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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The Samizdata legion of wild-eyed but erudite libertarians continues to grow apace. Our lastest regular contributor is Tom Burroughes, who has been known to moonlight as a journalist at Reuters for his measly paycheck when not more productively spending his time with Libertarian Samizdata. Expect to see him poking a pointy stick in the eye of irrational socialists of both left and right on a regular basis.
Also expect a steady flow of guest articles from people such as author of Statism Sucks! Ver 2.0, the redoubtable Andrew Ian Dodge and many other such folk in the New Year.
Glenn Reynolds from Instapundit has written a piece on the Wall Street Journal‘s Opinion Journal
Senators have “hideaway offices,” and so do I. Theirs are scattered in various nooks and crannies around the Capitol. Mine is at the local Borders. Theirs are more prestigious, but mine has better coffee.
I have an office with a nice computer, and I have a study at home with a nicer computer. But I often pack up my laptop, or a book that I’m reading, or student papers to grade, and relocate to this third place: somewhere more congenial than the office, less isolated than home
I understand that very well but from a different perspective. There is no Barnes & Noble in Zagreb or Belgrade or Sarajevo. But like Glenn I too drink a lot of coffee, which is perhaps why I am awake now at 3:15 in the morning? Most of the things I have posted to Samizdata before Christmas were written on my lovely titanium PowerBook whilst sipping turkish coffee or espresso or macchiato in a little café. Many times I go to a place I know with my cool leather computer case (I am big on that sort of thing) and if I do not see anyone I know, I pull out the computer and start writing. Sometimes I go to cyber cafés so I can plug in or at least use their machines to check my e-mail (I am compulsive about e-mail). When I was recently in Belgrade I was in a great cyber café, typing away and listening to the excellent Rambo Amadeus with a girlfriend who calls herself Serbogeek when on-line.
But usually, it is just plain old cafés I am in, which are extremely common in the former Yugoslavia and the bit that still calls itself that. Occasionally I can even sweet talk my way into plugging into a phone line to check my e-mail and maybe send a few: in my leather bag I have every type of phone jack adaptor known to mankind (all of which I bought in New York) and even a screwdriver if needed. I am very persistent. Once I surfed for hours in a place in Zagreb and in return I taught the café’s owner how to use the Internet. However it took me a while to get him to understand that he could access things in Australia and America and Russia without paying the phone bill for a call to those places, just a local one.
Of course setting up on a table with this exotic thing also leads me into many chats with people in the café I have never met before who are curious about my strange machine. So when I open up my computer and start to type, I frequently end up writing maybe only ten lines before someone has overcome their shyness and started asking me what I am doing and do I mind if they look.
So when people says that computers are cutting people off from real life and genuine social interaction, just tell them to walk into a café with a nice laptop and open it up. Someone will probably come say hello and offer to buy you a coffee.
I was warned that writing about sex would result in strange e-mails. I did not realise quite how strange however. Jay Driver wrote in a looooong e-mail:
I gather from your post about that Australian kid that you have been a prostitute yourself. I can understand who you might be pissed that people would say [you were] demeaned
As judging from the whole e-mail the remarks were obviously meant in all innocence, I am not insulted, but no Jay… I also have views on Formula One racing, why Christy Turlington is the best supermodel ever and the problem with Spanish politics. I have never driven a race car, I am not a model and I have never actually been to Spain.
Kevin Holtsberry wrote:
I was surprised that Natalija would lash out ay anyone troubled by supply 15 yr. olds with access to a prostitute. Is it really prudish to worry about this?
Fifteen year old dying boy, Kevin. To deny him a basic human experience because someone else has a problem with casual physical intimacy, yes I would have to say that is prudish. Also heartless.
Sandra P. wrote [with an attached picture]:
You trying to be the slavic Camile Paglia, honey? I think you’re looking for some adventures and if you think if you piss us off enough we will spank you. You might be right. Send me a pic and rock my world, Lipstick.
Hmmmm. For once words fail me.
Gavin Grant wrote [naughty bits excluded]:
I always find your writing exciting and interesting and stimulating and when you write about sex it is obvious you have tried things […] You really will not regret meeting me as I am also well educated and can provide you with intellectual stimulation as well. As you will be just up the road from me, you should call me on [phone number] and we can chat
Sorry Gavin, but you really really really need to go back and re-read that article I wrote about Christmas again… in it I told you I was going to be driving to Vienna in Austria not Vienna in Virginia. The fact I mentioned I was spending Christmas with my family in rural Croatia should have given you a hint I was not ‘just up the road’ from you.
Blogging is… interesting.
I had a wonderful Christmas with my family. It was everything Christmas is supposed to be: all the family together, exchanging gossip with my brother’s wife until we were both weeping with laughter; excellent food cooked by my mother (and too much of it) eaten with everyone talking at once; warm cosy house while the wild wind whipped the trees outside; happy overfed dogs lying in a pile in front of the open fire and sleepy cats curled up in the lap; I am ridiculously overdressed wearing a whole Valentino ensemble that a certain Englishman who edits the Samizdata sent to me for Christmas…and there is cat hair all over it now. Bliss.
