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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Perry de Havilland gave a talk about “a year in the life of samizdata”, last Friday, at the Tim Evans Parents household, which which got me thinking about the rise of amateurism generally, and the rise of the amateur Foreign Correspondent in particular. I found myself arguing that the present tendency of the blogosphere not to have real foreign correspondents is surely temporary.
Yes, the blogosphere is now a whole lot stronger, as Perry said, in editorial comment on the news than it is in news gathering itself, but soon, I surmise, there will be many new “foreign correspondents” blogging away. I might have added, but did not, that for many of us the majority of bloggers are already foreign correspondents on account of so many of them living in the USA, and many of us not.
How on earth would I have found out about Trent Lott, and about what an imperfect person he is, had it not been for the blogosphere?
(And yes, that is a fine double monosyllable to be called isn’t it? “The name’s Lott. Trent Lott.” But apparently he’s not that kind of forthright, no nonsense person at all. Very nonsensical indeed it would seem. This I have learned from the blogosphere’s numerous American correspondents, lead of course by the ultimate foreign correspondent, Instapundit.)
And the network is growing. One of the more exotic ones is a (for me) recent discovery called China Hand. Here are the concluding paragraphs of a recent piece from him about the recent rise of Chinese Christianity:
I should have seen the writing on the wall in the 80’s when my old teacher, a rabidly leftist ex Red Guard, suddenly started sending Christmas cards. Even today when I passed one of the glitzy new department stores in Huizhou – its whole forecourt is covered in Christmas trees.
→ Continue reading: The rise of the amateur Foreign Correspondent
TANSTAAFL Times is dead. In early 1996 I founded a libertarian newspaper called TANSTAAFL Times. The title was based on Robert Heinlein’s coined motto: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. To date the publication has made me a small profit (under $100). The original intention was to publish twice monthly and as material became available I would shift to a weekly format.
The first edition carried two cartoons I drew (badly) myself, a news report and an opinionated feature article. It sold for 50 pence and went like hot cakes at a Libertarian Alliance conference. I had little trouble finding subscribers, my peak being 97 and with a peak print run of 250. I doubled the price without any problems.
Despite these low circulation figures and the fact that I paid contributors, I never made a loss. I managed to sell advertising space which alone covered all my costs except postage.
So why did only 24 editions appear in six years? After all if Samizdata offered to pay $50 for a 500 word article or a cartoon, I’m sure our editors would be at risk of being crushed in the stampede of eager wannabe contributors.
I took a lot of criticism, some of it to my face, for the failure to produce regular editions of TANSTAAFL Times. True, 24 editions is six times more than the average periodical achieves in a lifetime (anything more than five editions is a sort of success). The critics didn’t help, because they failed to understand the nature of editing a periodical.
I calculated that there were 74 distinct tasks involved in producing TANSTAAFL Times properly. As owner, editor, chief columnist, sole reporter, designer and subscriptions administrator (I’m forgetting some of my job description) I estimated that the job could not properly be done in less than eight days a month. But this assumed that I had material to publish. The reason that I offered $50 per article was twofold. First I wanted to be able to refuse rubbish. Second I wanted to attract lots of libertarians with something to say.
In six years I received exactly three unsolicited articles one of which was 10,000 words long. One was published. I had one offer of cartoons, but no samples. For two years every week I begged a cartoonist (who complained that he was broke) to let me have a look at the rejected material he offered to Private Eye which they found too “politically incorrect”. I offered £20, £30, once going as high as £150. Nada. In total I managed to scrape fewer than twenty articles out of different authors, most of which refused payment. I note that Samizdata gets more contributions than that every single week.
I had intended to produce a glorious 25th edition of TANSTAAFL Times, I’ve written four articles for it. But the fact that I knew that I wouldn’t get any authors without a fight was simply a battle not worth fighting.
So I’ve decided to write this blog and acknowledge that Samizdata.net is achieving what I had hoped for, and that I’m better off, at least for the time being, as a regular contributor to this blog, than ruling my own dilapidated kingdom.
I hope in due course to put an on-line archive of the 24 editions of TANSTAAFL Times. In the meantime they can be accessed through the British Library. I like to think that TANSTAAFL Times was ahead of its time: offering a libertarian slant on current affairs. I will miss it.
The excellent Reason magazine is starting a blog called Hit & Run, which will be up and running first thing Monday (US time). The new blog will be presided over by Reason’s new Web editor, Tim Cavanaugh, formerly of the much-lamented commentary site Suck.com.
Sean Gabb will tonight be speaking at a debate – “This House Believes Promoting Diversity Causes Discrimination” is what he will be arguing – organised by the Local Government Association. (Sorry, I realise now that he didn’t say where this would be.) He has been circulating the proposed text of his speech to other Libertarian Alliance people, and I can therefore (and with his permission, given by phone this afternoon) tell you the kind of thing he’ll be saying:
I will begin by questioning the notion of diversity. What does it mean? As commonly used, it means that we should work for the sort of society in which every organisation, public and private, is filled with representative numbers of women, black people, homosexuals, and the handicapped. Anything with less than representative numbers of these and other groups is to be investigated on the grounds that it is probably discriminating. In describing the ideal society according to this view of diversity, the old sneer about jobs for black, one-legged lesbians is not that unfair.
