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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I did well enough to blog about it, so here goes. I took the line above, that sometimes Political Correctness isn’t going all that mad, it’s just people trying to be correct and not hurt each other’s feelings. I also mentioned that when I was helping a friend run some maths teaching classes some while ago, I took some photos of the children and my friend asked me to stop, because, you know, it might not look good, so now I’ve outed myself as a paedophile. Oh goody.
Mention was made of the phrase “nitty gritty”, which the British police are apparently not allowed to use now as it’s some kind of reference to slave ships. I’d been told this was going to get a mention, but as usual you only think of what you should have said afterwards. And what I should have said is that “nitty gritty” is objectionable not because it’s racist, but because it is a massively overused managerial cliché. If the PC brigade could also decide that “at the end of the day” is offensive on account of being a disparaging reference to Muslim daily prayer habits and that “the bottom line” is also verboten because it causes fat women to be unhappy about the size of their bums, then good riddance to those two cliches as well.
I’ve just fixed to be on the Mike Dickin Show, on Talk Sport Radio, just after 12 noon today. I’m to be asked about various varieties of “political correctness gone mad” stupidities, like a grandad being stopped from videoing his grandkids at a party, because he might be a paedophile, or something … What will I say? I look forward to finding out.
Talking of Sport, did any of you Samizdata consumers see the Zidane goal for Real Madrid in the Champions League Final last night? It was one of those “worth the price of the ticket alone” moments. Basically the ball went ballooning up into the air and took an age to come down, but when it finally did ZZ volleyed it into the top left hand corner, in a manner which would be extremely hard to do on a practice ground. To do this to win the biggest cup final in the world outside of the European National Championships and the World Cup is astounding. Like all the very best goals, it didn’t look to be seriously on until it had been scored. But I won’t be talking about sport on Talk Sport. I’m one of the token political commentators that they have to justify their franchise. Sadly, broadcasting in Britain is still heavily controlled by the politicians, although radio less so than TV. Soon, this kind of stuff (i.e. stuff like Samizdata) will be spoken as well as written, and the radio “professionals” will be bitching, just like the print pros bitch now about blogging.
Last time I boasted about the fact that I was going to be on the radio an Australian dominatrix tuned in. What exotic persons will listen this time? Sorry, no link to that, because I’m in a hurry, and I still find it complicated doing links back within Samizdata. If I do well, I’ll maybe have a brag here about it. If I don’t brag about it, draw your own conclusions.
Got an email the other day from, I think, a Mr (and I’m betting it is Mr) E. Palmeri, who signs himself “erp”. He refers to the story I began to tell in a previous posting about Pfizer and its support, via such things as the Pfizer forum, for capitalism and for the free market. Like I say, it is a story, and I ended my posting with those exact words. Which erp took exception to.
“And written or not, like I say, it is a story.”
Like it or not, it’s always as I said, it’s never like I said.
His emphasis on never. erp implies (and this is what got under my skin and provoked all the thoughts that follow), that I don’t know the regular as-I-say rule. Actually I broke this rule on purpose. I was trying to suggest an air of unfinishedness about my thoughts, of me talking aloud rather than presenting the finished article. I was trying to push people into thinking about Pfizer, into finding out about Pfizer, into telling me and the rest of us about Pfizer, not to nail down the final truth of the matter. To this end, I deliberately used the frequently heard by me and quite often said by me unruliness of “like I say”.
erp knows the kind of thing I mean, because the second and final sentence of his email to me goes thus:
Love your blog anyway.
And there goes another grammatical rule, the one about sentences like that one having a subject, in this case a first person pronoun. But we can all see why erp dropped the “I”. Fearful of being thought a pedant and nothing else, he ended with a deliberately colloquialised attempt to soften the blow, which he didn’t intend really to hurt, and as far as I’m concerned it worked fine. Glad you like it mate. Thanks for the kind words.
Why do I make such a fuss about this? Partly it’s a technique thing. erp is complaining about one of the very things that we Samizdatans regularly go out of our way to do, as do a thousand other bloggers. This is a blog that likes to talk in different tones of voice to suit the occasion, and to suit the different voices of the different writers. What, asks Perry in the spiel at the top left, is “on the minds” of the Samizdata people?