A couple days of feeling good, I go upstairs to my old room and plug my PowerBook into the phone and decide to post to Samizdata… oh. I cannot get into blogger.com. Oh well, must be these miserable Croatian phone lines. I try again later…still no luck. Go back downstairs, drink some loza. Try again…and again…
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeekkkkk!!!!!!!!!
Feelings of panic! Suddenly I am no longer in my comfortable home…now I am just an isolated nervous woman in the middle of nowhere in rural Croatia, cut off from the invigorating, cosmopolitan rush of the Internet. Gasp! Instapundit looks… dead… Mind over what matters? Silence. I check out Dawson to see if he has finally writen this “sort of ‘love post’ to Natalija at Samizdata” he said he was going to write…but all I see is eerie stillness. I look out of the window and the trees look back, gaunt and threatening. Beyond the gloom, is the rest of the world still there? The wind shakes the house. I close my PowerBook and stumble downstairs, stepping over the dogs. Even they are looking uneasy now. The fireplace is making the air seems oppressive, close, almost imprisoning. I drink more strong loza until I pass out.
And then I log on today, nervous, fearful, hung-over…
Ah! Phew! A tingle runs up my spine. I am back in contact with the world! The dogs are chasing each other around the house, the cats are hissing at them; mother is walking around with steaming pots of wonderful smelling…something; father is happily discussing the merits of his new Christmas rifle with my brother (who is pretending to be interested); my sister-in-law has remembered a prime piece of gossip she forgot to mention before and I see my lovely Valentino dress on a hanger… someone has removed all traces of cat hair from it.
Tomorrow I drive to Vienna to stay with friends.
The world is back running in well oiled grooves.
The Christmas hacker vandalism that took blogger.com off-line for most of yesterday is all the more appalling when you consider that blogger.com are one of the Internet’s secular saints, when you think what they provide to us, the bloggers, and you, the readers, essentially for free.
I feel another bout of ‘hunt the advertisement’ coming on… remember everyone, if you see a banner advertisement on a blogpage, anyone can click on the ‘get rid of this ad’ link under the banner on anyone else’s site and contribute a measly $12 for 1 year of ad-free blog viewing for everyone. If all 300,000+ people who have blogs on blogger.com or the millions of readers who read those blogs contributed that paltry sum, blogger.com, which is run largely on good-will, would be able to afford more bandwidth and better firewalls and obviously that would be in all our interests.
There have been some scorching articles on many worthy blogs this year but over on Transterrestrial Musings, ace blogista Rand Simberg has out done himself with the ultimate take down of the establishment media pundit’s irrational cultural masochist tendency.
Down the hall come blood-curdling screams from an emergency surgical unit. The doctor explains, “We’re low on anaesthetics. We’ve requisitioned supplies, but it’s hard to get anyone to respond. For some reason, there seems to be very little sympathy for these people.”
The cries of agony continue–it is almost unbearable to hear. “Sometimes, the only way to save them is emergency removal of fatally-flawed precepts and paradigms. There’s no time to do it gently.”
Outstanding. This is the perfect article to sum up the genesis of the whole blogging phenomena and it’s non-deferential wrecking-ball ethos. Absolutely stormin’ stuff! Run, do not walk, to Transterrestrial Musings to read the entire sublime article.
As evidenced by the previous post, Samizdata has a new contributor whose name will be familiar to many out there in Blogistan. Christopher Pellerito has long been running the excellent Liberty Blog, and his was the third blog we linked to (after Instapundit and Transterrestrial) when we burst upon the blogging scene. And thus do our ranks grow.
I have always suspected that most hackers who cause damage were people suffering from a low and probably very accurate self image. They try to prove that they are really cunning and smart by damaging an on-line system but in fact all they prove is something known since time immemorial… it is always easier to destroy something than it is to build it.
So what has the hacker who attacked blogger.com on Christmas done? By changing all the passwords his adolescent psyche craves for us to think he is ‘clever and cunning’ and oh how witty this ‘Robin hood hacker’ is for posting a benign message on Instapundit.
Of course the truth is rather different. Far from demonstrating any of those attributes, the hacker shows us he detests people who actually create things. Thousands of people wanting to post to their newsblogs, diaryblogs or whateverblogs are locked out and have to use the ‘forgot my password’ option on blogger to find out what their password has been changed to. He has said to every person he locked out “you can write an article and help make an on-line community, but why aren’t you paying attention to ME?… I can throw a rock through your window. Aren’t I clever?”
Pathetic actually. He has done the equivalent of breaking into an art gallery at night, not to steal a painting, oh no, that would actually make a certain amount of sense, but merely to scribe a message about how ‘he could have been more evil’ and then shit on the floor so that people next day will come and marvel at his ingenuity at breaking in. Yeah, we are real impressed.
