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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Natalie Solent links (Monday May 20) to a Guardian piece about blogging. That “fact checking your ass” meme is never going to die is it? They mention Glenn Reynolds of Instpundit by name and by blog. Do they know his meta-context?
I’m sure mostly they do. I’ve always rated the (what it now, just about, still, makes sense to call) “left” at least as good a bet in the long run for libertarianism as the (ditto) “right”. Most Guardian-readers love idea-based radicalism (making trouble for the high and mighty, such as many current Guardian-writers) more than they love socialism, if forced to choose. Many British (at any rate) onservatives, if forced to choose, love the high and mighty more than they love trouble-making (i.e. idea-based radicalism). (This is one of the meta-contextual reasons for the spat between the Libertarian Alliance and the Daily Telegraph. The LA suspects betrayal as the old establishment welcomes the new. The Daily Telegraph regards the LA as politically insignificant and out of the power loop, and hence socially inferior. Both have a point.)
Will there soon be lots of left wing blogs for us to link to and quarrel with? That would be something. Or will they all just be spoiler or defensive salaried offshoots of the mainstream media, like – and no offence is intended here, I’m just being descriptive – the Guardian’s web operations. (Mixed metaphor warning: can a mainstream have an offshoot? Make that journalistic treetrunk.)
None other than the talented and angst fuelled Bitter Girl! 
Steve runs quite possibly the strangest blog in the entire blogosphere, rejoicing in the name of Scrofula (morbid condition featuring swelling of the glands), tagline: News, Rumours, Stupidity and Muck.
He is particularly adroit at, um, interesting graphics (I particularly like his ‘Conan the Egalitarian’ and ‘David Blunkett as Robocop’). Many of his works are rather splendid animated gifs: watch Robert Fisk come to grief again and again! Make sure you visit his picture archive for maximum juicy goodness. Steve has a much better idea for a new EU flag than that silly barcode…
 Uncle Joe loves EU
😀
As someone who knows Tony Millard outside the blogosphere I can vouch for the fact that, yes, he was kidding in the two posts you find less agreeable (the reference to Chianti should have been a dead give-away)  . As with any good joke though, there was an underlying serious point to both of them, although I believe it had little to do with the proposed increase in petrol prices or depopulation of Britain.
His was a Pythonesque (Monty) take on the type of discourse committed in the name of libertarianism and various other ‘-isms’. That is a quasi-economic analysis, perhaps based on reasonable assumptions somewhere along the line but with a destination firmly in the barking moonbat land.
None of the above disputes, let alone refutes, your points about such increases being anything but a form of taxation, which we know is evil  , and I agree that no-one in their right free-market mind would consider this as a solution to any economic problem.
So let’s carry on fighting for Liberty in our varied ways. Tony Millard’s may be on the funny side, but the serious point is there. You just have to dig deeper for it. How British!
I liked Francis Moore’s short sting-in-the-tail posting over at the Liberty Log yesterday. 1), 2) and 3) are familiar enough this-versus-that contrasts (Korea, China, Germany), although deserving of infinite repetition. 4) (Britain) contains the provocative duo. Clue: they do the Liberty Log in Scotland.
Freedom and Whisky is also a Scottish inclined blog. There were two more good postings by F&W boss David Farrer yesterday, about Adam Smith and about the PC menace to Ryanair.
Have all these Scotbloggers been introduced? Presumably. If not, this should connect them.
The epidemic spread of Britblogging is definitely this weekend’s Britblogging story. Perry says he doesn’t want too much blogging about blogging, because, well, even to explain would be to break the rule, nevertheless …
… posted on the Libertarian Alliance Forum at 4.54 pm today, by long time Libertarian Alliance supporter David Farrer: “My new blog is now up and running.”
The first posting was last Wednesday, thus:
Welcome to this new blog. The title Freedom and Whisky links the two themes of this blog: libertarianism and Scotland. The libertarianism will, however, sometimes extend beyond events in Scotland and I shall also be covering non-political news of interest to me north of the border. I have therefore included links to a variety of Scottish sites which I often use.
Last Friday was the last Friday of the month, and that meant a meeting at my place. Libertarian Samizdata supremo Perry de Havilland talked about blogging, and many of those present were either blog bosses (Perry, Patrick Crozier of UK Transport, Andrew Dodge of Dodgeblog) or blog contributors (such as Samizdatans Tom Burroughes, David Carr and me).
The dark horse in the herd was Chris Cooper. He has written a number of things for the Libertarian Alliance over the years. One of my favorites of his was the first Personal Perspectives piece we ever published called Mere Anarchy, and he was writing about why Free Market Broadcasting would be a good idea long before most people realised that such a thing was possible, let along desirable. But he has been too busy working, raising a family, etc., to do as much libertarian writing since then as we’d all have liked. An ideal blogger, in other words. So I was especially glad when he showed up on Friday. And, it turns out that for the last month Chris Cooper has been doing Chris Cooper’s Blog (CCB from now on). Having glanced through CCB in amazement on Friday night, I gave it a proper read on Saturday.