This is a good question. And what’s on our minds is not always perfectly grammatical.
One of the best ways to persuade other people to share your thought processes, in our case libertarian thought processes, is to describe your own thought processes accurately. You persuade by writing out how you really do talk in your own head about what you are truly persuaded of. As an editor, I constantly find myself saying to a writer whose writing has got gummed up: “Step away from the keyboard. Tell me, out loud, what you’re trying to say.” Time and again the next thing I say is: “Great. Put that.” If the price I and my writer have to pay is that what’s being said doesn’t get enough of a grammatical polishing to suit all the erps out there, well, so be it. At least there’s a recognisably human voice being used.
Besides which, all these rules can be and are all the time being broken. erp is mistaken. Quite often these day, it is“like I say” whether erp likes it or not. English is not, thank goodness, one of those languages where if you ever stray from the official tracks some committee of erps will tell you to behave yourself or else, which is surely one of the reasons why it has spread so luxuriantly. (The contrast with French is painful, to the French. “But we control our language so much more carefully! Why isn’t it winning?” That could just be one of the reasons it isn’t winning, sunshine. Ever thought about that?) The English language is the ultimate anarchy. If I and thousands of others are saying “like I say”, and the people we’re talking to or for that matter writing for in a blog get what we’re saying (which everybody does including erp, even if they don’t all like it) then there goes that never, never to return.
If you want to be a good writer you probably need to know what most of these rules are, as I do, but you don’t have to follow them slavishly. Writing which is perfectly grammatical can be rather like the music written by all those contemporaries of Mozart, which obeyed all the rules but achieved little else. Mozart, meanwhile, who knew the rules inside out and every which way, would regularly have fun and games breaking them. For a famous and easy-to-find example, try the first few bars of Mozart’s “Dissonance” String Quartet K465. The erps of the day all had seizures.
I’m not saying: “Mozart broke the rules – I break the rules – so I’m Mozart”. I’m merely saying, you can do it. Grammar goblins won’t chase you to hell if you omit a noun or pronoun from the start of a sentence, or if you put like instead of as, or if (to mention some other rules I know about but break from time to time) you end a sentence with a preposition, or if you dare to – sparingly, and when you’ve got a good reason, like when an adverb absolutely has to be right next to the verb it qualifies without so much as a “to” in between, or when you don’t want any confusion about the adverb referring back to something else just before it so you put the “to” between it and what you’re wanting to separate it from, or if, as I am here, you’re having a laugh – split an infinitive.
Life is full of “rules” which in fact aren’t. I still remember the joyful moment when I realised that you don’t have to read a book by starting at the beginning and reading all of it in order. You can start anywhere you like, and stop anywhere you like. If you do this, no one will arrest you. Some dead schoolteacher may be yapping away inside your head when you break such “rules”. If so, think about what he’s yapping, and if you decide you’re not going to do what he wants, tell him to shut up.
Now don’t misunderstand me. I’m not putting a different rule in place to the effect that you should never read a book straight through from beginning to end. I’m just saying, you don’t have to.
This like-as business is trivial but the fact that it’s trivial isn’t so trivial. An essential part of living the free life (and thereby not being inclined to try to inflict unfreedom on others) is deciding which rules you really are going to stick to because you really believe in them, and which rules you’re going to allow yourself and everyone else you have dealings with to play harmless games with.
Loved your email anyway.
Via Instapundit, I went to i330.org (13 May 2002 20) for this ‘distrousering’, as my late father would have put it, of Matthew Engel, for writing silly things about the USA and its guns. I remember Engel as a very funny cricket writer. I used to buy The Guardian just for him during test matches (that’s cricket internationals for all you uncricketpersons out there). Then he became the Editor of Wisden, the annual cricket bible. I think the difference was he likes cricket, whereas he isn’t, as The Guardian’s man in the USA, allowed to like the USA, except the bits of the USA that don’t like the USA either.
We ought to do this kind of thing. Not with British correspondents in the USA but with US correspondents here. Are there any? I bet if there are they get all kinds of things wrong.