Now, this is a diversity of sorts. But it is not the diversity that really exists when not as carefully managed and constrained as a bonsai tree. This is the diversity that concentrates on superficial differences between individuals. When it comes to matters of opinion, there is no diversity. Everyone is expected – in public, at least – to endorse the kind of opinions that would not be out of place in a Guardian editorial. Let there be diversity of belief – let someone say the number of black people in this country has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished; or that America is the Great Satan, and got a jolly good hiding in New York last year, and should mind its ps and qs over the Middle East in future if it wants to avoid more of the same; or that homosexuals are the spawn of Satan, and aids is only the beginning of God’s punishment for their abominations – let anyone deviate from the Guardian line on any issue dear to the promoters of diversity, and there is an end of talk about diversity. The cry will go up for sackings from employment, for police and security service harassment, and of course for censorship laws with criminal sanctions attached. Promoters of diversity as the word is commonly used are inclined to tolerate only the diversity of which they approve. Where they do not approve, they will happily manufacture excuses for hate crime laws as arbitrary and soon perhaps as draconian as the religious laws of Elizabeth I.
That, I suspect, is the diversity promoted by the Local Government Association. …
Sean tells me that he intends soon to write a report of how this all went, in his Free Life Commentaries series, hopefully tomorrow. → Continue reading: An Old Whig in action – and perhaps a new blogger
From pixalated passions to physical phrolics, the cabalistic Sasha Castel and the vampiric Andrew Dodge – a union made in heaven, hmmm, … or perhaps the other place [A little known village in Dorset].
The blogosphere is agog.
At my suggestion Perry recently added Sofia Sideshow to our blogroll. I’ve rarely commented directly on other blogs, but I’ll make an exception this time.
It’s fun. Go read it. And oh yeah, bro’ Brian, you should get together with him since you’re producing a film in his general region of the world.
Mr jcrank: If you ever need some intros into the commercial space world for an SF movie, feel free. I’m part of the Artemis Project.
This is very cool. Here is a tube map (underground metro) that allows you to locate nearly 250 bloggers in London.
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.
I loved this, which I have only just found, “The Warblog of J. Alfred Prufrock”. It was posted on March 4th of this year, so I think it okay to give away the ending.
I must post…I must post…
I shall link to bloggers that get linked to most.
Shall I write a scathing essay? Do I dare to make a stink?
I shall make my page quite shocking, with my fonts fluorescent pink.
I have seen the A-list linking, link to link.
I do not think that they will link to me.
I have seen them writing onward down the scroll
Thirty posts daily makes a breathless tale
Plus columns and interviews and e-mail,
I have waited for this moment in the sun
On web-sites read and stored in my cache
Then InstaPundit links me! And I crash.
I don’t remember Samizdata attending to this on, say, March 5th, but I am very occasionally wrong about things blogular, and even sometimes about things generally. No doubt I’ll be humiliated by some commenter. “Sorry Brian, but …” Oh well.
More seriously, I want to say that whereas a “week-old piece of election commentary” would indeed be tiresome (I read that somewhere last night but sorry, didn’t keep a note of where), a nine month late blog-reference to something of enduring entertainment value is surely okay. Is not one of our blog-duties to keep the best bloggage from months and years ago alive, even as the rest sinks into the informational sediment that will be of interest only to future generations of info-archeologists?
At least that’s what Law.com says.
We always knew Glenn was destined fer a better title than Perfesser…
By which I mean blogs which have ‘link buttons’ such as those below. In addition to the plain brown wrapper blog links in the sidebar of Samizdata.net/blog, I am collecting complimentary graphic links to other blog for our External Links page sidebar.
If you have one and we are linked to you (or even if we are not), e-mail us with your nifty graphic and we will probably add it.
Who reads comments on Samizdata postings long gone? The writer of the original posting does because Perry sends them to us, so I read this one, from Chloe (of this blog), yesterday, about a posting whose only previous comment had been five days earlier. I had said that blogging is nicer, by its nature, than email chat-rooms. But Chloe said:
I see a difference between chat rooms, e-mail discussion lists, message boards, and blogs. I think it has to do with how easy it is to use the thing, and that reflects the mentality.
However, I believe if you haven’t read a blog you hate, you haven’t read many blogs.
Certainly there are rat-blogs out there. PLENTY of them. So many I hear of a new one every week.
But I guess it just depends on if you agree with it, or disagree with it. Maybe the hateful rat-blog I can’t stand would be the comraderie-laden paradise you love.
It’s all about perspective.
I sit corrected. However, here is further proof of just how subtly nice bloggers can be, when they’re trying to be. → Continue reading: Blogs across the sea
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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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