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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It’s the way the blogosphere works. Something happens in your back yard. Instapundit picks it up and tells you about it, and you get to work. It, in this case being an article in the New Statesman called “Bloggers of the Left, Unite!”, by James Crabtree. The New Statesman not itself being very blog-friendly, Crabtree decided to put his piece up at the “iSociety” bit of one of his his own websites. Here’s how it ends.
Should the left worry? Definitely. The blogsphere is an example of Willard Quine’s coherence theory of truth: that things are true if they agree – or appear to agree – with other things that are held to be true. Right-wing bloggers are thus creating their own world, in which their truth exists often without debate. And the same may be about to happen in the UK. The journalist Stephen Pollard, the only British political blogger on the left, notes: “There are plenty of new British political blogs. And they are all – all – on the right.” But political blogging is in its infancy here. It remains up for grabs. Got a computer? Got a view? Get blogging. There is a war to be won.
Or lost.
“Blogsphere”? Is that what they’re going to call it?
There appear to be no links from iSociety to “all – all” – or even any-any of – those right wing Brit-blogs, nor to Instapundit nor to Andrew Sullivan, both also mentioned in the piece. Wouldn’t want people actually trying to find out for themselves how unthinkingly and unargumentatively right wing or not as the case may be said blogs might be. For someone declaring war, Crabtree seems somewhat reluctant actually to engage with his enemy. But I suppose that when the attacks do start to come, from real blogs, there will be links.
And as for Stephen Pollard being “on the left” … Smack in the Blairite centre middle, more like, and with all kinds of market bells and whistles attached. Ditto Crabtree, to judge by who’s paying for his web activities.
There is something extremely endearing about a blogger (or Blogatrice, to be accurate) who lists amongst her many personal interests:
…alchemy, soapmaking, Hermetics […] laughing.
Go visit her new site at sashacastel.com!
Instapundit has a link to ScrappleFace, which looks like it’s worth a regular visit, and a rootle around in its archives. The target, all the time, is the portentously urgent and cliché-riden prose of the mainstream US media.
I couldn’t find any mention at ScrappleFace of Samizdata, but this could be because Scott Ott of ScrappleFace, judging by an early posting about Darwinism, is opposed to such things as Darwinism, as, on the whole, aren’t we. And then again, maybe I didn’t find any mention of Samizdata because I just didn’t find it.
I’m also enjoying the Orrin Judd versus Jonah Goldberg stuff, also flagged up by Instapundit.
Judd’s case is that although blogs won’t replace the mainstream media, and although bloggers won’t make any money, they do still profoundly influence the mainstream. One of the “under the radar” notions that Orin Judd noted as starting in the blogs and only later getting to the regular media is popular hostility to Saudi Arabia. Changing my subject somewhat, to content, it occurs to me that what President Bush may have in mind is that if all goes well in Gulf War 2, the USA will then have itself a new and staunch ally (Iraq) in the Middle East. And from this new Iraq, it can then turn around and start to discuss matters in Saudi Arabia, from a somewhat new perspective. Instead of depending on Saudi Arabia to influence Iraq, Bush will have Iraq to influence Saudi Arabia with. Which just might explain the difference in attitude of the Saudis towards Gulf War 1 and Gulf War 2.
I doubt that this kind of speculation has been much featured on the regular media, if only because the US government wouldn’t want it on the regular media – not just yet. But I bet I’m not the first bloggist to have said such a thing, and I further bet that the comments on this will quickly prove me right. (Prove me right someone – quickly please.)
You may be aware that there are blogs for every corner of the human mind. Well, almost every corner, since the thought of blogs for some of the corners of the human mind makes me shudder. It is also axiomatic that people who came up with the weblog technology will have their own corner (or basement) of the blogosphere where their blog about blogging, that is, meta-blog to their heart’s content.
Although I am not a techie by any stretch of imagination (thank you, you may stop now!), I am very interested in technology and so the following post of a techie blogger, Jon Udell of John Udell’s Radio Blog caught my eye:
Every web user engages daily in this process of information refinement. Many share their results – that is, URLs with annotations – in the form of FYI (“For Your Information”) emails. Some also share their results on personal “links” pages. And a few employ a new tactic called weblogging. A weblog is really just another kind of annotated links page, typically in the form of a daily Web diary that filters and reacts to Web information flow according to personal and/or professional interests.
The current weblog craze is, in all likelihood, a passing fad. If you visit Blogger, a portal site that aggregates over 1000 weblogs, you may conclude that this form of communication has already suffered the same fate that befell the Usenet. One “blogger” (short for “weblogger”) recently complained that although there was once a hope that the weblog could become a powerful tool for reaching out and connecting with the world, it has become a powerful tool for self-gratification and self-absorption.