Alex Singleton of Liberty Log rang me at 5 am this morning (not quite, but it felt like that) to check that I’d got a cheque he had sent me for travelling expenses (yes thanks), and he also mentioned that they’re thinking of starting some kind of campaign up there concerning the alleged superiority of Muslim culture. He mentioned a Reason online article. I’m in the middle of reading it now and I enthusiastically recommend it. It’s called “In Praise of Vulgarity” and is by Charles Paul Freund, which is probably a name known to lots of Samizdata’s readers but is one I haven’t attended to before. The article was published in March, but better late than never if like me you missed it the first time around.
I’ve just finished the bit about the USSR’s “stilyagi” subculture of the immediate post-WW2 era, and am about the read the bit about Algeria, and the use of pop culture there to get back at the Islamist suppression of the everyday pleasures of life.
I just checked the Liberty Log link above to make sure it worked, and they link to this article too, and you can see Alex Singleton’s brief comments on it.
One of the many joys of blogging is that you don’t have to say everything, you can be content to say something, and the something I want to say here is that I want to add my little voice to the chorus now saying that Brink Lindsey’s recent book Against The Dead Hand – The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism is very good.
I’ve not read all of the book yet, but Lindsey’s description (see for example chapter 2: “The Industrial Counterrevolution”) of the wider public policy atmosphere around 1900 is as good as I’ve ever encountered. You can read detailed blow-by-blow descriptions of the “Economic Calculation Debate” which are as good, and far more detailed of course, but a persuasive sense of how it all fitted into the big wide world out there, then and since, is harder to come by.
I’m now dipping into the more current stuff, which is much enriched by the fact that Lindsey works at the formidable Cato Institute. Here’s a typically good quote (on page 192):
… if – as is perfectly obvious – the world today is a jumble of market-oriented and anti-market elements, and if markets are recognized as efficient and useful while full-blown-collectivism is counted a failure, why blame markets and not the remnants of discredited collectivism for the fact that the current jumble is sometimes volatile?
By way of a personal footnote, I’ve also recently dug up an old piece of propaganda I did for a libertarian-conservative gang of stirrers at the University of Exeter, circa 1992, written by my wise and wonderful self. It’s a list of 37 reasons Why I am a Libertarian (Libertarian Alliance, forthcoming Real Soon Now), each starting with “Because”. Here’s Because Number 24:
Because if total state control is a mess, and a “balance” between state control and liberty is half reasonable, then total liberty would be totally reasonable.
Which is pretty much the same meme. And good memes can’t be bounced about too much and too often.
But I digress. My basic message here is, if you’ve any time at all to do it: Read Brink’s Book.
A group of Harvard and MIT professors, spearheaded of course by MIT’s Noam Chomsky, is calling for the Harvard endowment to sell its investments in a variety of companies which “benefit from or support the Israeli military.” (If the Harvard-MIT Divestment Campaign has its own website, I cannot find it; but this story in The Harvard Crimson cites IBM, General Electric and McDonald’s as examples of such firms targeted by the Campaign.)
What exactly does the Campaign hope to accomplish? Even if they got their way, this action would not cause the slightest bit of economic harm to Israel. This would be the case even if we were talking about an institution with vastly greater holdings than the Harvard Endowment trust. The only way for Harvard to sell its shares of IBM or McDonald’s is for some other investor to purchase them (duh!) Perhaps they spend too much time listening to the empty suits on MSNBC and other “instant analysts” on the tube, who attribute every dip in the stock market to a “sell-off,” never considering that every share traded on the floor of the NYSE is both purchased and sold at the same time.
Maybe you can chalk this up to delusions of grandeur, or the mistaken notion that Harvard holds as much sway in the financial world as it does in the intellectual realm. One of the most important (and under-reported) trends in the economics in the last 20 years has been the rise of “institutional capitalism” — financial institutions such as pension funds and mutual funds now own an outright majority of all corporate equities, rendering bit players such as the Harvard endowment largely irrelevant. In any case, this represents an awfully strange way to try to pressure the Israeli government.
So why are they doing it? I can think of two reasons … essentially they must believe that the Campaign serves some political or propagandistic purpose, because it is difficult for me to believe that they think their actions will directly punish Israel in any way.
