. I couldn’t understand the dialogue, but it was at least passively propagandistic. The main characters, scientists in white lab coats, worked in a sparkling clean high-tech facility, the kind of place science fiction writers of the 1950s imagined were in our future. The movie portrayed an entirely staged idealized version of an advanced communist utopia without gulags, without long lines for potatoes, and without the NKVD. Ukrainians don’t need communist-produced re-runs. They, like the rest of us, need a serious film about Stalinism for a mass audience, a Schindler’s List of the Soviet Union.
– Michael Totten
Yes, we want guns to shoot criminals who threaten us. Firearms are so readily available to them that we are really asking for nothing more than – in Guardian terms – equality and social justice between the criminal and non-criminal communities. We are not fussed how many criminals die, but that doesn’t make us uncaring because we also believe that many people would never become criminals if it could be made as risky as, say, being a victim of crime.
But we also want to deter the heavily-armed state. To break its monopoly of force. To keep it in its place as our servant by restoring its fear of us. We don’t believe there would be nearly as many smug Guardianisti telling us how to live our lives if every Englishman’s castle still had guns behind the portcullis.
– ‘Tom Paine‘
I agree with what Simon Jenkins says here. I take it that he opposes the 1965 Race Relations Act and the other measures that have undermined freedom of speech in this land.
– Paul Marks
I am reactionary on freedom of speech. I am for it. I have no time for the weasel words of pseudo-liberalism, that freedom must sometimes be curbed to advance freedom. It is like the tyrant’s censor who declares he approves of all criticism provided it is fair, constructive, offends no one and is not conducive to violence. That is free speech a la Putin. It is the more dangerous as it often has the best tunes.
– Simon Jenkins
Do you think Apple helped [the NSA] build that? I don’t know. I hope Apple will clarify that… Here’s a problem: I don’t really believe that Apple didn’t help them. I can’t really prove it, but they [the NSA] literally claim that anytime they target an iOS device, that it will succeed for implantation. Either they have a huge collection of exploits that work against Apple products, meaning that they are hoarding information about critical systems that American companies produce and sabotaging them, or Apple sabotaged it themselves. Not sure which one it is. I’d like to believe that since Apple didn’t join the PRISM program until after Steve Jobs died, that maybe it’s just that they write shitty software.
– Jacob Applebaum
|
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.
|