Perry made a distinction in his talk between “mezines” and “pundit” blogs. CCB, rather like Natalie Solent‘s Blog, looks to be both. Like Natalie, Chris is an uncompromising libertarian but he doesn’t hit you over the head with it all the time. And when he does it can take a few seconds to register, such a tabby cat does he usually seem, what with writing about other things besides libertarianism.
You’ll probably need a longer attention span for CCB than for your average blog. It’s more like a nineteenth century gentleman’s diary, kept as much for its author’s pleasure, now and in later decades, as for anyone else’s benefit. If you want to read CCB over Chris’ shoulder you’re very welcome, but he’s not begging. But just like those nineteenth century gentleman he can write, I promise you.
CCB has not so far been strong on links, but this may merely be because Chris has yet to master the technicalities of that. I know the feeling. If that’s so, the fact that Patrick Crozier was deep into technical confabulation with Chris over my computer on Friday night could prove significant. In particular, CCB‘s left hand bit, now decidedly blank, should soon come alive.
I shan’t organise my life around Chris Cooper’s Blog, not yet. But I will be giving it a look every few days.
No, not really… but Brian Linse is back home in L.A. after completing filming of his movie Den of Lions in Budapest. He is back to his old blogging habits at Ain’t no bad dude.
Last week, immediately after returning from my trip to France, I visited St Andrews University in Scotland, courtesy of the Liberty Club guys, to speak at a meeting they’d organised. It was all a great pleasure, and not just because the lodgings they shared with me for the night after the meeting are so nicely situated right by the sea or because they are such nice people or because the weather was so nice.
Even nicer is that the Liberty Club is doing so well.
Universities are vitally important places if you’re in the idea spreading business. You’ve got a clutch of bright people relatively early in their lives, selected for their brightness and put together into a community. And, for once, community really means community. As I wandered about the town with Alex Singleton on the day after the meeting, he kept greeting familiar faces. Messages sent out in one part of the place don’t just meander off into the wild yonder. They double back on themselves, and if you keep on with them you can very quickly dose the entire place. Universities are, to use a word libertarians are particularly fond of, meme machines.
So, if you do what the Liberty Club does, and hold a series of different meetings on different topics, and if you get thirty people to each meeting but not always the exact same thirty people, and if libertarianism is the meta-context of the people organising all this, then pretty soon everyone in the university with any interest in such matters gets to hear about libertarianism. You don’t agree with it necessarily, in fact you may disagree with it all the more fiercely on account of understanding it all the better. But for the rest of your life the libertarian attitude is fixed in your head as an attitude that you can have, that other intelligent people do have, and that you could switch to if you ever felt like it.
The Liberty Club is one of the most if not the most active student organisation on the entire St Andrews campus. It is (a) definitely libertarian. It is in particular (b) not conservative. And it is in general (c) not stupid. Its leading lights are not thoughtless, unfunnily self-mocking posturers, of the “we don’t mean this really we’re just students arsing about” variety. They give off vibes of philosophical and political passion and intelligence.
Their Liberty Log is a modest operation, with bits appearing only every day or two rather than every hour or two as here. Before leaving I contributed a piece to it concerning the meeting I spoke at, and there’s only been one further posting (by Marian Tupy) since then. But that’s a pace they can sustain, and their web activity (see also their website), is but the seasoning of the philosophical and intellectual dish they are serving up to their local target community. The meal itself is face to face contact and face to face argument and public debate. What their internet activity does is add a few more libertarian memes to an already meme-rich environment, and supply heavyweight back-up for any who want to pursue libertarianism further, either to agree with it or to attack it.
Like all capable people, the St Andrews Liberty Clubbers worry that they could be doing better. Couldn’t we all? Alex mentioned setting up some kind of organisation for reaching students everywhere, and that might make sense if it could be done without too much strain. But I’d say that what they’re already doing is a model to libertarian groups in colleges and universities everywhere. And thanks to the internet, others really can look and learn. My bet is that they’ve already “infected” several other campuses without even realising it.
There is a nice article about blogging by Daniel Sorid on Reuters. At last someone who actually understand why blogs are better than Usenet.
Recently my computer, a Blue-White G3 PowerMac, gave up the ghost after years of stalwart service and this, plus some rather more harmonious distractions, has been responsible for my suspicious absence from the Samizdata.
However I shall soon return to inflicting my views on the blogosphere. The multi-talented Andrew Dodge proved that he is capable not just of invoking evil spirits, scaring horses, authoring anti-statist tracts and smoking vile smelling cigars but also of helping me drop a cool £2,500 on a juicy new Quick Silver G4 PowerMac and setting it up for me. I am still accelerating up the curve of coming to grips with OS X (which is beyond cool) but I expect to be blogging my heart out soon.
Unqualified Offerings has recovered from an attack of technical problems and is once again broadcasting wild eyed libertarian wonders to the masses!
If you like intellectually challenging perspectives and rigorous arguments, then check out Jim Henley’s excellent blog.
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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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