Symbolism — elevating the cause to the level of the anti-apartheid movement. In the 1980s, there were a variety of disinvestment campaigns leveled against South Africa, and the Campaign wants their own cause elevated to the level of the global struggle against apartheid. I don’t think that I need to explain why such a comparison is preposterous, but they are trying to create that linkage in people’s minds. (This makes even more sense in light of the protestor I met in Washington a few weeks ago, who told me that the Palestinians were ‘the N
Tolerate v.tr. 1 allow the existence or occurrence of without authoritative interference. 2 leave unmolested 3 endure or permit, esp. with forbearance
Accept v.tr. 3 regard favourably; treat as welcome 4 a believe, receive (an opinion, explanation etc.) as adequate or valid. b be prepared to subscribe to (a belief, philosophy etc.)
The assassination of Dutch cultural nationalist Pim Fortuyn has raised many questions about the nature of tolerance and liberty. Orrin Judd suggests that Fortuyn was not a libertarian as some have claimed and in this I agree. Fortuyn was indeed informed by some very libertarian principles but sought to apply them within a statist context that placed him at least somewhat within the stranger wing of a Euro-conservative fringe with more than a few touches of the ‘classical liberal’ about him.
In truth Fortuyn defied easy categorisation but in some ways his views on immigration were just dealing with the inherent contradictions between distributive statism’s prerequisite of homogeneity (the need for a quantifiable unit called ‘citizen’) and the dis-incentivization for cultural assimilation and social integration inherent in welfare statism. Much of what he said has also been said by Ilana Mercer (who is a top flight pukka libertarian with whom I just happen to disagree regarding the implications of immigration in a free society) as well as many cultural conservatives.
Orrin Judd takes the view that the essence of Fortuyn was just about advocating sexual licence (a word loaded with political meanings I reject) whilst himself not tolerating religious based distaste in others for Fortuyn’s overt homosexuality. Yet having read some of what he said and trying to filter out the political populist crap that all democratic political figures encode their words with, it seems clear to me that what Fortuyn really opposed was the fact within the Muslim community in the Netherlands were elements who wanted to translate their lack of acceptance into intolerance.
Fortuyn was not insisting Muslims or for than matter Christians like Orrin Judd accept, which is to say agree with his sexual predilections, just that they tolerate them and for him this was non-negotiable (and I happen to think he was correct in that view). And therein lies the fatal flaw of all democratic state centred societies rather than classical liberal civil societies with the state just as ‘nightwatchman’… if political manipulation of the state gives the more cohesive sections of that society the ability to back their lack of acceptance with force (i.e. to make the laws of the state reflect their views), then a legitimate lack of acceptance becomes illegitimate intolerance. Fortuyn feared that in a democratic state, a cohesive alien Muslim cultural bloc lead by people for whom society and state were logically one and the same, would start to move the state away from being the guarantor of tolerance for people largely not accepted: of which homosexuals are a classical example being as they are both ubiquitous and always a minority.
Tolerance however is not a value neutral condition, far from it in fact. To tolerate something is to not accept it. One does not tolerate one’s friends, one accepts them. I tolerate people listening to heavy metal music even though I think most of it is drivel, for the simple reason it is none of my damn business what other people listen to. It only becomes my business if they are playing it loudly in the next house at four o’clock in the morning but then it is not a matter of ‘tolerance’ any more, it is a matter of unwillingly imposed real cost regardless of the type of music involved. I tolerate smokers because if they want to kill themselves and smell like ashtrays, that is their business not mine. I do not accept it as a good idea however. What is wrong is to use the violence of the state to prevent people doing what they want to themselves and others of a like mind and there is the problem with some conservative Christians and more or less all radical Muslims: they want to criminalise what they see as sin rather than criminalise the violation of the objective rights of others. Opposing that is not intolerance because tolerance does not mean tolerating intolerance, any more than it is tolerance to tolerate anything which actively seeks to violate your self-ownership. If you believe homosexuality (or eating pork or looking at pictures of naked women) is a sin, well fine, that is up to you, feel free to not engage in gay sex (or pork dinners or Playboy). If that then induces you to vote for people who will use the violence of the state (laws) to discriminate against homosexuals (or ban pork butchers and Playboy magazine), well that is not fine.
Just remember that what is sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. In a democratic state, no one group ever monopolizes power for ever. If the people who, on the basis of religious non-acceptance, want to legally disadvantage (i.e. no longer tolerate) certain people because of their sexual peccadillos… and then use their transitory political clout to actualise that, well don’t be too surprised if one day the object of that discrimination tries to use the state to legally discriminate against the religions which are seen as the source of the intolerance towards them. In a democratic state, any large cohesive voting bloc with intolerant rather than just non-accepting views is a potential threat. The more truly democratic a system is, the greater such threats are.