Two years later, he makes a similar argument:
Despite massive uptake of blogging in certain circles, I don’t see evidence that it has made much of a dent in scientific communities. The same is true, I think, in many other professions. Blogging seems huge to those of us engaged in it, and in important ways it is. Culturally, it represents a style of communication that is genuinely new. Technically, it may be the most popular application of XML. But blogging is still a drop in the ocean of email. It’s far from ubiquitous, and at the ETech conference, both Sam Ruby and I were surprised to see how little-understood RSS feeds were even among experienced bloggers.
Whether Jon Udell is right about the overall impact of blogging is not central to my point here, which is simple – understanding the technical side of information generation and dissemination opens more opportunities to generate and disseminate them as well as maximises the use of existing channels.
Underlying the weblogging movement are two technological trends – RSS headline syndication>1 and pushbutton Web publishing. I have recently come across the squabble over RSS formats that from a fifty-thousand-foot perspective looks like a tempest in a teapot. Neither the simplicity of RSS .9x nor the extensibility of RSS 1.0 matters to someone who has yet to experience the ‘virtuous cycle’ that is only recently being discovered by so many – for example, Don Box:
While spending my evening with RSS, I had two epiphanies:
1. The connection between blogging and RSS is deep.
2. WS-IL>2 is the closest we have to RSS in the web service space.
With respect to the first observation, the cycle looks something like this:
while (true) {
ScanRSSFeeds();
RantAboutStuffYouSawFromRSSFeeds();
ExposeYourRantsViaRSS();
}
What an amazingly virtuous cycle!
Before you start thinking of how sad spending one’s evening with RSS is and of any stupid puns on epiphanies or of any of the usual responses that the non-techies fall upon to compensate for their lack of understanding of squiggles, a much more important perspective springs to mind.
The above is worth noting, as technology is making difference to those who find themselves opposing the mainstream or standing aside from it. Communication via the internet, email, weblogs and other channels to come has transformed and will continue to transform the private and public discourse. Many bloggers have discovered the joy of sharing with the world ideas whose expression had, until recently, been confined to conversations over a pint of beer or a cup of latte. Not that there is a cause for rejoicing every time such idea is liberated and this freedom has its price (for a more precise total scroll down the left hand bar here for Havens of Fluorescent Idiocy). I do believe that we have merely scratched the surface of what blogging could do in terms of generating information and, more importantly, in terms of its aggregation.
On a more immediate note, RSS has to do with information filtering and as such is relevant to the blogoshpere. Various blog digests have been set up and disappeared, trying to find an intelligent way of sorting out the data and passing on information that is of interest. Preferences akin to mail filters would allow the user to filter only the data in which they are interested onto the page, from the entire pool of data. For example, a user interested in articles about “Football” would be able to set up a personalised channel that simply consisted of a filter for Football, or even for a particular team or player. Or for all references to Slashdot.org, or whatever. This would give him the largest selection of content, with the greatest degree of personalization available. Tools would be made available to simplify the process of creating these files, and to validate them, and life would be good.
I have risked boring you to tears with techie acronyms in order to get my message across – I see technology as the main tool (and a weapon, if necessary) of education, development, protection and dismantling of the modern state. If we fancy ourselves as making any impact with our arguments, campaigns, thoughts and outpourings via blogging, let’s at least explore it’s potential to the full.
Disclaimer: Those who blog purely for personal gratification and self-absorption, please ignore my rallying call. No need to spend evenings with RSS and various assorted technologies. 
Note1: RSS – a dialect of XML, a vocabulary for representing annotated links. What exactly RSS stands for is itself a subject of controversy – Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication, or John Udell’s favorite, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Note2: WS-IL – Web Services Inspection Language (WS-Inspection) 1.0
Occasional Samizdata.net guest writer Alice Bachini has been bitten by the blogging bug and has her own splendid blog called A Libertarian Parent In The Countryside.
It may well have the longest blog address I have seen (libertarian_parent_in_the_countryside.blogspot.com)!
Check it out. 
The much reported contretemps between occasionally hilarious Jewish-American comedian Jackie Mason and largely unknown Palestinian-American comedian Ray Hanania has also received several mentions in the blogosphere.
However to my knowledge only blogger Al Barger on the Culpepper Log has followed up this with some investigative reporting of his own. After Googling previous remarks by Ray Hanania and coming up with some controversial views in a Lebanese newspaper, Barger e-mailed Hanania to get his side of the story and he did indeed reply. The exchange of e-mails can be seen on the Culpepper Log.
