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]
|
“By the end of that summer, I had concluded that the population cannot be divided into an intellectual class and a nonintellectual class; instead, I concluded, everyone is to some extent an intellectual. The college professor is an intellectual who, it is hoped, applies his intellect to his teaching and research. The skillful auto mechanic is an intellectual who uses logic to eliminate various possible causes of an engine’s failure in order to narrow it down to the actual cause. Everyone is an intellectual. Compulsory schooling has robbed millions of people of the knowledge of their intellectual birthright.”
David Henderson, reflecting on how he learned to be less dismissive of folks who had not been to university. I am glad to say that I have never suffered from that form of snobbery: having a smart-as-hell dad who could have gone down the academic route but who chose a different path does help, of course, in providing a firewall against striking superior attitudes.
The way things are going, not going to university will be a badge of pride.
If I go through life free and rich, I shall not cry because my neighbour, equally free, is richer. Liberty will ultimately make all men rich; it will not make all men equally rich. Authority may (and may not) make all men equally rich in purse; it certainly will make them equally poor in all that makes life best worth living
– Benjamin Tucker
“Part of me hopes that Michael Moore’s movie makes hundreds of millions of dollars and that he suddenly wakes up from the slumber of logic he has been in for many years while the opportunity to choose to help the downtrodden and poor has passed him by. But I now see what Moore truly is in a different light, and success will only encourage him to lie to more people and mislead them about the opportunities that await them, should they only dream. After all, he’s a rich and powerful capitalist. The same thing he’s teaching his audience to hate. Irony, in a word.”
Michael Wilson, who has made a film about the rotund limousine socialist. If he ever imagines Mr Moore, a truly revolting character, is likely to have an epiphany when his bank account gets ever bigger, he’s in for a long wait. Of course, such things do occasionally happen: to wit, the case of playwright and film-maker David Mamet.
“Until he is forgotten, Mailer should be remembered not only in a fool’s cap and bells but also in a scoundrel’s midnight black. For in an age crawling with intellectual folly, he was one of the reigning dunces, even his best works were shot through with adolescent fatuities, while the worst of his words and deeds were stupid and vicious without bottom. One is torn between wishing that his memory would disappear immediately and wanting his remains to hang at the crossroads as a lasting reminder to others.”
Algis Valiunas, on Norman Mailer. One of the most scathing items on a novelist I have read for a while. Ouch.
“John, talking about a Hare Krishna group who’d been painting a little temple in the grounds of Tittenhurst Park near Ascot, which was briefly his home, was typical. “I had to sack them. They were very nice and gentle, but they kept going around saying ‘peace’ all the time. It was driving me mad.”
John Lennon, as remembered by Ray Connolly. I have mixed feelings about John Lennon – who could support some strenously foolish things at times – but I loved his razer-sharp wit.
“If your child is incapable of handling a 20-minute haranguing from a self-important public servant, he will be tragically unprepared for the new world. (Whom do you think he will be dealing with when he needs that hip replacement in 60 years?). Even if you oppose the president on a political level, it is empirically evident that the more one hears his homilies the less inclined one is to trust him. And Obama’s penchants to lecture us endlessly, to be the center of attention endlessly and to saturate the airwaves and national conversation are clear indications that he believes government is the answer to every societal, religious, economic, and cultural question we face. Why should your kids be immune? . .Why should we deny that he can elevate our schoolchildren from the abyss so they finally, after decades of neglect, can learn again? And who better to dictate the lesson plan than the president’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, a man who left Chicago’s school district with a meager 40 percent dropout rate? Honestly, if I’m going to be badgered and browbeaten by the president every day, kids should suffer a bit, as well. “
David Harsanyi, commenting on the recent Obama broadcast to American schoolchildren.
America has “Czars” because there are still a few respectable people using the titles of “Capo” and “Don”
– Commenter CJF
The persistent delusion is that the West has a capitalist economy. It doesn’t. It has a rent-seeking economy, and the failures of government regulatory agencies are as likely to be a result of their delivering such rents as of their being ‘honestly’ incompetent. History tells us that the sensibly cautious – not paranoid – way to look at government is with the presumption that it’s corrupt.
– Commenter ‘Person from Porlock’
“I think we should not have put off shrinking our financial sector. The result of the bailouts is that we are maintaining credit markets based on false information and artificial prices. You may have pulled the airplane out of the dive, but you are flying with faulty instruments, and I don’t think you are going to be happy about where you wind up.”
Arnold Kling, reflecting on the financial turmoil and the missteps of policymakers. It is quite a shock to realise that the demise of Lehman etc happened almost a year ago. The ensuing 12 months have gone past very quickly.
… to postulate an ideal society for which there is no precedent within the human experience, as many political theorists, including Karl Marx, have done, is very much like postulating an alternative biology without reference to the sort of biological structures that have so far proved viable.
– the late Edward Goldsmith, who, though he fitted very well the formal definition of a barking moonbat, definitely was not as mad as many say. The coherence of his approach his willingness to accept the logical consequence of ecolgism was especially troubling to Greens, who were embarrassed by the outright repudiation by one of the fathers of their church of its latterly adopted New Left values.
“I want simply to learn about the world and to live freely.”
– Laura Dekker
And she is indeed learning about the world… that states regard people who wish to act on their desire to be free as deeply suspicious. Get out of the Netherlands and stay on your boat, my dear, because the state clearly owns you at the moment.
“An old guy’s wife tells him to go to the butcher shop and get some meat. He goes to the butcher shop and stands in line for hours. Finally the butcher says, “We’re out of meat.” The old guy blows his top. He yells, “I am a worker! I am a proletarian! I am a veteran of the Great Patriotic War! I have fought for socialism all my life, and now you tell me you’re out of meat! What kind of a system is this?! You are fools! You are thieves! . . . ” A big man in a trench coat comes up to the old guy and says, “Comrade, Comrade, not so loud. In the old days you know what they would do if you said such things.” The big man in the trench coat makes a pistol motion with his hand. He says to the old guy, “Calm down and go home.” The old guy shrugs and leaves. He comes back empty-handed, and his wife says, “What’s the matter, are they out of meat?” “Worse than that,” says the old guy, “they’re out of bullets.”
An old Russian joke, as told by the one and only PJ O’Rourke.
|
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.
|