Daniel Antal, a Hungarian economist, wrote in regarding Brian Micklethwait‘s article “Give me a definition of racist”:
I had been busy trying to get an interview appointment with Pim Fortuyn, the recently assassinated controversial Dutch politician whom I formerly recommended as a new type of Liberal to listen to for Samizdata readers. I am also working on a paper which shall analyse his political manifesto, which has a shortened version available in English.
Well, should be clear, Fortuyn was a nationalist. Fortuyn had similar views on Islam as Rushdie or Naipaul, although he expressed them in populist political language. This was mistaken for racism by some journalists. You have cited the Simpson interview, which terminated on BBC when Fortuyn asked Simpson about his definition on racism. Later Fortuyn sent Simpson away for “showing disrespect to him” and did not allow the interview to be finished. However, today’s Independent have revealed the last sentence of the interview, clearly cut a couple of seconds on BBC before the end. It goes:
“Give me a definition of racism. You don’t know what a racist [is] because you have Negroes who are Muslims , you have yellow men who are Muslims, you have white men who are Muslims, so how can you connect the Muslim religion and culture with race? Then you are very stupid, Mr. Simpson.”
Of course regarding this example that Daniel Antal mentions, one can speculate why the interview was cropped where it was. To me it seems obvious that it suited certain people to have Pim Fortuyn dismissed as an incoherent fascist who is immune to rational discourse, rather than someone who asked inconvenient questions that the great and good in the media do not have answers for.
For another example of this, Sean Gabb‘s recent exchange on Radio 4 with Charles Moore, Editor of The Daily Telegraph was edited to the point of altering it beyond recognition. Much in the way Stalin would have former Bolsheviks airbrushed out of photographs when they did not continue to represent The Party Line, it seems that British national state media simply edits unwelcome dissent out before broadcasting. It would seem that when the true ‘loyal opposition’ actually dares to oppose, that cannot be allowed to sully the airwaves. They would rather give voice to Charles Moore, that way there is less risk of any real and intellectually rigorous dissent being heard.
At least Brian Micklethwait seems to have the contacts to actually get his voice live and unedited on talk radio shows to put his unalloyed, full fat, non-diet libertarian perspectives out on the statist clogged airwaves.
…to disagree with two of his first three posts, but I can’t help that. Here on Libertarian Samizdata I samizdate in a Libertarian way, and that involves criticizing what I see as ideas opposed to Liberty. You were kidding about the proposed sixfold increase in petrol prices, right? That’s called a tax. Taxes take people’s money by force and spend it on projects that meet with the approval of the taxers. Wrong in itself, and anyway the taxing powers always dribble the money away or spend it on rubbish, as is likely to happen to anyone who gets a pile of money they didn’t work for. Switching around different taxes as you propose would not affect that in the slightest.
I don’t know if there is anything artificially low about the price of red diesel. If it’s low because of subsidy, sure, junk the subsidy. But I suspect what you mean is that it is at is natural price and only looks odd compared to the absurdly hiked price of non-farm diesel. The natural price of a commodity is a package of information telling us all sorts of useful facts about its availability and usefulness. Censoring that information is like censoring speech. For a little while it seems to work, but under the surface all sorts of resentments will build up at pressure points, and now the censors themselves cannot judge where the pressures are. Your proposal, which I hope was facetious, would have effects quite different from your list. I don’t claim to know in any detail what they would be (although the idea that it would augment the status of the musclebound is absurd: when ten men come in to do badly the work of the cool machine you used to have, you aren’t going to love those men), but I don’t have to know. I just have to look at how rich and successful India became from its determined attempted to protect hand-loom weaving. Not.
As for Britain versus New Zealand, the problem for us is not that we have a large population but that we have an ageing population. Eventually the ratio of bedpans to nurses is going to get out of hand. Immigration is one possible solution, although it strikes me that it does not so much solve the problem as put it off for thirty years. As an alternative I’ll bang on once more about one of my favourite themes, namely what a good thing all round it would be if welfare would stop killing all the humble jobs. In this case, servants.
