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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Prostitution is a combination of sex and free enterprise. Which one are you against?
– Unknown
…with advance apologies to a certain nameless Reuters reporter who occasionally posts his own articles to the Samizdata.
This little gem was pointed out to us by Mathew Drachenberg on the hilarious satirical U Thant.com site (recommended). As you might know, Reuters have been heavily criticised for refusing to call Al Qaeda ‘terrorists’:
NEWSFLASH! 12:00PM 11/20/01
Reuters Journalists Die in Taliban Ambush
Reuters reports that “so-called murderers” may have “in the opinion of some Westerners, killed” individuals that “Reuters claims were journalists.” Witnesses say that the journalists had no warning of the impending irony before the terrorists shot them.
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.
– Edward R. Murrow
Censorship under whatever guise or excuse is the ultimate of evils because no other evil can survive without it. It is thus found to be advocated only by fools and those of evil intent.
– Dale Amon
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
– Herbert Spencer
…it is much, much worse.
Thomas M. Sipos writes from experience. He is an American attorney who has seen it all from the inside. His exposé article How to Make Money in Soft Tissue Injury makes compulsive reading. It is written in a style that rather reminds me of a less stoned version of Hunter S. Thompson: brutally cynical with an air of detached surrealism.
Highly recommended.
Unintended consequence is reality’s most profound joke on us all (but particularly on Marx, something Groucho understood but Karl never did)
– Perry de Havilland, said at a Brian’s Friday gathering
John F. Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
Hermann Goering said, “Common good comes before private good.”
Draw your own conclusions.
– Samizdata Illuminatus
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
– Benjamin Franklin, 1759
You are not a libertarian unless you accept as axiomatic that, at its core, society must allow individuals to make their own choices in the pursuit of self-defined ends
– Perry de Havilland, said at a ‘Brian’s Friday’ event
Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.
– Winston Churchill
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
– Ayn Rand in “The Fountainhead” (1943)
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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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