Well done, Al… this sort of thing reflects very well on the entire concept of blogging.
Whilst cruising Brian Linse’s Directory of ‘left wing’ blogs, I was trying to make sense of who was listed and why.
There are the blogs of the fuzzy and cuddly ‘soft left’ such as Brian’s own Ain’t no bad dude, ranging all the way to Chomsky adoring pro-totalitarians like Blowback: two blogs seemingly as far apart as robustly anti-left Cold Fury and the joyfully idiotarian WarBloggerWatch. But there are also hard to classify blogs like AirstripOne. When ‘Emmanuel Goldstein’ of AirstripOne writes things like…
That being said, Britain has no business opening up its markets just because it will help Third World countries. The argument for free trade must come from British interests.
…it should be clear that Emmanuel’s views owe more to Burke than Marx. This is pure old paleo-conservative Tory values: free trade may be allowed as an expedient if it is conducive to ‘national’ ends but it is certainly not carried out by right between free individuals. So does AirStripOne belong in a ‘leftist’ directory?
Yes actually. And so do links to Pat Buchannan or Ross Perot, because Brian’s ‘leftist’ directory is not really a ‘leftists’ directory at all, but rather a ‘Civil Interventionists Directory’ (i.e. the opposite of a ‘Civil Libertarians Directory’) because that is the only common thread between this disparate listing. What all these folks share is the belief that it is okay for a violence backed state to forcibly intermediate itself into private people’s lives, not just in emergencies but within the context of normal civil society, in order to change how they may choose to live.
Before I gat hauled before the Blog Complaints Commission, I issue this apology for not acknowledging that the BBC Bias blog was established by Peter Cuthbertson.
Well done, Peter.
The path of true progress has been pockmarked with inventions that are simple and wickedly effective. Mostly they are also so obvious that all who encounter them proclaim “why didn’t I think of that?”
Has anybody ever thought of a blog (or indeed any vehicle) dedicated to exposing and highlighting the outrageously left-wing bias of the BBC? Too late. Somebody has. Better still they are somebody (or, actually, somebodies) that we all know well. Our very own Natalie Solent is a contributor as are shining stars of the blogging firmament Patrick Crozier and Ben Sherrif.
They have a very zippy little cgi-bin thingy which all readers are invited to employ in order to send in their own damning evidence of BBC Bolshevism and I intend to employ it liberally. I urge all our readers to do the same. I am confident you will not be short of material.
I wish I had thought of that. I didn’t. But personal gratification be damned. Let the fightback begin
Occasional inhabitant of these pages, Andrew Dodge, has joined the current vogue in blogdom and acquired a new masthead for his site and pretty funky it looks too.
In fact, on close inspection, there are some, er, veeerrrrrrry interesting symbols indeed! He also echoes some earlier comments by yours truly and Perry de Havilland about the idiocy of the current Church of England and its idiotarian Archbishop, who threatens to replace Chris Patten (or is it Petain?) as my number One Target. That is until George Michael regales us with more wit and wisdom on the war against terror, of course.
Sarah Lawrence, the object of the previous article by Brian, is in fact the latest member to join the Samizdata Team, as eagle-eyed perusers of this blog’s sidebar may have already noticed.
She is an indomitable advocate for children’s civil liberties via her organisation Taking Children Seriously and her view can be found expressed on her own site SarahLawrence.org.
We look forward to seeing Sarah’s often highly controversial views on Samizdata.net!
At about the same time as Samizdata went through its metamorphosis, my old computer motherboard began its jarring death-rattle and, shortly thereafter, expired both graciously and soundlessly.
It was time to break open that stash I keep under the floorboards and upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. Now, thanks to the assistance of a quite remarkably useful Russian systems builder called Yuri, I am surfing the net on the equivalent of a twelve-cylinder roadbeast. I have every bit and byte and bob and meg and gig and ram and rom known to humanity. I am a souped-up, hyper-driven and power-processed blogger. I have Weapons of Mass Digitization and I intend to use them in a Holy Jihad against Idiocy.
Yes, thanks to Yuri and the new, improved Samizdata I am ready to roll like mountain thunder over the arid plains of mediocrity and mendacity.
And a little addition to my ‘Glorious Ironies File’: Yuri was once a soldier in the Red Army, stationed in East Germany and trained to kill Yankee Imperialists and bring down Capitalism. Now, he is running his own successful business in London and helping me to spread the seed of Capitalism all over the Net. Splendid!
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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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