The Pim Fortuyn quote hit the button, though.
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit takes a swipe at the awarders of the Nobel Peace Prize (May 7, 10:21:39 am), but I suspect him of misunderstanding the problem.
The basic problem of the Nobel Peace Prize is that it is awarded for effort rather than for achievement, and often not even for effort, merely for general niceness, and not infrequently for the kind of niceness that might well stir up a war.
My guess is that Glenn Reynolds disagrees with the Nobel Peace Prize awarders about the mere meaning of niceness, and that this is the basis of his disdain for them. I probably share his view of what niceness is, more than I do that of the Nobel awarders. But niceness is one thing; peace is quite another.
With the much more widely respected Nobel Prizes for various sorts of science, the awarders do the vital thing they don’t do with their Peace Prizes. They wait, to see if something of lasting value has actually been achieved. With science they often don’t have to wait that long, because with science the fact of significant progress is often clear for all to see.
But peace, by definition, has to go on for a decent length of time before it can reasonably be called peace. It is idiotic to award Peace Prizes to the signatories of a “peace treaty” before the ink is even dry. What if peace breaks down? Only time will tell if the lasting peace supposedly being attempted was in fact lasting.
Giving the Peace Prize to Shimon Peres for doing some “peace” deal or other in the Middle East a few months previously is idiotic, not because Perez is a bad man hell-bent on war (I don’t know what sort of man he is), but because he was so plainly still in the thick of the struggle and it wasn’t at all plain that peace would result. Surprise, surprise, it turns out that it hasn’t.
A decent Nobel Peace Prize ceremony would drag obscure old diplomats and forgotten statesmen out of retirement for well deserved pats on the back, for things they did thirty years ago, which, we can now see, caused a prolonged outbreak of peace in some hitherto intractable and now – because so peaceful for the last thirty years – utterly forgotten circumstance.
Examples? Can’t think of any off hand, what with peace being so unmemorable. Maybe readers of this can suggest some genuinely worthy Nobel Peace Prize recipients.
But I foresee further problems. One is that diplomats in their active phase tend to be older than star scientists. By the time you realise that a diplomat did a good job he’s liable to be dead. (Perhaps Nobel Peace Prizes should be awardable posthumously.)
And another even deeper problem is that the means of achieving peace can often be so not nice. Victory can be hideous in the manner of its achievement yet impeccably peaceful in its consequences, and hence in the total amounts of war and of peace that it gives rise to. Abject surrender can likewise do wonders for peace.
I recall witnessing a “peace” demonstration during the Falklands War, in Trafalgar Square. Said a plaintive placard: “PEACE IN THE FALKLANDS” (i.e. “Britain stop fighting”). Also saying “PEACE IN THE FALKLANDS” was a nearby news placard advertising the Evening Standard. For once, the instant prophecy proved correct. The British army, ignoring the “peace” protesters, had carried right on fighting and had on that very day won (as it turned out) the Falklands War, thereby establishing (as it also turned out) a period of peace which has lasted to this day.
The Opinion Journal’s email newsletter has pointed out a real gem. It seems a group of rather uneducated people have decided the famous second book in the Tolkien series, “The Two Towers” was actually named by director Peter Jackson for the World Trade Center:
“Peter Jackson has decided to tastelessly name the sequel “The Two Towers”. The title is clearly meant to refer to the attacks on the World Trade Center. In this post-September 11 world, it is unforgivable that this should be allowed to happen. The idea is both offensive and morally repugnant. Hopefully, when Peter Jackson and, more importantly, New Line Cinema see the number of signatures on this petition, the title will be changed to something a little more sensitive.”
So we are left with only two equally astounding possibilities:
(1) Tolkien was more prescient than even Nostrodamus. Some Forty-seven years ago he foresaw the Twin Towers attack and that his second book would be made into a blockbuster movie in the following year.
(2) Jackson has invented time travel. He wanted to use a title relating to the World Trade Center attack but did not want anyone to blame him, so he travelled 47 years into the past, joined J.R.R and his friends in the Oxford local and suggested “The Two Towers” would be an excellent title.
If you want a laugh, check out the petition where over a thousand of the mentally challenged have recorded their intellectual incapacity for posterity.
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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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