You want us to pay attention to you? Sure. Tell us who you are and you will get your wish big time. We all know how horse-thieves were treated when they were caught.
Well, actually post Christmas Day now, but nonetheless, we had at least one of the ingredients for a Traditional(tm) Christmas here: it snowed. Now, you would think that a place this far North would see a fair share of snow. Nope. When an inch comes down Belfast drivers are about as prepared and perplexed by the white stuff as someone in South Carolina. Iceland and Greenland are not all that much further North, but the Gulf Stream keeps us from looking like Norway. Which is fine except for the long, long nights this time of year. That’s one of the reasons for the pub life I suspect… besides the lack of central heating of course… at least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
On other fronts, someone hacked into Blogger and left a posting on Instapundit today. While the post was innocent enough, it was not quite an example of ethical hacking because if it were, we would not have seen a message: only the system administrator would have known.
Ethical Hackers can be helpful although many admins would publicly disagree with me. The facts of life are nearly every computer facility in the world is vastly undermanned. The result is a few heroic souls who do their best, but with the number of sources of information to watch and the rates of changes and updates to be dealt with they face a nearly hopeless task. if you visualize an anteater with ten anthills to watch you’ll have a good idea of the reality admins live with. In this sort of environment it is inevitable that something will be missed or an error will be made . If an Ethical Hacker spots the security hole and sends a nice polite private email to all involved stating what is open and what action should be taken to fix the problem, they are doing a service for all.
But if it is just a matter of putting a line on a blog or website so friends can see you did it… then you are just part of the problem. I would like that person to consider that they most likely pulled some guy away from his only day off in weeks, a day to feast with family and friends… Christmas Day fer chrissakes… just so they could show off.
To whomever did it: get some Christmas spirit in your soul. Someday you’ll be the one getting a call out in the middle of Christmas dinner.
Here is yet another example of how the newsblog movement*1 has inspired media upstarts to challange established media companies all over the world. The full ‘story’ can be found here.
Galina Petkova, 19, takes off her clothes during a newscast of “The Naked Truth” a late evening cable show on M-SAT TV in Sofia, Bulgaria, Dec. 10, 2001. Four days after the newscasts premiered, the programs’ rating outstripped the state’s television’s late evening news program, normally the most commonly watched.
Objective insights, clever punditry and naked babes… the perfect admixture for the next media revolution. As Frederick Hajek would have said “There ain’t nuthin’ that leads to catallaxy more that a bodacious naked 19 years old chick dispensing profundities! Beat that, Keynes, you totally bogus ol’ fart!”. Right on, Fred baby! Gil Scott-Heron blew it big time: the revolution will indeed be televised.
*1 = no, the newsblog movement is not something that happens after you take too many laxatives.
The regular Samizdata contributors are reading and listening to:
Dale Amon
Last book read: Winning Colours (Elizabeth Moon)
[No Dale, Guinness beer mats are not ‘a book’ even if you did have a bunch of them stuck together]
In the CD player: Christmas with the Miracles (Smokey Robinson & The Miracles)
Last magazine: New Scientist
Perry de Havilland
Last book read: The Rose Garden (Sadi)
In the CD player: Praise the Fallen (VNV Nation)
Last magazine: The Economist
Walter Uhlman
Last book read: Art of War (Sun Tsu)
In the CD player: The Wall (Pink Floyd)
Last magazine: Paladin Press Catalogue
David Carr
Last book read: To hell in a handcart (Richard Littlejohn)
In the CD player: Itaipu (Philip Glass)
Last magazine: Free Life
Christopher Pellerito
Last book read: Guilt, Blame and Politics (Allan Levite)
In the CD player: The Word (featuring John Medeski and the North Mississippi
All Stars)
Last magazine: Car and Driver
Natalie Solent
Last book read: Getting the Message (Laszlo Solymar)
In the CD player: All Solent household CD’s are currently in use as beer mats
Last magazine: House and Garden (huuuuuge pile of back issues)
Natalija Radic:
Last book read: CIA World Fact Book, 1995 ed. (US Government)
In the CD player: Dawn Maiden (Lidija Bajuk)
Last magazine: Schlagzeilen issues 36 and 60
Samizdata Illuminatus
Last book read: De Vermis Mysteriis (Ludwig Prin)
In the MP3 player: Return of the Deadly Mantis (Namanax)
Last magazine: 2600
Whilst still very much an early ‘work in progress’, the Capitalist Chicks< website is starting to take shape and now at least works with MS Internet Explorer 5.0.
I do have one minor quibble though: ladies, do you really need the damn disclaimer on every page? If you think that you actually do, might I suggest you re-word it at follows:
Disclaimer
The term ‘chicks’ is in no way meant to be derogatory towards women. If you insist on taking it that way, let us introduce you to the concept of several property. This is our website, we like the word and that’s all there is to it. If you have a problem with that, you are probably a socialist and thus are likely to find ‘chick’ the very least of many things here that will upset you.
Just a suggestion, ladies.
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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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